Salata Institute panelists predict legal, regulatory setbacks and areas of hope as Trump administration prepares to take over
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Climate experts expect a second Trump administration to feature multipronged attacks on recent years’ climate change progress, with battles in the courts, in Congress, and involving the enormous administrative power vested in the presidency.
Supporters of efforts to reduce planet-warming fossil-fuel emissions should begin to focus on working to keep gains already made and prepare for a slowdown in progress, according to a panel of specialists gathered at a Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability discussion Nov. 26 on likely changes ahead as a new administration prepares to take over.
There may, however, also be some bright spots ahead, the experts said, stemming from some states continuing to push for carbon-free energy, the economic momentum behind ever-cheaper clean technology, and from the desire by American businesses to profit from the sale of green products and technology to the world.
“There’s a lot of interest in what lies ahead with the new administration and Congress,” said James Stock, vice provost for climate and sustainability and director of the Salata Institute. “This is pretty complicated, and it’s multifaceted.”
The second Trump administration, with a pro-business bent and taste for deregulation, will bear hallmarks of the first, but with control of the White House, Congress, and a friendly majority on the Supreme Court, the action likely will be more aggressive, said several panelists.
“This version of the Trump administration is not just prepared to roll back federal regulations, but to target the states and the private sector actors that actually want to replace the gap left by the federal government.”
Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School
One prime target for the new administration will be 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, perhaps the nation’s most ambitious efforts ever to fight climate change. That legislation includes billions of dollars in tax credits, subsidies, and other financial incentives that aim to make carbon-free energy more attractive.
Although some 80 percent of the funding authorized by the legislation has been spent or is under contract, the Biden administration is pushing to get as much money out the door as possible before Inauguration Day, according to Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.
That might not be enough, she said, as, with control of Congress as well as the White House, there may be attempts to “claw back” money already awarded and to revise or repeal the law. Among the most endangered targets is the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, she said.
The administration can do quite a lot without having to go through Congress or the courts, Freeman said. At the president’s direction, government agencies tasked with administering climate-related legislation can ease rules or change direction via the governmental regulatory process.
They can alter the government’s position in lawsuits and begin new suits against those pursuing climate-friendly action, as occurred in the first Trump administration, which encouraged an antitrust lawsuit against four automakers that were negotiating with California on auto emissions standards. Similar suits can be pursued against states that challenge federal initiatives, against environmental nonprofits, and against business groups that cooperate to help create a level playing field for competition.
Freeman said these efforts don’t even have to be successful to damage U.S. climate efforts. A widespread “chilling effect” will stem from the attacks themselves, regardless of merit, that may prompt people and organizations to be less aggressive in their activities, or to choose not to fight back.
“This version of the Trump administration, Trump 2.0, is not just prepared to roll back federal regulations, but to target the states and the private sector actors that actually want to replace the gap left by the federal government,” Freeman said. “If that happens to come to fruition, I think that is much more dangerous and much more far-reaching, even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful. All that litigation will help to chill activity, will help to scare people off, and intimidate action, and will also grind it to a halt by tying it up in litigation.”
Stavins, who had recently returned from the annual international climate talks, held this year in Baku, Azerbaijan, said Trump’s re-election loomed over the talks and was a regular topic of conversation among the delegates and other attendees. If Trump again moves to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the timeframe for withdrawal would mean that the nation would no longer be part of the global talks by early 2026.
Other countries, including the U.K., the European Union, and China, indicated they would step up efforts at global leadership in the absence of the U.S.
Beyond withdrawing from the Paris accord, Stavins said that some in Trump’s orbit want the U.S. to withdraw from the underlying treaty that establishes the international framework to collectively address climate change, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in 1992.
Internationally, Stavins said, there is also concern that Trump’s stance may embolden other nations to follow suit.
The churning and uncertainty around the issue are what will be most damaging to the business community, Tufano said. Businesses generally look for opportunities to make a profit, which can occur in the climate space — though profitability will decline if IRA incentives are lost — but stability is key. In the absence of stability, Tufano said, business leaders often will wait to make decisions until the situation stabilizes.
“Businesses react negatively to volatility and uncertainty,” Tufano said. “The amount of jawboning and social media pressure and other kinds of pressure that can be put on firms cannot be underestimated.”
While some industries may be content to slow activities with respect to climate change until the business environment shifts again, some industries can’t afford to, Tufano said. Insurers are already on the front lines of the climate crisis and will still have to respond to climate-related weather disasters regardless of whether their connection to a shifting climate is in political vogue.
Similarly, the low price of installed wind power has made windy states such as Iowa and Texas prime locations for wind farms, a trend unlikely to be reversed. The fight to contain emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane may also be past the tipping point where political opposition can stall efforts to curb emissions.
The recent launch of methane-sniffing satellites that share their data publicly provides a roadmap for natural gas companies to target leaks, a relatively straightforward task once the leaks are found, Stavins said. The fact that they can then sell gas that otherwise would leak into the atmosphere provides a powerful incentive to lower methane leaks, helping both their bottom line and climate efforts, Stavins said.
“We’re likely to see a lot more action in the oil and gas sector in the United States, but in other countries as well because it’s become newly profitable to fix those leaks,” Stavins said, “a point of optimism.”
“For many years, no political journalist that I’d ever worked with nor myself had ever asked a politician: Why do you lie? And so it’s sort of this topic that is omnipresent and yet never discussed. I decided to discuss it, and I decided to ask politicians about it,” said Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University.
“They make a calculation — am I going to gain more from making this statement that is false than I’m going to lose. It’s that simple.”
Following several years of research and reporting, Adair ended up zeroing in on about a half dozen people’s stories in his book as case studies that reveal what he calls “truths about lying.”
He also laments that calling out the fabrications and misinformation has not worked to alter the behavior of political actors and that the internet has made it all worse.
“Lying is not a victimless crime. When politicians choose to lie, there are often people who suffer, and often an individual who suffers a great deal, often someone whose reputation is damaged, whose life is turned upside-down,” he said.
At the event, Adair told the story of Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher and writer who had been put in charge of an advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security in 2022 meant to help combat the spread of false information online. She ended up resigning under pressure after opponents of the board spread conspiracy theories online that her real goal was to crack down on free speech.
Adair also recounted the tale of Eric Barber, a city councilor from West Virginia, who became radicalized through Facebook to join the group that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Adair said that despite serving jail time, Barber still believes that the 2020 election was stolen and Donald Trump won.
Adair also discusses the case of Stu Stevens, a strategist for the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign. Stevens’ group produced an ad making the false claim that then-President Barack Obama was responsible for Jeep shifting production from Ohio to China. Jeep officials publicly stated that claim was false, noting that the company was expanding operations in China but “the backbone of the brand” would remain in the U.S. Adair said Stevens refused to admit the ad was wrong, insisting “it’s technically true.”
So why do politicians bend the truth? And where did it start? According to Adair, it’s a very calculated decision.
“They make a calculation — am I going to gain more from making this statement that is false than I’m going to lose?” he said. “It’s that simple. They want to build support for the base, and they believe that lie, in some small way, will help them do that.”
While both sides lie, Adair says his research finds Republicans do it more often. He writes in his book that from 2016 to 2021, 55 percent of the statements made by Republicans and investigated by PolitiFact were false, while 31 percent of those made by Democrats were.
“I asked that question of a whole bunch of Republicans and former Republicans who were willing to talk to me, and I heard a lot of answers,” Adair said. “One was that it’s just become part of their culture.”
“We went state by state, and we found that in half the states there are no political fact-checkers. That’s like having interstate highways where there’s no risk of getting a speeding ticket.”
Denver Riggleman, a former GOP congressman from Virginia, told Adair that Republicans view their work as part of an epic struggle, and that in that struggle anything is OK.
Adair took pains, however, to underscore that Democrats also lie. For example, a PolitiFact check on Joe Biden in May finds he wrongly stated that the rate of inflation he inherited when he took office was much higher than it actually was.
Overall, he went on to say, fact-checking is not working.
“Fact-checking is not stopping the lies. Fact-checking is not putting a serious dent in the lies,” Adair said.
“There’s plenty of fact-checkers who check politicians when they are running for president, but what about the senators and governors and members of the U.S. House?” he said. “We went state by state, and we found that in half the states there are no political fact-checkers. That’s like having interstate highways where there’s no risk of getting a speeding ticket.”
That leads Adair to his first recommendation.
“We need to be creative in getting [fact-checking] to more people, in using it as data so that we can suppress misinformation,” he said. He added that in addition to increasing the volume of fact-checkers in underreported areas, there needs to be more conservative organizations doing their own fact-checking.
“This can’t just be for people who listen to NPR and read The New York Times,” he said.
Adair suggests that AI might help fact-checkers by allowing them to track lies across multiple platforms. He also pointed to efforts by Facebook to fact-check posts on their site.
“I think that we need to reboot how we do this and how we think about this, because the lies are running rampant,” he said.
Asia scholar says they could spark higher prices, supply-chain disruptions for Americans — and possibly help Beijing weaken our ties to allies
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
President-elect Donald Trump’s longstanding plans to hit China with stiff tariffs would likely deal a blow to China’s already faltering economy, but it could also trigger some unintended negative consequences for the U.S. economy and foreign relations, economists say.
Trump warned last week that on his first day back in office he will impose 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada and an additional levy of 10 percent on Chinese imports. (He said during the campaign he would hit China with tariffs of 60 percent or more.) He said the nation’s largest trading partners need to take swifter, harsher action to halt the flow of illegal migrants and drugs into the U.S.
A revived trade war would further destabilize China’s economy, but economists and tax experts caution it would also harm the U.S. economy by increasing prices for American consumers and could lead to supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and a currency war with China. In addition, it could provide China with new opportunities to get closer to traditional U.S. allies in Europe, the U.K., Australia, and Japan.
Rana Mitter, S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard Kennedy School, spoke with the Gazette about how China is viewing the prospect of new tariffs and preparing to respond. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The Chinese economy is already facing headwinds from a battered housing market and sluggish consumer demand. How is Beijing viewing the possibility of another trade war with the U.S.?
There are at least two different strands of thinking, which point in different directions. One of them is extreme concern about the way in which a tariff policy could essentially make China’s global export drive much more difficult to achieve, particularly into U.S. markets, which still remain very important despite the political difficulties between the two countries.
The other is much more about medium-term thinking. Some think that the imposing of tariffs could be the beginning of some new, hard-nosed, realistic negotiation with the United States, which could end up being a version of the Phase One trade deal that did exist under the first Trump administration. I would say the first is more dominant, as far as I can tell. But that second thought, that there might be an opportunity for China, is not absent.
“I think the biggest fear on the Chinese side at the moment is uncertainty on what the phrasing of ‘60 percent tariffs on goods coming in from China’ actually means — or the most recent statement that there might be an additional 10 percent.”
Rana Mitter
What worries China the most right now?
I think the biggest fear on the Chinese side at the moment is uncertainty on what the phrasing of “60 percent tariffs on goods coming in from China” actually means — or the most recent statement that there might be an additional 10 percent. Defining where goods come from isn’t simple; there are different rules of origin; there are different components. Many products that are very popular in the U.S. and the world — Apple smartphones would be a very good example — have many components from China.
So, the question is: What does it actually mean to impose 60 percent tariffs? Until you know the answer to that question, you can’t very easily plan for it. I suspect that is part of the intention. The aim is to make it clear what direction of travel is on this issue, not to give a detailed, laid-out plan as to how it’s going to operate. And for many of the Chinese, I suspect they see this as the starting point for negotiation, and they see a new Trump administration wanting to be on the front foot in terms of that negotiation.
In 2023, China fell behind Mexico as the top supplier of U.S. imports. The value of China’s share of U.S. imports in semiconductors, smartphones, and laptops was 35 percent lower than when Trump first imposed some tariffs in 2017. How damaging could a U.S. tariff of 60 percent or more be to China’s economy? And could China make up for that elsewhere?
First of all, yes, it would make things difficult. Clearly, export of manufactured goods into the United States is a very significant part of China’s economy. But it’s worth remembering that other key markets, including the European Union and Japan, are also part of China’s strategy of selling to highly developed, advanced economies. Nonetheless, the U.S. is a very important market, and in fact, even during the last few years of U.S.-China political controversy, trade figures between two sides have actually often gone up rather than down. So, it is significant, there’s no doubt about that.
In terms of opening up new markets, there’s certainly very, very strong efforts, and have been for some years, to try and do that.
Think about the signature policy that China has used in terms of international exports and foreign direct investment, what’s been known as the Belt and Road Initiative [a global infrastructure development plan to connect Asia with Africa and Europe to strengthen China’s geopolitical and economic influence]. In the last year or two, the term GDI, Global Development Initiative, has been much more widely used by the Chinese for the next phase of their plans.
The aim is essentially to create new and higher value markets in emerging economies — Southeast Asia, Latin America, and to some extent, Sub-Saharan Africa, although the latter is still of more interest in terms of raw materials than it is in terms of new markets for sales. Or think about EVs (electric vehicles), both Chinese exports of EVs and the export of intellectual property, including Chinese technology, to areas like Southeast Asia is becoming a bigger factor than it would have been four or five years ago even.
Nonetheless, these are still small markets compared to the number of Chinese goods that are sold into very advanced markets like the United States — half a trillion dollars according to U.N. figures.
Trump has been promising for some time to impose additional tariffs if re-elected. Has China been preparing for that possibility?
Yes, they’ve been preparing for quite some time for this possibility. Since it became clear that President Trump would likely be the Republican candidate, and then could quite possibly win, there has been plenty of strategizing in Beijing about what that outcome would mean in a whole variety of areas, including security, as well as trade.
On trade, the question of how China tries to move to protect their markets and also deal with the shaky state of the domestic economy has been a really key question. But there is no clear answer yet.
If you look at the economic policies the Chinese government has undertaken in the last few months, it involves repeated use of fiscal stimulus to try to stimulate domestic consumer spending. But since China is very, very determined to maintain a global trade surplus, it’s going to be much harder for them to use domestic consumption as a means of boosting the economy. So, exports still really matter.
Getting around that involves a policy decision they don’t want to make: to release large amounts of the savings that ordinary Chinese have in their accounts, reduce their trade surplus, and redirect spending into the domestic consumer market. That is something that has been advocated by Chinese policymakers for more than 20 years. They always step back from it because, in the end, exporting more has seemed more politically attractive and a solution more suited to where they are at the moment in terms of global supply chains.
Which countries stand to benefit most from a decline in Chinese imports to the U.S.? Is anyone poised to step in to meet U.S. demand?
You put your finger on the key issue. Filling that gap in short order will be very, very difficult. There is a reason that China has become so dominant over 30 years. If there was some reason — terrorists or a conflict or something else — that made China no longer viable, then India is probably one place that would attract investment on that front. But it would take time to bring its supply chains and its technical capacity up to standards.
Vietnam, but of course Vietnam borders China, and it’s possible that issues with supply-chain problems might well affect Vietnam more directly. There are also places where you can get niche manufacturing of various sorts done. But in terms of that kind of higher-value-added manufacturing, that demands technical skills, lots of components, supply chains, those are very complex things.
A slightly different issue, but not unrelated, is the dominance that Taiwan has on the very-high-end semiconductor market. That’s still a very vulnerable part of a global supply chain and that will remain relevant in terms of trying to shift capacity from China. Because it’s never just about China, it’s also about the things that get sent to and sent from China as part of the wider manufacturing process.
Harvard economist Larry Summers recently said if the U.S. takes a broad brushstroke approach to tariffs on imports, that may provide Beijing with a ready excuse for China’s own internal economic problems, further straining U.S.-China relations. Do you share that view?
I think that’s quite plausible, but I’d say there’s another “yes, and.” It also provides an opportunity for something else that China could do that the U.S. would find unattractive.
What’s being proposed is not just a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods, but also 25 percent on all goods from Mexico and Canada. [And Trump said during his campaign that European Union nations might also face tariffs.] That gives China an opportunity to talk to the EU, to talk to mid-sized, independent economies like Australia, the U.K., Japan, and say, “Because we are all being targeted by these tariffs at different levels, it makes more sense for us to find some common cause.”
It would be a real reversal if the United States chose to undertake a trade policy that got the Chinese and Europeans closer to each other rather than the U.S., as is traditional, being close to its democratic allies.
So that may be an unintended consequence that could have lasting harm to the U.S. well beyond spiking prices for American consumers?
It opens an opportunity for China that doesn’t exist at the moment but would exist if there was a very wide-ranging, broad-brush approach on tariffs imposed on all imports. Since all advanced economies do import as well as export, they’re going to find themselves very vulnerable.
And if they feel the United States is trying to prevent exports into the U.S. rather than encourage them, they will look to other large markets. There aren’t that many of them of that size and even larger in the world, but China is very clearly one of them.
The 20th-century novel, from its corset to bomber jacket phase
Machado de Assis (clockwise from upper left), Gertrude Stein, Colette, and Ernest Hemingway.
Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
In ‘Stranger Than Fiction,’ Edwin Frank chose 32 books to represent the period. He has some regrets.
In his new book, Edwin Frank ’82 charts the history of the 20th-century novel through 32 key works, from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” and H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz.”
The Gazette interviewed Frank — founder and editorial director of the publishing house New York Review Books — about “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” including why he selected certain titles, controversial omissions, and his hopes for the future of the art form. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Your book traces the trajectory of the 20th-century novel through 32 titles. What made, in your view, those works and authors exemplary of that century?
The authors in the first and largely the second part of the book are authors who represent new beginnings and new ways of thinking about the novel. H.G. Wells invents a certain kind of popular fiction. André Gide invents a certain kind of art novel that stands apart from the popular 19th-century novels. Kipling and Colette are looking at what it is to be at the start of a new century and to be young people, and what it means to hope for a new world or to be impatient with the old world. I include Gertrude Stein and Machado de Assis because they represent new ways of writing that emerge in the New World, which of course, has a shorter history of producing novels. Most of those writers were at the beginning of the last century young people, and I wanted to map the new terrain, and these writers serve to do that.
In a way, the book has behind the scenes a single character: the 20th-century novel. You could say that at the beginning she dresses Edwardian style, not always happily, and by the end, she’s wearing a bomber jacket. I wanted to explore the changes that took place over the course of a lifetime of the novel as literary form.
In the second part of the book, the novelists are dealing with issues having to do with the conclusive destruction of the Victorian ways of life by World War I. They know they live in a new world altogether, one where all sorts of old codes have been destroyed, and the question is how to chronicle this new world.
“I thought that the book should be introducing people to wonderful writers who are less well known to the Anglosphere and suggesting ways in which books that sometimes seem daunting to read are entirely engageable books and still very much alive.”
Photo by Jonathan Becker
Were you worried that many of the novels you chose are not well known and that those that are well known are not even read by many people?
I thought that the book should be introducing people to wonderful writers who are less well known to the Anglosphere and suggesting ways in which books that sometimes seem daunting to read — let’s say Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” — are entirely engageable books and still very much alive. I saw that as being, frankly, part of my own story of expanding publication and translation of books from different parts of the world so that readers learn to read across barriers that once seemed challenging.
You include American authors Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Why not William Faulkner or others that some may see as glaring omissions?
The conception of the book was international, and the presence of American writers had to be circumscribed. And even so, certainly the largest contingent of writers in the book reflects my own linguistic competence. I speak briefly about Faulkner and state his importance. Several people said that the omission of Dos Passos is, just from the point of view of the international novel, perhaps the most glaring one because along with Faulkner and Hemingway, Dos Passos is undoubtedly the single most influential American writer on writers abroad in the last century. The panoramic novel he invents is a major genre, and I’m very fond of Dos Passos. It was with some regret.
With Stein, I wanted to suggest that she does pass on to, certainly Hemingway and Faulkner, a sense of American literature as posing a question of scale; what kind of sentence can be big or small enough for the almost unimaginable uncertainties that the new world opens up. We often forget how provisional a country America was, and perhaps still is. Stein realized how an open form could particularly address that situation. As she famously said, “There is no there there.” That is Stein’s sort of peculiar genius. Even if we don’t think of her as having written a book that is as beloved as any of those writers’ books, she made a remarkable contribution.
There are other novels I wrote about, but they ended up on the cutting-room floor. For example, Naguib Mahfouz’s “The Cairo Trilogy,” which looks back to 19th-century European novels, but also introduces a heady, lyrical, almost fantastical dream narrative that he takes from the ancient tradition of Arabic writing. And then there is also the surrealist Louis Aragon, who didn’t make the cut. I regret that because I wanted to bring out how surrealism, largely neglected or seen as a visual art in the Anglophone world, was a major contributor to the novel in the 20th century. Magical realism came out of surrealism.
What influence, if any, did the novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries have in this literary form in the 20th century?
The novel is a popular form starting really in the 18th century. But in the 19th century, it becomes truly popular, and the growth of literacy and industry allows novels to be produced on a larger scale for a larger audience. In a way, the 20th-century novel is impatient with the novel’s success. It’s impatient to prove that the novel is a fully serious form of art and not just a popular form of art. The novel is also skeptical of the political and social arrangements that have emerged in the 19th century; wanting more freedoms for individuals, sexual freedoms, artistic freedoms, and freedom to talk about the whole range of lived experience. If the 19th-century novels tend to balance the claims of self and society, saying that that balance is the precondition for a life of, as Freud would say, “ordinary unhappiness,” or even perhaps a happy life, in the 20th century, that balance becomes suspect, and the novel explores the ways in which things can be set out of balance.
What do Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” or Elsa Morante’s “History,” which are in the last part of the book, say about the end of the century?
The last part was the part where books surprised me most often. I didn’t quite know how I was going to end the book. I thought it should end the way a pop song ends, by fading out, but you have to fade out on a strong chorus. As it happened, the book was writing me as much as I was writing the book. Those post second World War books end up as a person does: entering middle age and looking back at a history that is in many ways already set. There are novels that stand as models of innovation, but they are now older novels. You get to a book like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” whose very title announces itself as a book of a century, though it never mentions the 20th century, but it is a book, in some sense, about what is the meaning of these 100 years that we have lived through. And that struck me a good deal. Books like Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual” or Elsa Morante’s “History,” or García Márquez’s novel have a quality of trying to sum up, and I hadn’t really anticipated that. I was getting to the end of my book, and I suddenly realized that, in fact, a lot of books from the last part of the century were about summing up; they were about ending.
What are your hopes and concerns about the future of the novel and its place in the cultural conversation?
I would worry that the novel becomes a sort of a special property of the educated classes, that it becomes a little precious and loses its connection to the larger life of society and to a whole range of different kinds of people who have emerged in modern societies.
It strikes me that here in America we are living through changing times, and it’s remarkable to me how few novels there are that deal with — as Dickens, a brilliant stylist in his own right — financiers, scallywags and shameless politicians and what you will. I hope that those novelists do emerge. People always talk about how people no longer have the stamina to read long books, but then you have George Martin’s books, which are very long indeed, and people seem to gobble them up. Those books have a range of characters and events that shows an appetite to be comprehensive. And recently, Karl Ove Knausgård’s “My Struggle” too. I think, to some extent, that the literary novel is still a little overshadowed by the sheer range of accomplishment in the previous century and is struggling to find a new footing, a new sensibility and a new way of responding to the new world that we inhabit.
Friends, colleagues gather for 70th birthday conference honoring economic scholar, former Treasury Secretary and University President Lawrence Summers
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Jason Furman (from left), Olivier Blanchard, and Brad DeLong.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
In introducing the final panel, Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, remarked, “This is not a roast.”
But the recent economic policy conference marking Lawrence H. Summers’ 70th birthday was often roast-like — although always affectionate — interspersed with anecdotes from computer labs during Summers’ student days, the halls of Washington, D.C., and the president’s office in Mass Hall. Pointed comments about economic concepts prompted laughter, as did Summers — seated in the front row — who offered some good-natured rebuttals to the ribbing.
The gathering featured panels on Summers’ impact on modern finance, labor and public economics, and macroeconomics and policy. Speakers described a colleague and friend who has had a deep impact on those around him. His trademark probing questions have pushed others to think deeper, while his public positions have made a difference on topics as disparate as the recent rise and fall of inflation, passage of the Affordable Care Act, and his early recognition, in 1992, of the importance of educating girls in the developing world.
Summers offered some good-natured rebuttals to the ribbing.
“No one was talking about this, but Larry did, and he single-handedly took that issue from something that education ministers care about to something finance ministers care about,” said former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, “And we all know the power difference between those two posts. Literally millions and millions of girls owe a change in their lives and futures to that speech.”
Today, Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School. His career spans studies at MIT and Harvard; the World Bank, where he was chief economist; the U.S. Treasury department, where he was secretary from 1999 to 2001; Harvard’s president’s office from 2001 to 2006; and the National Economic Council, which he directed from 2009 to 2011 under Obama.
Panelists painted a portrait of a scholar and public servant who is an innovative thinker and fearless in his thoughts and beliefs: Summers at one point remarked about a fundamental concept he still disagrees with, to knowing laughter. “I’ve lost that argument with the world, largely. I’m aware of that, but not to the extent of giving it up.”
Sheryl Sandberg described Summers’ impact on her career as profound.
Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and HKS’ Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, described Summers’ ability to extract knowledge from those around him by focusing on a single issue or question and probing it until he was satisfied he had learned all he could. UC Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong said Summer’s questioning style went both ways: People learned more than facts and figures from him. They learned how to think differently.
“Larry’s nearly unique edge, I think, is an extremely, extremely sharp eye for what pain points are about to become salient, over and over seeing when things are changing in the macro economy so we really need to change our models to deal with skating where the puck is going to be,” said DeLong, who has been a co-author with Summers. “Because the important questions are about now and the next decade. You write even a good paper about an important question in macro from a decade ago, and you have written a paper about an unimportant question.”
Sandberg, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1995, said Summers’ impact on her career has been profound. She met him as a student, he advised her thesis, gave her a job at the World Bank when he was chief economist, and later at the Treasury, where she was his chief of staff. Through her career he was always willing to listen, she said, and she knows he listened to others even when they were facing public scrutiny, a time when many would shrink from associating with them.
“He never worried that he would somehow get dragged into someone else’s mess. He just showed up,” Sandberg said. “I know all of us here showed up for this day because Larry has shown up for us.”
Study finds 1:2 ratio of plant to animal protein lowers risk of heart disease
Maya Brownstein
Harvard Chan School Communications
4 min read
Increasing the ratio of plant-based protein in your diet may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease, finds a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
According to the researchers, these risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meats. The researchers also observed that a combination of consuming more plant protein and higher protein intake overall provided the most heart health benefits.
While global dietary guidelines recommend higher intake of plant protein, the ideal ratio of plant to animal protein has remained unknown. The study is the first to investigate this ratio and how it impacts health, specifically heart health.
Risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meat with several plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes.
“The average American eats a 1:3 plant to animal protein ratio. Our findings suggest a ratio of at least 1:2 is much more effective in preventing cardiovascular disease. For coronary heart disease prevention, a ratio of 1:1.3 or higher should come from plants,” said lead author Andrea Glenn, visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition. Glenn worked on the study as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Chan School and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt.
The study was published Dec. 2 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The researchers used 30 years of data on diet, lifestyle, and heart health among nearly 203,000 men and women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study. Participants reported their dietary intake every four years. The researchers calculated each participant’s total protein intake, measured in grams per day, as well as their specific intakes of animal and plant proteins. Over the course of the study period, 16,118 cardiovascular disease cases, including over 10,000 coronary heart disease cases and over 6,000 stroke cases, were documented.
After adjusting for participants’ health history and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, the study found that eating a higher ratio of plant to animal protein was associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease. Compared to participants who consumed the lowest plant to animal protein ratio (~1:4.2), participants who consumed the highest (~1:1.3) had a 19 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 27 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease. These risk reductions were even higher among participants who ate more protein overall. Those who consumed the most protein (21 percent of energy coming from protein) and adhered to a higher plant to animal protein ratio saw a 28 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 36 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease, compared to those who consumed the least protein (16 percent of energy). No significant associations were found for stroke risk and the ratio; however, replacing red and processed meat in the diet with several plant sources, such as nuts, showed a lower risk of stroke.
The researchers also examined if there’s a point at which eating more plant protein stops having added benefits or could even have negative implications. They found that risk reduction for cardiovascular disease begins to plateau around a 1:2 ratio, but that coronary heart disease risk continues to decrease at higher ratios of plant to animal protein.
According to the researchers, replacing red and processed meat with plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes, have been found to improve cardiometabolic risk factors, including blood lipids and blood pressure as well as inflammatory biomarkers. This is partly because plant proteins are often accompanied by high amounts of fiber, antioxidant vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats.
“Most of us need to begin shifting our diets toward plant-based proteins,” said senior author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School. “We can do so by cutting down on meat, especially red and processed meats, and eating more legumes and nuts. Such a dietary pattern is beneficial not just for human health but also the health of our planet.”
The researchers pointed out that the ratios they identified are estimates, and that further studies are needed to determine the optimal balance between plant and animal protein. Additionally, further research is needed to determine how stroke risk may be impacted by protein intake.
The Nurses’ Health Studies and Health Professional Follow-up Studies are supported by National Institutes of Health grants UM1 CA186107, R01 CA49449, R01 HL034594, U01 HL145386, R01 HL088521, U01 CA176726, R01 CA49449, U01 CA167552, R01 HL60712, and R01 HL35464.
Dance the audience can feel — through their phones
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Engineer harnesses haptics to translate movement, make her art more accessible
Shriya Srinivasan danced with precise steps, using graceful flicks of her wrists to depict a heroine holding a mirror and applying makeup and perfume, her expressions lit by hope and excitement. Behind her, centuries-old Indian watercolors depicted similar heroines.
The assistant professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was performing a bharata natyam dance about a common archetype in Indian paintings and dance — a vasakasajja nayika, or heroine eagerly preparing to meet her lover — for a recent event at the Harvard Art Museums. Before the dance, she explained to the audience how the brain’s prefrontal cortex heightens feelings of excitement and anticipation in love by tapping into memories and activating reward centers.
“As a dancer, I aim to enter the emotional and physiological state of the character I am playing, inducing a faster heart rate or slowing the breath, to simulate anxiety or deep loss, for example,” she said. “Mirror neurons in the viewer then assimilate these cues and allow them to resonate with the emotional experience and catharsis of the character.”
A recent collaboration between the lab and Anubhava led to the creation of an app that allows audience members to feel dancers’ movements through a smartphone’s vibrations, a project featured last month on the PBS Nova docuseries “Building Stuff.”
“The scientific question at hand was: How can we enhance the experience of dance, reaching beyond just audio and visual input into tactile or other forms of sensory input?” Srinivasan said.
Her research and development team, which included Isabella Gomez ’24 and Krithika Swaminathan, Ph.D. ’23, developed custom sensing devices that are placed on the ankles of Anubhava dancers to capture and classify their complex footwork into patterns. A smartphone app transmits the movements into audience members’ hands. Srinivasan says the technology has the potential to make dance performances more accessible for the lay viewer, as well as visually- or hearing-impaired people.
“Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect.”
Shriya Srinivasan
Srinivasan, assistant professor of bioengineering, in her office.
Photo by Grace DuVal
To make the haptic feedback stimuli convey the feel of the footwork, researchers set the vibrations to different intensity levels. Light, flowing movements were represented by vibrations targeting surface-level mechanoreceptors in the skin, while more intense, punchier movements penetrated to deeper skin layers, Srinivasan explained. The project culminated in a dance titled “Decoded Rhythms” for an audience at the ArtLab, where Srinivasan did a 2023-2024 faculty residency.
“For me, dance and engineering are similar in process,” Srinivasan said. “Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect. Just as engineers design a system to meet certain requirements, dancers create choreography to evoke a particular emotion or reaction from the audience. It’s about problem-solving and design.”
Srinivasan, who grew up dancing bharata natyam under the tutelage of her mother Sujatha Srinivasan, established Anubhava in 2015 with co-founder Joshua George in the hopes of creating a space for Indian forms in the American dance world while also merging arts, science, and humanities onstage.
“There’s a high level of rhythmic and mathematical complexity that goes into the choreography that we produce that might not always translate to an audience if they’re not familiar with the style of music that we utilize, or if they’ve not been trained in the dance form,” George said.
Since this collaboration, Srinivasan said Anubhava has been diving deeper into neuroscience, psychology, and mental health, incorporating portrayals of emotions such as fear and anxiety, which she said are not commonly explored in Indian classical dance tradition, into their recent performances.
“I find it immensely fulfilling to engage in work at the intersection of disciplines,” Srinivasan said. “Exploring a problem from different perspectives can help you envision solutions that aren’t visible from traditional silos.”
Srinivasan is especially interested in further research on how physiological changes in the body of a dancer portraying emotions onstage might evoke a similar response in audience members.
“There are vast opportunities to study why the world makes us feel the way we do. When I experience art, it evokes a certain emotional response in me. Understanding why is deeply fundamental to the work of an artist, but doing so with the lens of science gives me this tangible way to say, ‘OK, if I modulate ABC, I can get somebody to feel XYZ.’ To me, that’s nuanced insight.”
Colorized transmission electron micrograph of an HIV-1 virus particle (yellow/gold) budding from an infected cell.
Credit: NIAID/NIH
Shafaq Zia
HMS Communications
long read
Decades of scientific work turned the tide on a fatal disease and yielded insights into immunity, vaccines, and more
In 1981, fresh out of medical school, physician-scientist Bruce Walker began his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. One day, a young patient showed up with an unusual cluster of infections and cancers. Baffled and powerless to treat him, Walker and his colleagues could only watch as the patient quickly succumbed to the mysterious condition.
“I distinctly remember the first case we saw at Mass General,” said Walker, who is the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “The attending physician said that although we didn’t know what this condition was, we probably would never see another case like it.”
Two weeks later, another patient came in with the same set of symptoms. It quickly became clear to Walker and his colleagues that they weren’t dealing with a rare disease — it was the beginning of a new epidemic.
The baffling condition was acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — the most advanced stage of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which attacks and destroys infection-fighting immune cells. By 1993, HIV had become the leading cause of death in Americans aged 25-44 years.
In the 40-plus years since it was identified, scientists have made notable progress against HIV, transforming the infection from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition, one that affects some 1.2 million people in the United States and nearly 40 million worldwide.
This decades-long quest for a cure for HIV has also yielded broader insights that have implications for the treatment of COVID-19, cancer, and other diseases.
From molecular insights to frontline medicines
Since the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, basic science and animal research have played a critical role in illuminating the virus’ complex behavior.
Some of the pivotal studies toward unraveling the structure, biology, and behavior of HIV have emanated from labs across Harvard Medical School. Using a range of imaging techniques, Stephen Harrison’s lab has identified key portions of HIV and studied the evolution of HIV antibodies, which is critical to understanding how the immune system interacts with the virus. The work of Joseph Sodroski, Bing Chen, and Alan Engelman has elucidated how HIV enters host cells and interacts with cell receptors, studying the structure and behavior of the virus’ protein envelope during this process.
This research has illuminated how HIV integrates its genetic material into host cell DNA, a crucial step in the virus’ life cycle. These insights have enhanced vaccine and therapeutic development by revealing how broadly neutralizing antibodies work and guiding the design of new immune-targeting strategies.
Early analyses of patient samples revealed that HIV is a human retrovirus — a type of virus that converts its RNA into DNA upon infecting a host cell. This tricks the host cell into copying the virus’ genetic material into its DNA as part of the cell’s normal replication cycle. The maneuver enables it to use the host cell machinery to make more viruses. HIV specifically goes after CD4 T lymphocytes or so-called helper T cells. These white blood cells coordinate immune response by signaling other immune cells to fight invaders. The virus begins by hijacking the cells’ molecular machinery to assemble thousands of viral particles, which go on to infect other CD4 T cells, spreading the pathogen throughout the body.
Today, the standard treatment for HIV is antiretroviral therapy (ART) — a combination of HIV medications, typically taken daily, that disrupt the virus’ replication cycle. When taken consistently, ART can lower the amount of actively replicating virus in the body — or viral load — to undetectable levels, lowering risk of transmission and allowing people with HIV to live nearly as long as uninfected individuals.
ART has also proved to be useful as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) — an approach that can prevent up to 99 percent of sexually transmitted HIV infections from developing after exposure. Notably, a new class of medicines has raised hopes as a game-changer in HIV prevention. Two recent clinical trials of more than 7,500 cisgender men and transgender and nonbinary people showed that twice-a-year injections with the long-lasting drug lenacapavir prevented HIV infections in nearly all participants.
Yet, millions around the world are already infected. Once inside the body, HIV persists because of its remarkable ability to hide within healthy CD4 T cells, where it can lie dormant for years without triggering an immune response, said Daniel Kuritzkes, HMS Harriet Ryan Albee Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Although these latent reservoirs of HIV do not actively produce new virus particles, they can reawaken at any time, leading to active HIV infection. This chronic immune activation among infected people — even when the virus is kept at bay — can amplify the risk for several chronic conditions.
“People living with HIV often have elevated markers of inflammation. This chronic immune activation can predispose people to long-term complications, including cardiovascular illness.”
Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the division of infectious diseases, BWH
“People living with HIV often have elevated markers of inflammation,” Kuritzkes said. “This chronic immune activation can predispose people to long-term complications, including cardiovascular illness.”
Indeed, research has shown that people with HIV have a somewhat elevated risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and certain types of cancer. Now, the latest research from Advancing Clinical Therapeutics Globally — a global network of experts conducting HIV research — has found that daily use of statins could reduce risk of cardiovascular disease in people living with HIV by 35 percent. This pivotal work was conceived by and led by Steven Grinspoon, HMS professor of medicine and director of the Metabolism Unit at Mass General Hospital.
While this offers a path toward managing HIV-related complications, Kuritzkes emphasizes that the ultimate quest of research efforts remains achieving sterilizing immunity through a vaccine that halts the virus in its tracks, preventing infection from taking hold in the first place.
The roadmap to a vaccine
With some 1.3 million new infections a year, a vaccine remains the best way to end the HIV epidemic, said Dan Barouch, the William Bosworth Castle Professor of Medicine at HMS and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
“We should use all of our prevention and treatment tools, including education and pre-exposure prophylaxis with antiretroviral drugs, to prevent HIV, but to really end the epidemic, we need a vaccine,” Barouch said.
Despite great strides with PrEP, Barouch notes, it will only reach high-risk individuals, and as many as half of new HIV infections occur in people who are not designated as high risk. Thus, Barouch notes, even if PrEP were available for free and accessible to everyone in the world, which is far from reality, it would still invariably reach a ceiling of population efficacy.
Yet, after 40 years of effort, the HIV vaccine field is at a crossroads. Since the dawn of HIV research, there have been hundreds of attempts at vaccine design, and dozens have made it to early-stage clinical trials, but only five have been tested in large-scale clinical trials.
“There is a lot of exciting basic, preclinical, and early clinical research, but currently no vaccine candidate has a clear trajectory for advanced clinical development,” Barouch said.
Why?
First, the ability of the virus to shapeshift within the host and across the population. The virus mutates rapidly, resulting in an astonishing genetic diversity not seen with any other virus.
“With HIV, you are not targeting a single virus, you’re targeting millions of different viruses,” said Barouch.
Another problem is the fact that the virus integrates itself into the host genome quickly — within days following infection — then goes into hiding, establishing a latent reservoir that can reactivate at any time. This means that a vaccine needs to induce rapid immune response that counters viral maneuvers very rapidly. No other virus seeds reservoirs so quickly, and no other vaccine has been capable of inducing such rapid defense.
Finally, the virus is cloaked in an envelope of sugar molecules — or glycans — that render it largely impervious to antibodies. There are only three or four targets on HIV that render it vulnerable to antibodies. Thus, for antibodies to work, they must be hyperprecise to latch on to these hotspots in order to disrupt the viral shield. This, Barouch notes, may be one of the greatest hurdles to developing a potent enough vaccine.
Among the most recent efforts was a vaccine developed by Barouch and Johnson & Johnson that was tested in Africa and in South and North America. The approach used a so-called “mosaic” platform optimized using computational biology to target multiple strains of the virus.
The researchers used computer design to create a mosaic antigen in the lab. The trial, which concluded in 2021, showed the vaccine had great safety but low efficacy — around 14 percent. A vaccine needs to be at least 50 percent effective, but ideally 70 percent or more, Barouch noted, meaning that it would have to prevent at least seven out of 10 infections.
Despite the disappointing results, Barouch said, the findings helped refocus the field of HIV vaccine research on the importance of neutralizing antibodies — the types of immune proteins that are capable of disabling rather than merely recognizing the virus.
To that end, Barouch and team have redoubled their efforts to design vaccines that create precisely such broadly neutralizing antibody response as well as spark a robust T cell response, thus activating both major arms of the immune system.
Lessons from elite controllers
In the early 1990s, researchers noticed a tiny subset of HIV-infected patients who were living healthy and symptom free without medication. These patients, who came to be known as elite controllers, had undetectable viral levels in their bodies. Their immune systems were powerful enough to naturally keep the virus from replicating. Between 0.15 and 1.5 percent of HIV-infected individuals are estimated to be elite controllers.
“In these individuals, the immune system is able to suppress HIV replication,” said Yu, whose lab focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind this remarkable immune response, with the hope of harnessing these insights to develop new antiretroviral treatments for HIV. “And in a rare subgroup, the immune system may even eliminate all cells infected with replication-competent HIV, curing the infection entirely.”
When Gaurav Gaiha, then a first-year student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, learned about elite controllers, he was captivated by the concept of using insights from these unique individuals to develop an HIV vaccine.
At that time, a prevailing scientific theory was that elite controllers had an exceptionally powerful T cell response to HIV. However, when Gaiha began comparing the T cell responses in elite controllers to that of people living with progressive HIV, he discovered something surprising: While T cell function in elite controllers was important, there was another important piece to this biological riddle. Gaiha therefore shifted his focus and instead began to zero in on the specific regions of the virus that these T cells were targeting.
In a 2019 study, Gaiha, Walker, and colleagues applied network theory to tackle this question. They treated each amino acid in the viral proteins as a node in a network, allowing them to quantify how central each amino acid was to the protein’s function. Their findings offered a breakthrough: T cells in elite controllers consistently targeted critical regions of the virus protein network — areas that were essential for its survival and losing or mutating them would significantly hinder the virus’ ability to replicate.
“It’s similar to key players in a network,” said Gaiha, now an assistant professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “Key players keep the network connected, while others may be more on the periphery. If T cells target key player amino acids from these critical regions of viral proteins, you may have a chance to control the virus for a long period of time without therapy.”
These insights, Gaiha noted, have implications beyond HIV — they helped guide COVID-19 vaccine developments that stimulate T cells and induce a robust and long-lasting immune response.
Encouraged by promising results in humanized mice, Gaiha and Walker are now collaborating with two biotech companies to translate these insights into a viable HIV vaccine. The group’s viral vector-based vaccine candidate is set to enter a first in human clinical trial in Zimbabwe and South Africa in early 2025, while a second RNA-based vaccine trial is meant to begin in 2026 at Mass General.
“I am hopeful that we will see good outcomes from these initial vaccine trials,” said Gaiha. “But more importantly, I am looking forward to learning key lessons that will guide us, so we can continue to refine. We’re in this for the long haul.”
Ripple benefits beyond HIV
The search for a cure continues, but the sinuous 40-plus-year journey has fueled advances well beyond HIV.
For starters, many of the successes in the identification, testing, and treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ignited the COVID-19 pandemic, were built on knowledge and hard-earned experiences with HIV.
“Research on HIV really paved the way for the advances that were made with COVID, by laying the platforms for vaccine development that, in particular, the vectors that were used to generate immune responses, the mechanisms for rapid diagnostics, the understanding of viral pathogenesis — all were really contributed by work that had been done on HIV,” Walker said.
“If it wasn’t for the decades of HIV research, we would not have had the COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly.”
Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, BIDMC
“If it wasn’t for the decades of HIV research, we would not have had the COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly,” Barouch said.
HIV research also equipped scientists with the tools and know-how to unravel viral structures and monitor the behavior of viruses inside their hosts. This work also led to the development of animal models that allow researchers to study how the body responds to vaccines and treatments and laid the foundation for the modern-day infrastructure needed to conduct clinical trials.
HIV research has catalyzed understanding of immune system function in myriad ways. For example, recent advances in gene therapy and CAR T cells were heavily influenced by research conducted in HIV infection.
“Fundamental mechanisms of how the immune system can recognize, engage, and target virally infected cells were first discovered in the context of HIV infection, and a lot of this progress has subsequently been translated to alternative disease contexts,” said HIV researcher Xu Yu, professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.
For example, gene therapy uses lentiviruses as vectors to deliver therapeutic genes into the target cells.
“These lentiviruses are very similar to HIV, and a deeper understanding of HIV allowed researchers to use lentiviruses for therapeutic gene transfer,” Yu said.
HIV research also helped advanced the field of CAR T-cell therapy, which uses genetically engineered immune cells for the treatment of blood cancers. One of the first CAR T-cell studies was done in the context of treating HIV infection, more than 20 years ago.
“Experience gained with CAR T cells in this setting was instrumental in advancing them for oncologic indications,” Yu said.
Gund Hall may look the same but a major renovation has improved its energy efficiency and accessibility. (And, now, hopefully, the roof will stop leaking.)
Gund Hall, it is safe to say, was overdue for an update after weathering 50 Cambridge winters.
The iconic Quincy Street home of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is open after a major renovation this year, its most significant since the building opened in 1972. While the changes may not be readily apparent, the need was.
The hall’s concrete-and-glass stepped exterior, which encloses GSD’s beloved five-story, central studio area known as “the trays,” had badly deteriorated over the years, allowing moisture and cold air to seep in, and heat to escape. The space was so inefficient, it consumed nearly half of the building’s total energy. Before rainstorms, students covered their desks with tarps.
“The main purpose of this work is to get rid of the leaks once and for all. This building, for the 52 years it has been open, has always leaked. When it rains hard, you see the buckets everywhere,” said David Fixler, a lecturer in urban planning and design at GSD who chairs the faculty building committee, which has been advising on this first phase of what will be a multiyear project.
Other improvements include boosting the amount of natural light coming into the trays and making the adjacent outdoor terraces wheelchair-accessible for the first time.
For decades, the building’s unique design, as well as its historic and educational importance to GSD, have presented major obstacles to undertaking any substantive restoration that would fix these persistent problems without compromising the look and feel of the original design by Australian architect John Andrews, March. ’58.
The five-story, central studio area known as “the trays.” Nearly all of the original windows were badly degraded and couldn’t be salvaged.
Gund Hall Project Fact Sheet
15,475
Square feet of studio tray glazing area
1,617
Panels of glass
160,830
Total square footage of Gund Hall, excluding terraces
28%
Amount of floor area taken up by studio trays
46%
Building’s total energy consumption attributed to studio trays
“When John Andrews was originally tasked to design a new facility for the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, he surprised his clients with a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space,” Sarah M. Whiting, dean and Josep Lluis Sert Professor of Architecture at GSD, said in a statement. “Though much has changed since Gund Hall first opened in 1972, the careful rehabilitation of the structure underscores the school’s commitment to this same priority: our students.”
Gund, like other examples of mid-century Brutalist architecture, was constructed before the 1973 global “oil shock” and widespread awareness of climate change. It features large surfaces of exposed concrete, many windows, and is not well-insulated, all of which make it less than well suited to the harsh climate of New England.
“Philosophically, one of the compelling things about brutalism is the structure is the building. What you see is what it is. There’s nothing hidden,” said Fixler, an architect who specializes in mid-20th century building conservation. That means “sometimes they fail spectacularly, and they’re hard to fix.”
Nearly all of the original windows were badly degraded and couldn’t be salvaged. Above, clerestory windows on the roof were replaced with triple-glazed windows.
The curtain walls on each end of the building now have windows made from custom vacuum-insulated glass, a state-of-the-art material not widely used in North America. They provide energy efficiency and noise reduction comparable to traditional triple-glazed windows without the bulk, allowing the new windows to hew very closely to the original window profiles and glass sizes, while delivering two to four times better energy performance than standard glass. They will yield future savings in both carbon and dollars spent on utilities.
Gund Hall features large surfaces of exposed concrete and numerous windows.
The project takes an aging facade that “had the problems of its time to a facade that is the best-performing glazing system anywhere,” said project architect George Gard, MAUD ’14, of Bruner/Cott Architects. The firm has restored other mid-century buildings at Harvard, including Smith Campus Center and Peabody Terrace.
With so many Brutalist-era buildings around the country now confronting similar challenges because of age, the School hopes the project serves as a model for others, by identifying innovative technology, techniques, and materials and helping define best practices.
“We see a lot of future potential as it becomes more common. And we hope that, this project being a high-profile building on Harvard’s campus, can be part of a growing acceptance of this technology,” said Gard.
Given the project’s unique complexity, Fixler, a conservation architect for many decades, has been incorporating the renovation into his teaching.
“What I find heartening is that [among] the students, there’s a growing understanding that it’s a really responsible thing to do to recycle old buildings, whether you like them or not, and to use that opportunity to test new ideas to make them more resilient, make them more sustainable,” he said.
Not everyone appreciates Brutalist behemoths like Gund Hall or Boston City Hall, often called one of the country’s ugliest buildings, or thinks they’re worth preserving.
“One of the biggest challenges, frankly, is getting people to understand why these are good, interesting buildings, and getting people to love them — because so many people hate them,” he said.
“There are a lot of people, especially younger people of the generation that I’m teaching now and my kids, [who] think these buildings are cool. But an awful lot of people of my generation just don’t.”
Study decodes neural mechanism that causes hairy mammals to shake their fur when wet
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
It’s a regular occurrence when taking our canine pals for drizzly walks and summer swims. But until recently, the biology behind the water-flinging, human-drenching, muzzle-distorting “wet dog shake” has mystified scientists working to decode the sense of touch.
Last month, researchers in the lab of David Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology and chair of Harvard Medical School’s Neurobiology Department, reported in work published in the journal Science that they’d used cutting-edge techniques to track sensory signals that underlie wet dog shakes from receptors on the skin to a part of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus.
Using tools — many developed in the Ginty lab — that allow researchers to isolate and trace single neurons and stimulate or block them using light, the researchers determined that the shaking behavior can be evoked by activating a class of sensory neurons called C-LTMRs and, conversely, the number of wet dog shakes evoked by mechanical stimuli decreases when C-LTMRs and the parabrachial nucleus are muted.
The researchers determined that the shaking behavior can be evoked by activating a class of sensory neurons called C-LTMRs.
Though unseen in humans, the motion is universal among fur-bearing mammals, serving as something of an early warning system that insects, dirt, water, and other substances are about to come into contact with the skin. Occurring in everything from grizzly bears to dogs and cats to lab mice, the response is innate, Ginty said, meaning that, though reflexive, it can be controlled by the animal. In humans, Ginty compared it to feeling a bug landing on your arm: You may jerk your arm or flick at it with your other hand with little thought, but it can be controlled if desired. In Ginty’s lab, researchers used droplets of sunflower oil applied to the upper back to trigger the response in mice who’d been genetically engineered so that specific neurons could be stimulated or blocked using light.
“One thing we’ve done over the last 15 to 20 years is generate genetic tools that allow us to study each of the sensory neurons that associate with the skin in isolation and that’s been incredibly powerful,” Ginty said.
The skin has approximately 20 different types of sensory receptors, including those that detect hot, cold, itch, and touch. Twelve or so receptors detect different types of touch, from a quick stab of pain to vibration to steady pressure to a soft caress. The signal triggering the “wet dog shake” starts in C-LTMRs, or C-fiber low threshold mechanoreceptors, which wrap around the base of a hair follicle. The receptor is one of the body’s most sensitive and can pick up the slightest movement of the hair or a depression of the skin around the hair’s base.
From the receptor, the signal travels along nerve cells into the spine, where it joins with the spinal cord. The signals then emerge from the spinal cord and travel to the brain stem and the parabrachial nucleus. Beyond enhancing our understanding of a basic and familiar mammalian behavior, Ginty said that the techniques developed have allowed researchers to overcome a major hurdle — understanding what’s going on inside the spinal cord.
“We understand the logic of organization of the neural circuitry that underlies visual information processing and sound information processing,” said Ginty, whose lab has been focused on unravelling the neurobiology of touch for decades. “For touch — for somatosensory information processing — we’re kind of in a black box trying to understand it because it’s been so challenging to access and record neural activity in the spinal cord.”
Though they’ve tracked the signal to a specific location in the brain, Ginty said many questions remain. An important one is understanding whether the pathway they identified accounts for all the wet dog shake response or, given the limitations of their functional manipulations, if there’s more going on than they were able to see.
“We’re struggling to answer that question, because the tools we typically use are rarely 100 percent effective in blocking one of these steps,” Ginty said. “So, you never know if a residual 10 percent underlies the remaining behavior or if there’s another pathway or another cell type that you’re missing. In this case, I guess it’s the latter, but we can’t be sure.”
Another important question in the work, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Lefler Center for the Study of Neurodegenerative Disorders, is why, if C-LTMR receptors are located all over the body, do only those on the upper middle back trigger the response?
“It’s a very exciting time to understand brain-body physiology: how the body is represented in the brain and how the brain, in turn, controls organ systems of the body.”
David Ginty
From a behavioral standpoint, the answer is clear — that part of the body is out of reach of claws and paws and hooves for swatting or scratching — but that doesn’t explain how nerve signals from that part of the body trigger the wet dog shake while other signals that begin in the same type of receptor and go to the same part of the brain do not. Perhaps, Ginty said, the signals emanating from the nerves originating on the upper middle back propagate to unique regions of the parabrachial nucleus from those originating elsewhere on the body. Another possibility, he said, is that the signal from the upper back is somehow amplified in the spinal cord before reaching the brain.
Though Ginty is a dog lover, he said the work began not out of an appreciation for dogs but by accident. Dawei Zhang, then a graduate student in Ginty’s lab, was using optical tools to activate the then-mysterious pathway beginning with C-LTMR and noticed that every time he did, the mouse would give itself a shake. When Zhang and Ginty saw the reaction, they immediately realized what it was.
“It’s a very exciting time to understand brain-body physiology: how the body is represented in the brain and how the brain, in turn, controls organ systems of the body,” Ginty said. “Some of the new tools coming online are really powerful for helping us unravel these circuits.”
Polaroid gave her a shot. She helped revolutionize photography.
HBS Communications
4 min read
Meroë Morse — focus of Baker Library exhibition — led company’s researchers during innovative era
Meroë Morse had no formal background in business or science when she started at Polaroid in 1945, but within a few years she rose to become manager of black-and-white photographic research and later to director of special photographic research, a notable achievement for a woman in the 1950s and ’60s.
A new exhibition at the Business School’s Baker Library is putting the focus on Morse and her contributions to the development of instant photography — launched commercially by Polaroid in 1948. The collection, “From Concept to Product: Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s Culture of Art and Innovation, 1945–1969,” on view in Baker’s north lobby through April 18, draws on the library’s extensive holdings of the Polaroid Corporation Collection.
“The function of industry is not just the making of goods, the function of industry is the development of people.”
-Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid
A culture of innovation
Edwin H. Land, Polaroid’s founder, cultivated a creative culture within his research and manufacturing enterprise, building an interdisciplinary community devoted to technical and artistic excellence.
Morse, an art history graduate of Smith College, found exceptional opportunities for women in the post-war era at Polaroid. She oversaw round-the-clock shifts of researchers conducting thousands of experiments in the company’s Cambridge laboratory, and met increasing demands for new Polaroid films as the popularity of instant photography soared.
Morse’s affable and commanding presence among her male colleagues.
Instant photography is launched
The first instant film and camera sold for $1.75 and $89.75 respectively on Nov. 26, 1948, in Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store. The camera measured 10½ by 4½ by 2½ inches and weighed four pounds, two ounces. It featured an optical foldout viewfinder, a three-element 135-mm f/11 lens, and shutter speeds from 1/8 to 1/60 of a second. All 56 cameras sold out that day.
Morse holds a hand-made wheel containing names of some of the developing chemicals used in instant photography.
Early Polaroid test photograph of Edwin Land in November 1945.
The first Polaroid film, Type 40, produced sepia-toned prints with a limited tonal range.
Children pose for a test photo.
In 1950, the company introduced black-and-white film Type 41.
Research in black and white
In 1948, Morse became the laboratory supervisor responsible for photographic materials. The earliest Polaroid film, Type 40, produced sepia-toned prints that had limited tonal range. Morse and her lab looked to produce black-and-white images that exhibited greater detail and a color palette more familiar and appealing to consumers. In 1950, after two years of intensive work, the company introduced black-and-white film Type 41. The film produced prints that exhibited finer detail and, as U.S. Camera enthused, created “pictures-in-a-minute of exceptional tonal values.” The Detroit Free Press reported that Land credited Morse with “valuable assistance in research that led to the new film.”
Meroë Morse poses for Polaroid test photos.
Ansel Adams and Polaroid
Morse also served as chief liaison to Ansel Adams, the renowned landscape photographer. A principal consultant for Polaroid from 1948 until his death in 1984, Adams tested the company’s prototype cameras and film. He reviewed technical and design aspects of Polaroid prototypes, from the wording of instruction manuals to the tonal values of finished prints.
The exhibition was organized by Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, with support from the de Gaspé Beaubien Family Endowment. This text is drawn from the exhibition catalog.Find more information at the Baker Library website.
Juniors who talked to us when they first arrived here — and again as sophomores — reflect on how they’ve changed
Gazette photographer Stephanie Mitchell has been conducting a bit of an experiment inspired by her own college years — specifically the address by Nora Ephron to Wellesley’s Class of 1996 expressing, “You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.” She met with a group of Harvard students during their first year and sophomore year, photographed them, and asked them to describe themselves in three words. The students, now juniors, participated in the exercise once again. The three words they chose appear below in gray (2022), dark gray (2023), and black (2024).
Free. Independent. Friendly.
Independent. Free. Possibility.
Free. Independent. Creativity.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Sofia Chavez
Currier House
When we first spoke to Chavez in 2022, the student from Hidalgo, Mexico, noted that she was “learning how to be independent for the first time, leaving home and my country.”
This year, she said: “I’m growing. I’m an adult. I have the freedom of choosing my own path, making decisions, making mistakes, and learning from them.”
In all three of her interviews, Chavez described herself as “free” and independent.” She added a new descriptor this year: creativity. “It gives you the tools to solve problems, not only academically, but in your life.”
As a first-year, she listed women’s and gender studies and sociology as academic interests. By the fall of her sophomore year, she was leaning toward a government concentration in the law and justice track with a secondary in economics. Chavez has since declared a government concentration with a language citation in French. She is considering a senior thesis in political theory and a career in law.
“As a perfectionist or overachiever, you always want to have things in control,” said Chavez, but lately she is happier because “I don’t think about those expectations anymore, only my own.”
God-loving. Adventurous. Passionate.
God-loving. Adventurous. Kind.
God-loving. Grateful. Composed.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Bradley Chinhara
Lowell House
Two years ago, Zimbabwe native Chinhara characterized himself as an “adventurous” person with “diverse interests,” from electrical engineering to rugby to playing the marimba. He credited Christianity and love of family as guiding forces.
“I still pray every day. I still love my religion,” said Chinhara. He’s added two new descriptors this year.
“Grateful, because I wake up every day, and I realize that I go to Harvard, which was one of my biggest dreams growing up. … Grateful for my mom. She passed away, but she lived a beautiful life. … And then composed, because I’m a junior now. I know how things work. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. I’m now at a point where I know what I want. I know how to pursue it.”
Chinhara’s interest in computer science hasn’t wavered as he tilts toward tech entrepreneurship and product management. In 2023, he launched a software development startup. He said he will declare a secondary in economics and is considering business school.
Last spring, he “started reaching out more, talking to more people, going to office hours.”
“It dramatically improved my academic life, my social life, my mental health.”
Fun. Kind. Excited.
Grateful. Motivated. Hopeful.
Energized. Grateful. Inspired.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Myra Bhathena
Pforzheimer House
“Building relationships is the most important thing to me,” said Bhathena in her first-year interview. That theme continues today. She feels energized, she said, “reflecting on the people who have gotten me here.”
“It brings me back to my family — my grandparents, my parents, my siblings. I was lucky to spend the end of the summer with a lot of them, and they always ground me.”
Bhathena has completed many foundational requirements for her economics concentration and is turning to her secondary in global health and health policy. Interning at Boston Children’s Hospital doing research this past summer has only reaffirmed her pre-med track. “I am really excited to dedicate my career to medicine and to caring for people.”
She has moved into mentorship roles in clubs and the classroom, for example serving as a Teaching Fellow for EC10. “I love teaching, and I’m excited to meet new freshmen in the class who are just as nervous and scared as I was.”
This year, “I am a more balanced person,” Bhathena said. “Time has given me more freedom to just be myself and take some deep breaths and enjoy my last two years here.”
Friendly. Excitable. Ambitious.
Approachable. Adaptable. Vibrant.
Evolving. Ambitious. Present.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Dara Omoloja
Leverett House
Omoloja spent the summer back home in Wisconsin. “I had a lot of time to think and contemplate my priorities. There’s so much I need to do and that I want to do in this life.”
In her first Gazette interview Omoloja said she was most looking forward to “immense personal discovery that everyone mentions when thinking about college.”
Now a junior cognizant of how quickly time is passing, she said, “In the past, I spent so much time looking down, be that at my phone, or as I walk, looking at the floor, because I’m thinking about how all these people are seeing me. But now, I really want to pay attention, to be present. Every time I look around, I think, ‘Wow, this world is so pretty, and I want to just take that in more.’”
Reflecting on last year, Omoloja said, “I learned to advocate for myself more. … My biggest lesson was although it is important to show kindness and to have community, it shouldn’t go at the expense of your personal comfort and happiness. … I’m more comfortable in my identity this year. I’m very happy to be me.”
“Ambitious,” a word she used to define herself in 2022, re-emerged as she studies for the MCAT and takes the courses “Medicine and Health in America” and “Therapeutic Rationalities,” concrete steps toward becoming a doctor.
Adventurous. Ambitious. Authentic.
Excited. Fun. Adventurous.
Excited. Relaxed. Melancholy.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Austin Wang
Lowell House
Wang describes himself as both excited and relaxed this year. “I think believing in yourself and having confidence is really important,” and when things become hectic “it’s good to be relaxed and Zen.”
Rejuvenated from a summer of seeing friends and family, doing genetic computational research at the Medical School, and volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, Wang also feels a bit melancholic.
“I looked down at my Pset, and I look up, and it’s already junior year. It went by really quickly … I’m looking forward to the second half.”
Since his last interview, the Canada native has declared his concentration in chemical and physical biology with a secondary in computer science and has continued to find ways to break out of his comfort zone, a goal he emphasized in previous years.
Ringing the Lowell House bells every Sunday has been “super fun.” He shares the recruitment joke for the bells, known for waking up students at the bright hour of 1 p.m. on Sundays: “If you feel like you’re too well liked, feel free to join!”
Creative. Passionate. Fun.
Enthusiastic. Creative/Artistic. Natural.
Creative. Mellow. Open.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Nali Gone
Eliot House
Creativity has been a constant for Gone over the past three years. “It’s a great way for me to engage with the world and understand what people think and feel.”
This year, “I’m not as worried about what’s going to happen. I’m just living in the moment. I am really trying to put myself out there and try new things. Now is such a formative time in my life.”
Gone has declared a concentration in women, gender, and sexuality with a secondary in psychology, and is currently taking a history class about the relationship between guns, property, and power, as well as a First Amendment seminar. “I’m in my amendment era, one might say.”
Last year Gone helped stage-manage for the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club musical “Jekyll and Hyde” and the musical comedy “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” and continues this year with the musical “Pippin.”
A key lesson from sophomore year: how to find balance and take breaks between time commitments.
Excited. Determined. Outgoing
Excited. Passionate. Ambitious.
Growth. Excited. Passionate.
First Year
Sophomore Year
Junior Year
Riley Flynn
Eliot House
Softball continues to be a focus for Flynn, a rise ball and curveball pitcher who was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 2023. While athletics can be time-consuming, she enjoys the camaraderie while traveling the country with her teammates.
Last season, Flynn underwent elbow surgery. “I’m finding my way, working through rehab, and my team has been great through all of that, supporting me and helping me. I should be able to play in the spring.”
What else has changed? “My first years were definitely more about exploring, and this year, I have found things that I am passionate about, whether it’s making friends, playing sports, what I’m studying, and I’m definitely going to go deeper into that in the next two years.”
She’s delving into her concentration in human developmental and regenerative biology with a neuroscience secondary, taking courses in organic chemistry and psychopharmacology.
“I feel that I’ve found my place here and now it’s more about growing in order to continue finding people and places that I love.”
8 students to pursue social, political, computational sciences
Whether examining animal ethics, combating AI bias, or weighing the values essential to a functioning democracy, Harvard’s newest Rhodes Scholars have made their mark across a wide expanse of disciplines. These eight seniors, representing four countries and several U.S. states, will continue their academic pursuits at the University of Oxford next year. They shared their plans, accomplishments, and what it was like to receive the news of their award.
Matthew Anzarouth.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Matthew Anzarouth
Montreal, Canada
Concentration: Social studies
Matthew Anzarouth was at home with family in Montreal when he got the phone call that he had won a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. Anzarouth was one of two recipients from the region that includes Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces.
“I felt a mix of shock, excitement, and profound gratitude,” Anzarouth said. “This opportunity is an extraordinary privilege, and I’m really keen to make the most of it.”
Anzarouth is currently writing a thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism, with an emphasis on language policy in Quebec and Indigenous self-determination. The Mather House resident is using political theory to examine the challenge of reconciling universal individual rights with group rights specific to Canada’s national minorities.
“I’m using political theory as a way of understanding — and hopefully better resolving — the challenge of coexistence in a culturally diverse federation,” Anzarouth said. “The thesis work has helped me stay engaged with my country’s politics and reflect on how I want to contribute.”
At Oxford, he hopes to continue his studies of political theory, focusing on questions of how to balance competing claims for cultural preservation and how to balance power between legislative and judicial bodies of government. He hopes to eventually attend law school.
Lena Ashooh.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Lena Ashooh
Shelburne, Vermont
Concentration: Special concentration in animal studies
The summer after her first year on campus, Lena Ashooh worked as a research assistant in Puerto Rico, studying the impacts of natural disaster and trauma on the behavior of a colony of free-ranging macaque monkeys. It was a pivotal moment for the Kirkland House resident, who said it felt like observing an “extremely sophisticated society of individuals.”
“That was where I initially had the idea that, were the conditions that animals are in to change completely, they might behave in ways that we never imagined,” Ashooh said. “This led me, in philosophy, to working out how we might wrong animals in the beliefs we have about them and to be interested in how we’re managing land, the decisions we’re making about who has access to land, and who should be involved in the decision-making process.”
Ashooh designed a special concentration in animal studies, combining political philosophy, government, and animal psychology. She is an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, has written for the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and co-founded Harvard College Animal Advocates. Off-campus, she works as a lab manager in animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg’s parrot lab at Boston University.
“I say that to study animal studies is to study social injustice and gives us a new way of understanding how oppression and violence occurs, and how moral complacency and inaction occur,” said Ashooh, who is planning to eventually attend law school. “One of the key questions that animal studies allows us to address is: How is it that people can be led to look at suffering and decide not to act on it?”
Ashooh hopes to study philosophy next year, focusing on the question of what it means to treat and respect an animal as an individual.
Shahmir Aziz.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Shahmir Aziz
Lahore, Pakistan
Concentration: Biomedical engineering and mathematics, secondary in computer science, language citation in French
As an undergraduate researcher in different Harvard labs, Shahmir Aziz has analyzed the impact of physical exertion on the glycolytic levels of diabetes patients and has investigated nano-lipids as potential drug delivery vesicles. As an intern at Novo Nordisk, he has focused on optimization of drug-delivery processes.
He wants to keep working on the cutting edges of biotechnology, and he wants to help others do so as well, in his native Pakistan.
“In the long run, I hope to help start a culture of startups and biotech in Pakistan, so that students and other innovators can grow out their ideas,” said the Adams House resident named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan.
A first-year course in quantitative physiology taught by Linsey Moyer solidified Aziz’ chosen field of study. He also took courses in government and political philosophy, feeding an equal passion for international relations.
At Oxford, Aziz plans to pursue a master’s in bioengineering, followed by a second degree in diplomacy and global governance — arenas in which he’s also made meaningful contributions on campus.
A member of the leadership team of Harvard’s International Relations Council, Aziz helped the University’s Model United Nations team win two major intercollegiate competitions. “The opportunity I have cherished most at Harvard has been to interact with students from all extremes and opposites of background, pursuing all nature of subjects, and dreaming all ranges of noble dreams,” Aziz wrote in his scholarship application.
Some of those interactions have come in his four years playing Harvard Club Tennis, as a sports editor with The Harvard Crimson, and as a course assistant in the Department of Mathematics.
Thomas Barone.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Tommy Barone
Little Falls, New Jersey
Concentration: Social studies
Tommy Barone wants to understand what people believe, and why.
Barone currently is studying what he calls a “crisis of liberalism,” or the philosophical values essential to healthy democracy. In particular he’s interested in how best to understand the beliefs of people engaging in illiberalism in democratic societies.
“It’s so easy to create a narrative about why something important or worrying or disruptive in society is happening that serves your ends,” Barone said. “I think it’s a civic obligation that we listen to what people have to say and try to understand them. If you are trying to theorize something that involves people without speaking and listening to the people who are part of that phenomenon, you’re going to be missing something.”
Barone said that when he learned he had been named a Rhodes Scholar, all he could do was start “breathing heavily.”
“I didn’t cry until I called my parents,” Barone recalled. “Then I cried. Then I had to get it together to talk to the judges afterward.”
The Currier House resident, who hopes to pursue journalism in the future, is co-chair for the editorial board at The Crimson. Their coverage won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2023 Mark of Excellence Awards.
“I’ve had the unique challenge, but also the really educational, enriching experience, of being tasked with bringing people together to have difficult discussions in one of the most challenging years on campus in decades,” said Barone, who plans to study history at Oxford. “I’ve had the privilege to publish a really broad diversity of perspectives on a range of important issues on campus.”
Sofia Corona.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Sofia Corona
Miami, Florida, and Pereira, Colombia
Concentration: Applied mathematics and economics, secondary in government
From watching her mother commute several hours a day for work in Maryland to biking throughout her community, Sofia Corona learned early on that how people move is fundamental to the human experience.
Helping people get where they need to go — within cities, towns, and systems that benefit all — has become her life’s work. “I’m interested in how communities are engaged in infrastructure planning, especially when the benefits of that infrastructure are collective and widespread, but the burdens are localized,” said Corona, a Currier House resident graduating in December.
Corona, who hopes to work in the transportation sector, thinks seismic shifts toward sustainable modes of transportation are possible. “At the same time, our transportation networks are often superimposed on inherited, segregated landscapes, both racially and socioeconomically,” she said. “We can’t be agnostic to that.”
At Oxford, Corona’s master’s coursework will contextualize mobility systems within broader economic development and sustainability frameworks. At Harvard, she worked in the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, conducting research on inclusive decision-making in renewable energy projects. She also spent time in the MIT Transit Lab. Her professional experience includes internships at Uber, BMW, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and McKinsey & Co.
Her interests have taken her all over the world, from working on carbon dioxide pricing for the Chilean Ministry of Finance to collaborating with researchers at the Technical University of Munich on a tool that advises local transit agencies.
The Colombian American was a walk-on on Harvard’s varsity sailing team and is an avid mountaineer with the summits of Denali and Kilimanjaro among her feats, and she has run the Boston, New York, and Berlin marathons. Among her most cherished moments at Harvard have been as a dog-walker to Currier House dogs Huckleberry and Ari.
Aneesh Muppidi.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Aneesh Muppidi
Schenectady, New York
Concentration: Computer science and neuroscience, concurrent master’s in computer science
Waiting in a room with other Rhodes Scholar finalists, Aneesh Muppidi did a homework problem set and chatted about South Asian politics, having already made peace with not winning.
“In my head I thought, ‘This has been an amazing process, but now it’s time to go back to the real world,’” the Lowell House resident said.
Then, he heard his name.
“I called my little brother first,” he said, followed by his parents and two best friends.
Muppidi has spent time mulling the question Alan Turing famously posed in 1950: Can machines think? He’s come to believe that understanding human intelligence — and computationally scaling up that intelligence — can solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as diagnosing complex medical conditions or giving personalized tutors to every child in every classroom.
At Harvard, he’s immersed himself in the power and promise of artificial intelligence through projects on deep reinforcement learning in Assistant Professor Heng Yang’s Computational Robotics Lab; particle filter machine learning algorithms with the Fiete Lab at MIT; and autonomous agent detection with Professor Sam Gershman’s Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.
Outside the lab, Muppidi is equally passionate about AI policy and ethics. Ensuring technologies are developed safely is a cornerstone of Muppidi’s research, which he plans to continue while pursuing master’s coursework in computer science and public policy at Oxford.
Muppidi served as president of Harvard Dharma and as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society. He includes among his mentors Sanskrit instructor Nell Shapiro Hawley, now at Vassar College, with whom he took two years of the ancient language of India. “How she taught had a very beautiful effect on my life, in the sense that I was able to get closer to my spiritual identity, who I am as a person, and what I believe in.”
Ayush Noori.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Ayush Noori
Bellevue, Washington
Concentration: Computer science and neuroscience, concurrent master’s in computer science
When Ayush Noori was 7, his grandmother, Munira Brooks, was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that slowly robbed her of the ability to speak, move, or breathe. Assisting in her care and witnessing her long struggle inspired Noori to pursue science and medicine. “My mission is to give people with neurological disease more time with their loved ones,” said Noori.
Noori has championed this mission for nearly a decade. Since the age of 12, working or volunteering in various labs, he has conducted research at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and precision medicine, seeking to develop new AI-enabled diagnostic and treatment options for patients with neurological disorders.
As an undergraduate, Noori has authored 25 peer-reviewed publications — including seven as first author — in scientific journals including Cell, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Aging, Alzheimer’s & Dementia, and NBD, and his work has been featured at more than a dozen international conferences. He has been advised by professors including Marinka Zitnik at Harvard Medical School; George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Materials; and Sudeshna Das, Alberto Serrano-Pozo, and Bradley T. Hyman in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He plans to do graduate study in clinical neurosciences at Oxford next year.
The recipient of more than a dozen fellowships at Harvard and a Roberts Family Fellow at Harvard Business School, the Goldwater Scholar and Adams House resident is also devoted to teaching and mentorship as co-founder of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory and as a peer adviser at Harvard College.
“I have an immense debt of gratitude toward Harvard because I’ve studied and trained here since I was a teenager,” he said. “The College, SEAS, MGH, and Harvard Medical School have enabled me to contribute to the global fight against neurological disease and given me hope for a healthier future, for my loved ones, and for the world.”
Laura Wegner.
Photo courtesy of Laura Wegner
Laura Wegner
Walsrode, Germany
Concentration: Economics, secondary in computer science
Laura Wegner, Currier House resident and Germany Rhodes Scholarship recipient, wants to address patients’ fragmented medical records and revolutionize healthcare technology to improve patient outcomes.
It’s a cause driven by personal experience. While in high school, Wegner, formerly a competitive swimmer, had to undergo surgery for a knee injury. Doctors used the “wrong surgical method,” Wegner said, due to not having access to her full medical history, including information about a pre-existing health condition, leaving her unable to continue swimming.
“That was a personal experience where I thought, ‘Wow, parts of my patient data are stored in so many different places, and I wish they were together somehow.’”
To improve experiences for future patients, Wegner co-founded the startup Mii in 2022, a patient healthcare passport that securely stores patient data so patients can bring their medical history from doctor to doctor, around the world.
Wegner has taken Harvard courses in health economics, privacy and technology, and entrepreneurship, and has worked as a fellow with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Eager for global perspectives, Wegner has studied digital healthcare systems in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, and she is writing her thesis on systems in Estonia and Lithuania.
Looking forward to improving her technical skills at Oxford with the hope of continuing her work in healthcare technology, Wegner says she loves both the creative and technical sides of entrepreneurship.
“It’s just about having an idea and then immediately being able to build a prototype, test it out, and see where it goes. It’s an amazing opportunity to bring any idea to life, and hopefully have it improve people’s lives.”
Kellyanne Conway, president-elect’s 2016 campaign manager and former senior adviser, discusses recent election, what comes next
The Democrats got it wrong.
It wasn’t threats to national security or democracy, and it wasn’t the U.S. Supreme Court’s undoing of Roe v. Wade. What voters cared most about this election was “safety, affordability, fairness, and education,” said Republican operative Kellyanne Conway during a sometimes testy 90-minute talk at the JFK Jr. Forum about the 2024 election and what to expect from the incoming Trump administration.
That’s why ads and other messaging about crime, inflation, immigration, student loan forgiveness, and school choice proved so effective in the campaigns of President-elect Donald Trump and several other Republican candidates, she told Setti Warren, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.
Trump won by running up the numbers of voters already predisposed to vote for him and “peeling off” some support among “core Democratic” Party constituencies, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, union households, Jewish, and younger voters, improving on his own 2016 and 2020 numbers, said Conway, who managed the final months of Trump’s 2016 campaign and served as an adviser during his first term.
Conway said she thinks Democrats underestimated how motivating the issue of K-12 education was to many across the political spectrum, particularly women, who did not support Harris as robustly as they had Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.
Trump was seen as “authentic” and a proven commodity who had already done the job and ran a “joyful” and “forward-looking” campaign, she said, pointing to Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s franchise, rallies at concert venues, and his garbage truck ride.
Conway credited the campaign’s embrace of “new, new media” like TikTok, podcasts, and social media influencers, as a strategic move that paid real dividends in the final weeks reaching young men and low propensity voters. Also important was the campaign’s under-reported effort to educate disengaged voters about the many ways they could cast a ballot before Election Day, which also helped the former president prevail.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has announced more than two dozen nominees for White House and Cabinet positions, primarily top campaign staffers and high-profile business executives.
“What they all have in common is they know him; he knows them; and they are fluent in the America First agenda, meaning: This is what we’ve been elected to do,” Conway said. “So he’s got people who are willing to work with alacrity and energy to get that agenda through.”
At times, Conway flashed the quick and cutting fast-talk that has made her a polarizing figure on the left, sparring with student questioners.
She called for students to try to bring their friends who suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” back to their senses.
“You all know someone afflicted by it. … It wrecks the nervous system. It addles the brain. There is no vaccine, cure, or therapeutic, but you all have a role to play in helping people at least unwind a little bit from it” by not canceling those who have a different point of view.
“I certainly hope that the new government that’s forming can rely upon, if not all of you right away, most of you along the way, to help in any way, shape, or form that you possibly can,” she said.
Study estimates over half of Americans eligible to take them based on diagoses, underscoring need to ensure equity of access.
BIDMC Communications
4 min read
In a new analysis of national data, an estimated 137 million U.S. adults, more than half of the adult population, would qualify for the anti-obesity drug semagludtide.
“These staggering numbers mean that we are likely to see large increases in spending on semaglutide and related medications in years to come,” said corresponding author Dhruv S. Kazi, associate director of the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Ensuring equitable access to these effective but high-cost medications, as well as supporting individuals so that they can stay on the therapy long-term, should be a priority for our clinicians and policymakers.”
The findings, which were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions and simultaneously published in JAMA Cardiology, underscore the need to increase equitable access to this new class of pharmaceuticals.
Semaglutide belongs to a class of drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists. It is currently approved to manage diabetes, treat overweight or obesity, and of recurrent cardiovascular disease. About 15 million adults take semaglutide, which stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin and reduces the hunger hormone ghrelin, decreasing the appetite and slowing down the rate of stomach emptying. As a result, semaglutide helps lower blood sugar levels and promotes weight loss.
Semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease.
In 2023, it was the top-selling drug in the U.S. in terms of total pharmaceutical spending. But rapidly emerging data about its effectiveness for other health conditions is likely to further expand its use in future years. For instance, semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease. Semaglutide and others in its class are currently being evaluated for treatment of liver and kidney diseases, substance use disorders, and dementia.
Ivy Shi, who is a resident in internal medicine at BIDMC, worked with Kazi to produce the analysis. They used five years’ worth of recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a long-running survey of the U.S. population run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to identify U.S. adults aged 18 years or older who would be eligible for semaglutide treatment based on currently approved indications. They analyzed information about 25,531 survey participants gathered through in-person interviews, physical examinations, and laboratory testing.
They found that of the 136.8 million U.S. adults who qualified for semaglutide, 35 million would administer it for diabetes management, 129.2 million for weight loss, and 8.9 million for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. The semaglutide-eligible population includes 26.8 million adults covered by Medicare, 13.8 million covered by Medicaid, and 61.1 million covered by commercial insurance.
“The large number of U.S. adults eligible for semaglutide highlights its potential transformative impact on population health,” said Shi. “Prior studies have shown that more than half of the individuals who have taken these medications state the therapy was difficult to afford. Interventions to reduce economic barriers to access are urgently needed.”
Co-authors: Ivy Shi, Robert W. Yeh, Jennifer E. Ho, and Issa Dahabreh of BIDMC; and Sadiya S. Khan of Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.
Disclosures: Sadiya S. Khan reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute outside the submitted work. Jennifer E. Ho reported grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Issa Dahabreh reported a contract with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Kazi reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, American Heart Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Institute for Clinical and Economic Research outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.
Funding/support: Dahabreh is supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine (R01 LM013616), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01 HL136708), and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (ME-2021C2-22365).
Harvard coach Andrew Aurich answers questions from the media.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Dream job and a winning season for Aurich, but one big test remains: The Game.
For many Crimson football fans, devotion can be measured by consecutive years of attendance at the Harvard-Yale game. But Saturday’s showdown will be a first for the man who now leads their beloved program.
“All the time I was playing at Princeton, and coaching at Princeton, I was kind of jealous of Harvard-Yale,” said Andrew Aurich, Thomas Stephenson Family Head Coach for Harvard Football. “I’m really excited to experience it.”
The first-time head coach, who came to Harvard from Rutgers University, has led the Crimson to an impressive 8-1 record. The team clinched at least a share of the Ivy League title with a dramatic win over the University of Pennsylvania last weekend, making Aurich the first head football coach in Harvard history to win a league title in his first season.
We caught up with Aurich to learn more about preparations for one of the biggest dates on the Crimson calendar. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Crimson are having a great season under your leadership. To what do you attribute your early success?
Former head coach Tim Murphy played a big part in what’s happening this year. When I got here, it was very clear these players were already training to win a championship. They are very tough mentally. We’ve had some close games where our ability to focus at the end, and really execute, has allowed us to win.
Tell me about your leadership style.
One of the core parts of our culture is 100 percent honesty; the players are always going to get 100 percent honesty from me. Whether or not they like what they hear, they should know it’s coming from a good place. I expect the same from them. If there’s a better way to do something, I want to find a way to do that.
Aurich on the sidelines during the Harvard-Stetson game in September.
Credit: Harvard Athletics
What changes have you brought to the program?
My plan all along was to get an Ivy League head coaching job. But my experiences outside the league helped me see there were opportunities to help these young men become better players and a better team overall. If you ask them, they’ll say there’s a little more emphasis on sports science, whether it’s in the weight room or the emphasis we’re putting on nutrition, hydration, and sleep.
You said something interesting just now — that you always wanted to be a head coach in the Ivy League. Say more about that.
I knew I wanted to get into coaching when I was playing at Princeton. My dad had been my high school football coach, so I went back to St. Paul, Minnesota, and coached with him for a year and confirmed that I loved it. I ended up at a small Division 3 school in Pennsylvania for two years, and then I got the opportunity to go to Rutgers for my first stint as a defensive assistant.
From there I got the running backs coaching job at Princeton. My experience with the student-athletes there was so enjoyable. They’re just so driven and fun to be around. The next year I went to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with my former boss at Rutgers, coach Greg Schiano. But as soon I got to the NFL, I immediately thought: “The Ivy League is where it’s at, I’ve got to do everything I can to become an Ivy League head football coach.”
What happened next?
I ended up back at Princeton. I was there for a long time, but saw that I needed something more than just Ivy League experience. When coach Schiano got the head coaching job at Rutgers again, I knew that working for him would help prepare me for success.
Landing the top job at Harvard must have felt like a dream fulfilled.
I was on the road recruiting with coach Schiano as the whole hiring process was underway. He doesn’t know the Ivy League all that well, so he was trying to get some perspective. “What is it like?” he wanted to know. I told him: “Coach, this is like being at Ohio State or [University of] Michigan in the Big Ten.” The entire time I was at Princeton — whether I was a player or a coach — I saw Harvard as top dog in the Ivy League.
How are you preparing for Yale?
Well, there’s definitely a different kind of energy right now. My job is to make sure our players are going about their business the same way they have been for the last nine weeks. This game means a lot to a lot of people. Even the level of the interest from the outside, including the number of media requests, is completely different from previous weeks. But ultimately, I can’t get caught up in it. Because if I am, I know the players are.
The Crimson fell to the Bulldogs in 2022 and ’23, but you’re the favorite this year. What do you hope to see on the field Saturday?
I want to see a team that is protecting the football on offense, that is taking the ball away in defense. I want to see a team that is executing 11 guys every play. I want to see a team that’s on the attack every single play. That’s how we define ourselves as a football program.
Will you get to participate in any of the fun stuff this weekend?
Hopefully the fun stuff I’ll be doing is celebrating a win.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (left) with Michael Sandel and Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Supreme Court justice revisits Michael Sandel’s class, which left her with lessons that lasted long beyond her time in it as first-year
In a passage from “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, is a Harvard College first-year drawing a smiley face in her notes for the course “Justice.”
“I want to laugh at the way my mind spins as I listen to the opinions being expressed,” she writes in a College essay excerpted in the new memoir. “I want to know the answers. I glimpse that there are no answers. Yet to wonder is not enough. We must never stop asking the questions.”
On Tuesday, Jackson was met by 800-plus smiles — and a standing ovation — as she returned to visit a course that proved influential in her life. Welcoming her at Sanders Theatre was Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, who has taught “Justice” since 1980. Jackson credits Sandel’s Gen Ed offering with building her confidence while instilling a passion for healthy debate.
“I felt myself expanding and growing more visible to myself as I engaged the great philosophical conundrums,” she writes in the book. “The animated discussions about open-ended ethical dilemmas made me come completely alive.”
Seated with Jackson under the bright stage lights, Sandel invited students to engage with the issue of affirmative action while drawing on insights from influential philosophers, ancient and modern. Primary readings this semester include works from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. But the syllabus also features the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative-action policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.
Some students lined up to share responses to Jackson’s dissent in the UNC case. (She recused herself in the case of Harvard, having served on its Board of Overseers.) Jackson may have been a quiet participant in “Justice” three decades ago, as she notes in the book. But she was much less so on her return to the two-hour lecture as she laid out her legal and moral reasoning on affirmative action. The whole exchange was off the record.
Taking the stage to address the class for the final 45 minutes of the session was Margaret Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Sandel assigned students to read her 2003 opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which established the right to same-sex marriage for the first time in U.S. history. Sandel said that Marshall’s opinion is a rare piece of legal writing with the resonance of prayer. It has found second life as a popular reading at weddings nationwide.
Harvard, MIT, Mass General form renewable energy collaboration
Group will include higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, seek to leverage buying power to advance cost-effective projects
Amy Kamosa
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
The Big Elm Solar Project located in Bell County, Texas, came online this year.
Credit: Apex Energy
Harvard announced on Wednesday the formation of the Consortium for Climate Solutions, a first-of-its-kind renewable energy collaboration of higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, as well as state and local government entities, led by Harvard, Mass General Brigham (MGB), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The consortium will leverage its members’ collective purchasing power to overcome market conditions that serve as barriers to development of projects that advance cost-effective renewable energy and allow for larger-scale investment.
“With these new utility-scale renewable electricity projects, Harvard will purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, fulfilling a key component of our approach to meet our goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026.”
Heather Henriksen, chief sustainability officer
“Investing in new, large-scale renewables marks a significant step forward for Harvard in its commitment to a clean energy future,” said Meredith Weenick, executive vice president. “By founding the consortium with MIT and MGB, we are not only catalyzing the transition to a cleaner grid but also demonstrating a collaboration model that will enable a variety of nonprofit organizations and municipalities to work together to address the urgent challenges of climate change.”
The consortium recently finalized negotiations that will result in the development of 408 megawatts of new renewable energy through two large-scale, utility-grade projects — the Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota. The 200-megawatt Big Elm Solar project came online earlier this year, and the 208-megawatt Bowman Wind project is expected to come online in 2026. Collectively these projects will generate clean power equal to the electricity use of 130,000 U.S. homes annually.
“With these new utility-scale renewable electricity projects, Harvard will purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, fulfilling a key component of our approach to meet our goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026, while we simultaneously work on the longer-term effort to decarbonize our historic and urban campus,” explained Heather Henriksen, Harvard’s chief sustainability officer.
Achieving fossil-fuel neutrality by 2026 is a bridging strategy to mitigate the negative impact of fossil fuels on emission levels and air pollution while the University develops longer-term technology and infrastructure changes to eliminate its use of fossil fuels by 2050. In addition to purchasing electricity from renewable sources, the University looks to seek greater energy efficiency and heat recovery on campus, replace fossil-fuel equipment at the end of life, increase its electric vehicle fleet, and find other reductions of fossil-fuel use.
“There is plenty of scientific evidence that fossil fuels are negatively impacting health, community stability, and ecosystems around the world. As Harvard continues on its path to become a fossil fuel-free campus, it is critical that the University not only conduct research on how to drive down global emissions and bolster adaptation, but to use our purchasing power to help produce cost-effective renewable energy solutions at scale,” said Mike Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School, faculty chair of the Business and Environment Initiative at HBS, and co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Sustainability. “The consortium is an excellent example of engaging with the renewable electricity markets to expand their scale and impact.”
The consortium founding members, Harvard, MGB, and MIT, sought opportunities to collaborate with smaller nonprofits and municipalities. This resulted in the partnership with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying organization, enabling the city of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass. Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and WGBH to join under the PowerOptions umbrella. The consortium is providing PowerOptions members with access to affordable, large-scale renewable energy purchases that would typically be out of reach for individual buyers.
The creation of the consortium, supported by Harvard’s leadership, was led by the Office for Sustainability working with faculty and other key stakeholders. The projects chosen for investment align with the recommendations and criteria set forth by the Fossil Fuel-Neutral by 2026 Subcommittee of the University’s Presidential Committee on Sustainability. The consortium vetted more than 100 potential projects, ultimately choosing the Big Elm Solar and Bowman Wind projects from developer Apex Clean Energy.
Locally, the consortium’s power-purchase agreements with the Big Elm and Bowman projects will enable its members to accelerate progress toward their individual sustainability goals consistent with local emissions-reduction regulatory targets, while simultaneously reducing fossil fuel emissions at a national scale.
“The locations and scale of each project, in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States, mean that the potential positive impact is significant, creating a more robust and cleaner grid,” explained Henriksen.
Rapid relief for the severely depressed? There’s a catch.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Ketamine carries risks, say researchers. Yet for some patients, it’s ‘the only thing that works.’
At the Ketamine Clinic for Depression at Massachusetts General Hospital, patients make their way each day to receive intravenous infusions of the powerful anesthetic that has become an alternative therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
Many of the clinic’s patients have not been helped by traditional treatments, including psychological counseling, antidepressant medication, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroconvulsive therapy. With its rapid antidepressant effects, ketamine is sometimes the only option that provides relief, said clinic founder and director Cristina Cusin, who has been researching depression and mood disorders for the past 25 years.
“We don’t have good weapons to treat some severe forms of depression, just like we don’t have treatments for advanced-stage cancer,” said Cusin, who is also an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “We’re always looking for the next thing so that we can continue to offer hope to patients who don’t respond to standard treatments.”
In 2000, after a study reported that small doses of IV ketamine rapidly reversed symptoms of depression while standard antidepressants often took several weeks to have an effect, ketamine became the next new thing. In 2019, based on years of research, the FDA approved a nasal spray medication, derived from ketamine, to be administered under medical supervision.
Depression is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of sadness and hopelessness, that affects 18 percent of Americans. One-third of those diagnosed with depression don’t respond to standard treatments, with acute consequences to their personal and professional lives. The stigma associated with depression makes it harder for people to seek treatment, said Cusin.
“There are some forms of depression that have a strong biological component; there are neurocircuits in the brain that are not functioning right. In many cases, it’s not for lack of trying.”
Cristina Cusin
“In our society, if you suffer from depression, you may be told to ‘try harder,’ ‘stop complaining,’ ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps,’ and so on,” Cusin said. “But there are some forms of depression that have a strong biological component; there are neurocircuits in the brain that are not functioning right. In many cases, it’s not for lack of trying.”
Patients follow a strict protocol to be admitted to the MGH Ketamine Clinic; not only do they have to be referred by their primary prescribers, but also prior treatments for depression must have failed. Ketamine therapy is integrated with other treatments and is done in the clinic under medical supervision and in coordination with patients’ primary medical teams. The clinic doesn’t admit self-referred patients or those with active substance use disorders or a history of psychosis. Ketamine produces hallucinogenic effects and dissociation, which can exacerbate psychotic symptoms.
Other risks associated with ketamine are the possibility of developing addiction and a host of medical problems, but for patients who experience rapid relief from their symptoms of depression after treatment, ketamine is a game-changer, said Cusin. “Our patients have failed other treatments, so they don’t have a lot of other options,” she said. “If this is the only thing that works, they keep coming.”
Scientists continue researching ketamine’s antidepressant effects on treatment-resistant depression. A recent clinical trial found that ketamine was as effective for non-psychotic treatment-resistant depression as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which has long been the gold standard for hard-to-treat depression.
Conducted by Amit Anand, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the study found that 55 percent of those receiving ketamine and 41 percent of those receiving ECT had at least a 50 percent improvement in their self-reported depression symptoms. Anand co-authored the pivotal 2000 study that revealed the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine.
Encouraged by his recent study’s results, Anand is conducting a follow-up clinical trial comparing ketamine and ECT treatments among patients with suicidal depression. If ketamine can affect suicidal thoughts, it could be lifesaving. “What we’re trying to see is that if ketamine can cause a very rapid reversal of the troubling kind of depression leading to suicidality,” he said. “People are suffering, and even if it is for a short time, it is beneficial to provide a rapid change.”
“What we’re trying to see is that if ketamine can cause a very rapid reversal of the troubling kind of depression leading to suicidality.”
Amit Anand
Even though doctors and researchers are hopeful regarding the promise of ketamine, there is growing concern about the proliferation of private ketamine clinics, which began to crop up around the country after restrictions on telemedicine relaxed during the pandemic. These clinics offer IV ketamine infusions, with prices ranging from $600 to $800 per infusion.
Most ketamine private clinics operate in a gray zone, with almost no oversight, and function as for-profit businesses, said Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician, educator, and cannabis specialist at MGH.
“The end result is that now our population has broad access to ketamine, and it’s a little bit of an uncontrolled experiment,” said Grinspoon. “Whether it’s going to alleviate many people’s depression or whether it’s going to get a lot of people addicted to ketamine is going to be an open question. We don’t know how much it is going to help or harm things.”
Ketamine is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or opioids, but its use as a recreational drug poses serious risks. Actor Matthew Perry died last year of “acute effects of ketamine.” His autopsy also found opioids in his blood, but the level of ketamine found was equivalent to the amount that would be used during general anesthesia.
The other troubling issue for Grinspoon is affordability. “I work as a primary care doctor in an inner-city clinic,” he said. “None of my patients can afford six $800 injections. … The last thing we need is for ketamine to be another treatment for just the well to-do. … This has got to be affordable.”
At the MGH clinic, patients receive low doses of ketamine in long intervals and have mixed experiences. While some report feeling relaxed, others find it unpleasant, but most said their symptoms of depression improve and don’t interfere with day-to-day functioning. Still,
Cusin warns that ketamine should not be a first-option treatment for depression.
“If someone is depressed or suicidal, there are alternatives out there,” said Cusin. “There are 50, 80 different treatments to consider. It’s rare that somebody has tried everything. Usually, there are entire classes of medications or treatments that have not been considered. There is always hope.”
Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants awarded to 12 projects
Grant recipients foster a culture of innovation and belonging on Harvard campus
Laurie Rodriguez
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
The Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project holding an in-person lighting master class for Harvard media professionals.
Photo by Julia King
Twelve projects have recently been awarded grants from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund (HCLIF) for the 2024–2025 cycle. Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows submitted grant proposals for projects aimed at fostering an inclusive environment at the University. Each project aligns with HCLIF’s mission to “encourage experimentation, build a culture of inclusion, and grow a network of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging innovators at Harvard,” while also supporting the University’s goal of achieving inclusive excellence. Funded by the Office of the President and administered by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, these grants range from $5,000 to $15,000.
“Harvard is committed to continuing its investment in innovative ideas that promote a campus culture of inclusion and belonging,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “These grassroots projects unite community members at all levels of the University — researchers, students, faculty, postdocs, and staff — who identify pressing campus needs and apply their expertise to develop solutions. From a series exploring faith and justice to a project creating inclusive medical illustrations, the HCLIF projects are transforming ideas into action and making a significant impact.”
“From a series exploring faith and justice to a project creating inclusive medical illustrations, the HCLIF projects are transforming ideas into action and making a significant impact.”
Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer
This year’s project teams showcase cross-University collaboration, with members representing Schools and units from across Harvard.
The awardees include the Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project, a second-year grant recipient. It is a University-wide training resource that educates video producers and media professionals at Harvard on how to create lighting that captures a variety of skin tones effectively in photography, especially skin tones previously overlooked in photography and film training. With additional funding, they will work to identify a host site for the project and complete editing of previously recorded videos. “This project started with the intention of honing media producers’ skills in the craft of inclusive cinema lighting, but we ended by finding the time and space to really see people and understand how they want to be represented,” said Julia King, creative video producer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jacob Beizer, senior digital content producer and strategist at the Harvard Kennedy School in a statement. “We are excited to provide this resource to the entire Harvard community.”
The Inclusive Anatomical Images project stems from collaborations between Harvard Medical School, Harvard Art Museums, and the University of Global Health Equity based in Rwanda. The project seeks to ensure diverse patients have a higher chance of being better served and aims to improve patient outcomes by creating more inclusive educational medical literature. It creates materials reflecting a diversity of bodies — including various sizes, ancestries, genders, and skin tones — to better serve a wide diversity of patients. With this year’s funding, the team will expand their reach by making their resources more accessible to institutions, researchers, and health professionals beyond Harvard, while expanding their team to meet the demand for their expertise and images. Martha Ellen Katz, a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, said, “Our project has the potential to validate the life experience of historically excluded patients, physicians, dentists, and student learners at HMS, and curricula worldwide. Our equitable work culture, which strives to be as non-hierarchical as possible, also encourages student leadership and acknowledges the essential contributions of all team members, collaborators, and supporters.”
The Connecting Community Through Food project celebrates Harvard’s student body through food. By collaborating with Harvard College students, student organizations, and employees, the Harvard University Dining Services team aims to develop recipes and menus authored by Harvard undergraduates from a diversity of backgrounds. These meals will be served more regularly in dining halls. Smitha Haneef, executive director of the Harvard University Dining Services, explained, “We want students to experience the dining halls as welcoming, comforting places, hopefully like their home kitchens. For this to happen, the menus must feel like home. This project helps us realize that vision for more community members.”
Additional 2024 HCLIF Recipients
Community Project on Faith and Justice cultivates inclusivity and engagement centered on faith by hosting speaker series and community events where affiliates can explore the influence of faith in their lives.
Disability Awareness Series aims to increase awareness about the resources available for, and challenges faced by, those with disability and accessibility needs at Harvard. It engages Harvard College students, staff, researchers, and faculty through an awareness campaign and series of events.
Disability in Health Professions Mentorship Program cultivates a supportive community for current and future health professionals living with disabilities and chronic illness, fostering a greater sense of belonging at Harvard.
Emerging Scientists Program connects high school students from Cambridge and Boston with Harvard graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff, providing meaningful and accessible life sciences research experiences.
Harvard Career Capsule empowers graduate students by providing professional attire and equipment to support their career development.
Harvard University Peer Coaching Initiative aims to reduce loneliness and enhance interpersonal skills by pairing Harvard students and researchers. Participants engage in weekly sessions over the course of a semester to practice effective listening with one another.
Justice-Impacted Inclusion seeks to make Harvard more inclusive of formerly incarcerated people and others impacted by the justice system. The initiative consults with formerly incarcerated policy experts and creates resources, such as a guide on inclusive language and practices.
LifeSaveHer develops trainings to address misconceptions regarding performing CPR on women, including modifying male CPR mannequins to represent female bodies, ultimately aiming to reduce cardiac arrest survival disparities for women.
Trans+ Community Celebration at Harvard seeks to uplift the trans+ community by creating inclusive spaces within the University.
Applications for the 2025-2026 funding term of Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants are now open to Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and academic personnel. Harvard community members interested in participating as judges for the 2025-2026 HCLIF grant applications can now sign up.
In podcast, experts discuss breakthroughs in treatment, from genomic sequencing to AI, and how close we are to personalized vaccines
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Cancer kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year, but advances in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are ushering in a new era of treatment.
Alumnus Levi Garraway, who runs late-stage drug development at the biotech company Roche and previously worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said the field has come a long way.
“Although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA,” Garraway said. That’s why the pillars of cancer treatment — surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy — are so limited in their applications. Moving to more personalized treatments based on a patient’s genetics has revolutionized the field. “[Genetic sequencing] was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.”
Connie Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham, said artificial intelligence has shown remarkable promise in detecting breast cancer, with success rates that far exceed what the human eye can detect alone. “What [other industries] are doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.”
Treatment and prevention will only become more personalized and effective as researchers continue to explore the human genome and genetic structure of cancers, said Catherine Wu, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. One question that drives some of her research: Is it possible to vaccinate against cancer?
“That’s the vision,” said Wu, a recent recipient of the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research. “Can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was? That was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely?”
In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Garraway, Lehman, and Wu about some of their most cutting-edge cancer research — and what hope lies on the horizon.
Transcript
Levi Garraway: And now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.
Samantha Laine Perfas: Advances in technologies like genomic sequencing and artificial intelligence have ushered in a new era in the fight against cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year. Researchers are now working on therapies that can be genetically tailored to individual patients and they’re also working on methods for discovering cancers at much earlier stages. Someday, we might even have vaccines that can prevent the disease altogether.
How close are we to turning a corner on cancer?
Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, we’re joined by:
Garraway: Levi Garraway. I run late-stage drug development at Roche, which in the U.S. is known as Genentech.
Laine Perfas: Levi attended Harvard as an undergraduate, graduate, and medical student. He also worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for 11 years. Then:
Connie Lehman: Connie Lehman. I’m a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and I’m a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham.
Laine Perfas: She’s also a founding partner at Clairity, which uses the power of artificial intelligence to better inform precision care. And finally:
Cathy Wu: Cathy Wu. I am a professor of medicine and division chief for transplant and cellular therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Laine Perfas: She was an undergraduate at Harvard and completed her clinical training at the University. Recently she received the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. This episode looks at the future of cancer treatment.
Historically, how have we approached cancer treatment and how has that shifted in recent years?
Garraway: Historically you had surgery, you had radiotherapy, and you had chemotherapy. I put historically in quotes because these are all in wide use today, and they’re probably not going anywhere anytime soon. And the reason why they’re not going anywhere is because they actually can be effective in treating many cancers, even curing some cancers, but there are well-known limitations. And of course, I think for all of us who went into this field, it was in part to try to counter those limitations. And one is that there’s a whole lot of cancers that can’t be cured with those therapies, and the other is that these are all blunt instruments. I mean, often you get damage to normal or adjacent cells and tissues as well as cancer cells. And that’s a big problem. You often can’t tell in advance who’s going to respond or who’s not going to respond, for example, to chemotherapy. So it’s a vexing issue when you have a patient and you know they need treatment, but you can’t tell them that they’re going to benefit from a potentially toxic treatment.
Wu: Yeah. I agree with Levi. I think we were taught that the pillars of cancer care have been chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. I think what’s been exciting in the lifetime that we are going through our training and treating our patients is that we’ve seen so much evolved that there are actually new pillars that have been coming up and so I think that one of the things that kind of worldwide that we’re excited about is immunotherapy because this has emerged as a fourth pillar that is touching on all the different disease types and has proven to be really important.
Lehman: It is really exciting to see this transition to more targeted and more personalized treatment. Also at the other end of the spectrum is, can we actually even prevent cancers? Like, are there domains where we don’t need to wait until they’re so far advanced that cure is really elusive even with the most advanced therapies? So in my part of the sandbox, we’re really focused on early detection and also accurate risk assessment so we can have the right interventions to prevent the cancer from developing. It’s so interesting to look at the changes in how breast cancer presents. You can have women moving from one country to another, to adopting different diets, different lifestyles, and their breast cancer risk goes up within their lifetime. So there are these correlations between modifiable risk factors and lifestyle, diet, exercise, environmental, carcinogens, and how can we be better at identifying those and really stopping the cancer from occurring?
Laine Perfas: Treatment has become a lot more personalized in many ways. The historical treatment, if this is accurate, it seems like it was very much one-size-fits-all. What were some of the problems of that approach and why did that need to change?
Garraway: One major recognition that happened over time is that you could have two women with breast cancer, they’re both called breast cancer, but they behave very differently. They may show up very differently. They respond differently to treatment. There’s now a lot more understanding about why that is. And one big reason is that although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA, the genomes of those cancers. They’ve acquired mutations of various types. Some of them are completely random and they don’t matter to the cancer, but others are critical. They become what we call drivers of the cancer. So when we talk about what made cancer become more personalized, it was the recognition that some of those mutations, they occur over again in certain subsets of cancer, but you can design medicines against the resulting mutated proteins that drive the cancer. And those medicines are now much more selective. Now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.
Wu: A lot of innovation follows technology. So I think that it’s always been recognized that you can try to do one-size-fits-all. But the reality is that not everyone responds and patients do or do not have toxicities. So I think the kind of technology that has brought so much insight has been through unraveling the molecular secrets of cancer cells through sequencing. I think that very, perhaps, simple technological advance has meant the world to what we understand about cancer now. And at some level, I think that the personalization is what is fighting fire with fire. You’re confronting that heterogeneity up front. You’re not trying to hide from it. You’re acknowledging that it exists and that it actually mandates that we become more selective in terms of how and what we can offer to our patients.
Lehman: I really like how both Levi and Cathy talk about [how] this personalized domain is about getting the fit with the patient and that patient’s tumor and the treatment. We see that in other domains of medicine. So, for example, we can look back at old studies and there was a drug therapy that people were very excited about, and the results were mediocre and everyone abandoned and moved on. But there were some patients that responded really well. So you want to go back and say, it wasn’t necessarily a bad treatment. It was a bad selection of the patients that could benefit. If we can be more tailored and more personalized and more targeted, will there be a lot of drugs that had been like, this isn’t a great way to approach treating quote, breast cancer, which is far too broad of a term to use. Exactly the same analogy happens in the imaging sciences and radiology. We had a boon in developing new technology for breast imaging from old film screen to digital mammography to tomosynthesis to contrast-enhanced mammography to MRI to nuclear medicine scans to ultrasound. Everyone’s really excited, and we were trying to use these in screening, and some of them give orders that, well, we can’t screen with ultrasound, there are too many false positives, we can’t screen with MRI, it’s too expensive and we can’t afford it and the value proposition isn’t there. But what we needed to do was to say, what if you targeted the right population, that, one, is disadvantaged with mammography and, two, is really at high risk for having a cancer aggressively grow and fail to be detected by mammography? And if you targeted those high-risk patients, all of a sudden these technologies look a lot better, look a lot more powerful.
Laine Perfas: Cathy, one of the things you mentioned that I wanted to ask about was genetic sequencing. I believe it just was so time-consuming and expensive in the past that it wasn’t really a practical thing that could be done on a patient-by-patient basis. How has that changed and what doors has that opened with research?
Wu: It’s been huge. In short, I think the big change happened around 2008-09, more or less, where suddenly from the exorbitantly expensive experience of running the Human Genome Project, there was new technology available that suddenly made it possible to sequence on the order of hundreds to low thousands, which still sounds like a lot. That was back then. Now we’re coming down to the low hundreds per sample. We are already testing the waters, but I really do think it’s a reality that in the not-too-distant future that this should be a diagnostic test that can be offered that is a standard part of your cancer workup. As we as a community gain more experience, this experience can be aggregated and we can look for patterns and we can look for opportunities that can at one level afford personal opportunities, but also at a population level find perhaps therapies that can benefit another population that may share those kind of genetic characteristics.
Garraway: I’ll add a couple of points. One is that what Sam described, the laborious nature of sequencing, the unlock, as you point out, that happened coming close to two decades ago, was the ability to sequence at scale. So this technology called Massively Parallel Sequencing came on the scene, and now all of a sudden, where it used to be so laborious to even sequence one gene, and there are 20,000 genes in the genome and there are many hundreds that are critical in cancer, now all of a sudden you can sequence dozens or hundreds of genes at a time. Eventually, as Cathy mentioned, it’s become possible to sequence whole genomes routinely and many times over. So the expansion of technology has been remarkable. The other thing that it is enabling is possibly a new generation of what Cathy mentioned: immune therapy. It may be that in the fullness of time, the same sequencing technologies will figure out mutations that actually now cause a tumor to look more foreign. There can be new ways to target the immune system with that information, but that’s also very personalized information. Each tumor will have a different set of mutations or changes like that. So this is a direction that immunotherapy is taking. It’s early days but it looks very intriguing.
Laine Perfas: Is it accurate to say that there could be a future where we might be able to vaccinate against cancer or treat people with personalized vaccines for their specific case?
Wu: That’s the vision. I think that if we are going to be able to offer sequencing as a routine test, then the information content that is provided by that test not only allows you to understand maybe some of the origins of where that kind of cancer came from, what were the steps that made it into the cancer that it was, but it also provides you with different therapeutic opportunities. That gets into another interesting topic, which is, how can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was, right? So that was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely? A cancer vaccine is far more complicated. Some of the principles, though, are very similar. But because of the scale of that difference in the personalization, it is more complex. On the other hand, the ingredients to make that type of vaccine are contained within the sequencing information that I think we would all envision would be a routine test in the not-too-distant future.
Lehman: I also think it’s exciting, and we’re becoming more and more sophisticated and not thinking of the multitude of cancers as cancer. So a vaccine against cancer is almost like thinking, will we have a vaccine against a virus? And so we have areas that have been incredibly exciting during my career where I certainly didn’t think when I was a medical school student and learning about cervical cancer that we would have a vaccine to prevent HPV infection and that would eradicate a very large percentage of cervical cancers in patients that are vaccinated and that also can reduce the occurrence of prostate cancer. So there’s a whole domain that you can actually stop the trigger for the cancer to be able to develop rather than wait and then see that there’s circulating cancer cells and now let’s come in and let’s try to have the body help fight away those cancer cells.
Laine Perfas: Connie, early detection is an area that you’re really passionate about. And actually in the work you’ve been doing, you’ve been using AI. I would love to hear more about that and how AI is being used to detect breast cancer sooner.
Lehman: Part of the different changing face of breast cancer has been mammography screening. Mammography is a very imperfect tool, but it did change the spectrum of patients presenting with breast cancer. We shifted historically from women coming forward when they noticed that there was a lump in their breast, or a doctor noticed that, and we could find cancers preclinical before that happened, and we really saw a shift in both the morbidity of the treatment, but also the survival.
That was a big win, but as I said it’s limited, and we have women presenting with advanced cancer despite routine screening. We have the costs and the false positives and the challenges of using mammography effectively. So I think that what I’m most excited about is changing the paradigm of how we screen and moving away from a very archaic age-based approach and moving into a risk-based approach.
Everyone has seen over the years the arguments about screening mammography. In Europe they tend to start at 50 and screen every two to three years. In the U.S. we constantly battle about whether you start at 40 or 50 and it’s every year or every two years. That argument is so limited. It’s almost unbelievable to me that we’re still having a basic argument about 40 or 50 or every year or every two years when there’s such a diversity of the risk profiles of women within their 40s, within their 30s, within their 50s, and we ignore that. Now one of the reasons why we’ve ignored it is our traditional risk models are inadequate. So the area I’m most excited about with artificial intelligence is using computer vision, not to look for cancer currently on the mammogram, but to predict whether that woman will develop cancer within the coming five years. So if you can look out into the future, is there something about this tissue that is putting this woman at increased risk? And our research to date shows that the AI applied to the basic regular mammogram can predict future breast cancer at a level that we just haven’t seen before.
It also eliminates the really unfortunate racial biases in our traditional risk models, which were built largely on European Caucasian women, and just don’t perform for us in Black, Hispanic, and Asian women. There’s a whole other domain, too, of having the computers learn how to read the mammograms, because one of the limitations of mammography is you need these highly specialized humans to read them, which really reduces the impact of screening mammography globally, because we just don’t have enough highly specialized radiologists to interpret the mammograms. So I think we’ll also see that shift.
Garraway: We could have a whole conversation, of course, on AI in medicine, and what Connie described in radiology is so exciting. It’s really going to be revolutionary. I’ll just say at a high level that AI is already changing every component of the research and development of new medicines, starting all the way from the very beginning, where you can use AI to conduct a lot of the compound screening or chemical screening in a computer. Where it used to be, you have to have lots of expensive chemical libraries and iterative screening of things. A lot of that can be done in silico, as we call it, because of AI, and even design of therapeutic antibodies from scratch, using AI-first principles. Then when you get into the clinic, the ability to synthesize all kinds of patient data to predict the kinds of patients that one should study so that you’re not fooled either in the positive or the negative way about whether a medicine is working. So it’s hard to come up with a component of the research and discovery of medicines that’s not being impacted by AI.
Laine Perfas: A lot of Connie’s work involves using AI for mammography and then Levi, you mentioned really every area of medicine is being revolutionized. Are there other emerging technologies that are really changing the landscape of cancer detection, treatment, and lowering morbidity rates?
Wu: I think there’s a lot of exciting technologies that are among us right now. It’s not for nothing that we’re in the age of human biomedicine that we actually can learn directly from human biospecimens as opposed to fruit flies, worms, and mice, which is really how we gained our insights in the past. Along the lines of some of the AI work, there’s a tremendous interest, not only unlocking the secrets one cell at a time, looking at the DNA, the RNA, the protein expression, but also looking to see how all of these cells in, for example, tumor tissue, are patterned, are organized in space. These patterns on the one hand are teaching us how the cells are interacting with each other and allowing us to relate that to patient characteristics. So for patients who are destined to respond or not respond to a particular therapy, what were the patterns that were seen? And what does that tell us about the biology that happened? A lot of that information can also be fed into AI-related algorithms so that we can become better at pattern recognition.
Lehman: Yeah, Cathy, I like how you’re presenting that because it is where, again with these multidisciplinary approaches, the more I interact with specialists in computer science and artificial intelligence, the more I realize how much we really need their expertise just infusing healthcare. Because what we deal with is, we’ve had this incredible renaissance where we have so much technology that can collect so much data and in the imaging sciences alone. I think about, when I started, the kinds of images I would look at with plain films and a chest X-ray and a mammogram and then the complexity of the way that we can image the human body and the data that results from that. But the technology to collect that information, to create those patterns, just far exceeds our ability as humans. From the military, from the auto industry, I mean, what they’re doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.
Garraway: Sam, you asked the question about other kinds of technologies. Of course, as Connie’s mentioning, AI pervades all of them, but I will mention there are technologies that are also allowing new kinds of cancer treatments to emerge. There are now what we call treatment modalities, which are different than were possible in the past. I’ll just mention a couple of them.
One is what we call cellular therapy. So this is a technology platform. You basically collect certain kinds of immune cells from an individual and then you expand them in the laboratory. You engineer them so that they can destroy tumor cells very effectively and then you give them back to patients. And so, the first generation of cell therapy, you would collect those cells from a patient with, let’s say a blood cancer, and then you engineer them and you give them back to the same patients. That actually often works remarkably well. You can get very profound clinical benefit in patients who otherwise weren’t going to benefit at all. But as you might imagine it’s logistically challenging to do this for every patient, and in every center and every context. So not as many patients have access to cell therapy as one might like.
So there’s now a new kind of emerging generation of cell therapy. The technical term is allogeneic cell therapy. In that setting, what you do is you collect immune cells from completely unrelated donors, and you expand them and you engineer them, just like we talked about, but then you can store them so that in the future, you have, like, an off-the-shelf way of leveraging this cell therapy. You don’t have to do the whole start-to-finish process on every single patient, every single time. We think this is potentially a really exciting, future promise. Then the other platform I’ll just mention very briefly, it’s called bispecific antibodies. Traditionally one kind of therapy we call a therapeutic antibody, it’s a mimic of the immune system but it allows you to design an antibody that binds a particular disease target very tightly. But bispecific antibodies work by binding not just one target, but two targets. So if one target is on the tumor cell and the other target is on the immune cell, the bispecific antibody can bring the immune cell to the tumor cell and activate the immune cell and kill the tumor cell. So I just want to bring up that we talked a lot about AI as it’s revolutionizing everything, but there are other kinds of platforms that we use more and more in the pharmaceutical arena to try to develop new kinds of medicines that can bring new kinds of benefits.
Laine Perfas: Hearing about all these emerging therapies is so exciting and amazing and miraculous-seeming, especially as someone who is not a cancer researcher. But I also want to acknowledge that there’s still challenges there, you know, there’s costs, resources, still limitations on technology. A lot of it is just a lot of work.
Wu: We know. Oh, we know.
Laine Perfas: So what keeps you all hopeful with the current trajectory and where do you see us being or hope we’ll be 10 years from now, 20 years from now?
Wu: I think the hope comes from all the progress that we see. It is incremental. I think all of us know the challenges but experience the positive signals that kind of give us hope and tell us that we’re on the right track, and you’ve got to have the focus and the vision to get you through the finish line.
Garraway: Yeah, Sam, I think it’s a really prescient question because I know that both Connie and Cathy are part of outstanding institutions where unfortunately, the waiting rooms are still all too full with patients, some of whom are benefiting from these approaches, but others are not benefiting enough, or even at all from these approaches. So the unmet need is still quite considerable, and sometimes it feels like the pace of advance, it’s almost like, there’s a concept of how evolution happens, which is punctuated equilibrium: There’s a bunch of evolution, and then it plateaus, and there’s a bunch more, and then it plateaus. Cancer research and drug development can be like that. So you have this flurry of activity that led to targeted therapies, and then you have this flurry of activity that established immunotherapies, but all the while, you can be in these plateau phases also, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s not happening fast enough.” But the fact that these advances have happened and that we’ve been fortunate enough in our careers to either witness or, in some cases, participate in those advances, it doesn’t get old. You don’t forget those moments of impact, those opportunities to bring the advances. That’s what motivates you to bring more of those. I know for me, that’s what wakes me up in the morning.
Lehman: I actually think our strongest energy is around what we know needs to be done and the technology we have to make that happen. So we need to have the right people agree that this is the direction we have to go in. You can be in those domains where dogma, and this is the way we’ve always done it, and politics, can slow down the implementation and the progress. And so that’s really in the domain that I’m working the most in. The early detection-prevention side is to change the guidelines, to change the approach, to change how we think about how we screen to detect breast cancer early.
COVID was such a horrible period for so many, but one of the silver linings was we realized that we can be both safe and fast in certain domains of healthcare. I had been struggling with how many barriers there were to telehealth and to providing services to women in rural areas and in healthcare deserts. All of a sudden, all those barriers with COVID, it’s like, we can probably do these things that we used to always say weren’t safe, weren’t OK. But now that we need to do it, we can do it. I think it gave people new vision in what can be accomplished. That is something that’s going to be exciting as we continue to move forward in the next few years.
Laine Perfas: Thank you for this wonderful conversation.
Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and links to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.
We ingest equivalent of credit card per week — how worried should we be? In ‘Harvard Thinking,’ experts discuss how to minimize exposure, possible solutions.
Kempner AI cluster named one of world’s fastest ‘green’ supercomputers
The Kempner Institute AI cluster’s graphics processing units are networked together to allow for incredibly fast parallel processing.
Credit: Harvard University
Yohan J. John
Harvard Correspondent
long read
Computational power can be used to train and run artificial neural networks, creates key advances in understanding basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems
Researchers at Harvard now have access to one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers in the world.
Built to support cutting-edge research at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, and Harvard University more broadly, the Kempner’s AI cluster has just been named the 32nd fastest “green” supercomputer in the world in the Green500, the industry’s premier, independent ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally. In addition to cracking the top 50 list of green supercomputers, the cluster has been certified as the 85th fastest supercomputer overall in the TOP500, making it one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers on the planet.
“The Kempner AI cluster’s ranking in the latest Green500 and TOP500 lists positions us squarely among the fastest and most eco-friendly AI clusters in academia and the world,” said Max Shad, Kempner senior director of AI/ML research engineering. “It is no small feat to have built this kind of green high-performance computing power in such a short period of time, enabling cutting-edge research that is innovating in real time, and allowing for truly important advancements at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.”
High-performance computing forms the backbone of the massive growth in the field of machine learning, and researchers at the Kempner Institute are leveraging this immense computational power to train and run artificial neural networks, leading to key advances in understanding the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.
The Kempner Institute AI cluster is housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and uses a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to minimize energy usage.
Credit: Harvard University
Measuring green compute power, from flops to gigaflops
The Kempner’s AI cluster opened with an initial pilot installation in spring 2023, and now represents the forefront of Harvard’s growing engagement with state-of-the-art computing resources. Composed of 528 specialized computer processors called graphics processing units (GPUs), which are networked together in parallel with “switches” to enable fast and simultaneous computation, the cluster can run rapid computations on hundreds of research projects at once.
To gauge the cluster’s green computing power and overall computing power, engineers from Lenovo measured the speed of the cluster’s highest-performing GPUs (called H100s) using the LINPACK Benchmark, which requires solving vast linear algebra problems. This is expressed in terms of floating point operations per second, or “flops.” The system’s efficiency, or “green” computing capacity, depends on how many flops the H100s can perform with a given amount of power, which is expressed as gigaflops per watt of power used.
The Kempner’s H100s demonstrated the capability to perform 16.29 petaflops, at an efficiency of 48.065 gigaflops per watt of power used.
Just how fast is the Kempner AI cluster? To get a sense of perspective on the Kempner’s 16.29 petaflops of computing power, consider this: The computers aboard Apollo 11, which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969, were capable of 12,250 flops. That sounds like a lot, but by the 1980s much faster computations were possible: The CRAY-2 supercomputer recorded a performance of 1.9 gigaflops. That’s 1.9 billion flops. And now we have vastly more computing power in our pockets. The iPhone 15 is capable of more than 1,700 gigaflops. And the Kempner’s AI cluster has more than 16 petaflops of computing power — that’s 16 followed by 15 zeros — which is four orders of magnitude greater than the iPhone in your pocket. These numbers suggest that the ability of a Large Language Model (LLM) to produce grammatically correct language and simulate cognition is more computationally intensive than navigating a rocket to the moon — at least for now.
A supercomputer supporting new research at the Kempner, and across Harvard
With this magnitude of computing power, Kempner researchers are able to train state-of-the-art AI systems like large language models (LLMs), of which ChatGPT is perhaps the best known, quickly and efficiently. For example, the Kempner cluster can train the popular Meta Llama 3.1 8B and Meta Llama 3.1 70B language models in about one week and two months, respectively. Before the Kempner’s cluster was established and operational, training the Llama models on the next-fastest computer system at Harvard would have taken years to complete.
Beyond using the cluster to create faster models, researchers are also employing the cluster to better understand how and why they work. “With this enhanced computational power, we can delve deeper into how generative models learn to reason and complete tasks with greater efficiency,” says Kempner Institute Research Fellow Binxu Wang.
In addition to providing researchers with the capacity to train complex models quickly and efficiently, and to understand the mechanisms behind how they learn, the Kempner cluster enables scientists to compare vast numbers of model architectures and learning algorithms in parallel, with important applications in fields ranging from medicine to neuroscience. One example: In research recently published in Nature Medicine, Kempner associate faculty member and Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor Marinka Zitnik and colleagues used the cluster to develop and train TxGNN, an AI system that distills vast amounts of medical data into knowledge graphs, and then uses the graphs to predict the effectiveness of a drug for treating rare diseases.
The Kempner GPUs form part of Harvard University’s growing computational ecosystem, joining new or soon-to-be-available GPUs supported by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC). More than 5,200 researchers across the University make use of these computing resources in a wide array of scientific and technological applications.
The power of parallel processing
So what exactly is a cluster? As the name suggests, a computing cluster gathers together multiple devices, each of which can function as a full-fledged computer in its own right. Linking devices together unleashes the power of parallel computing, which leads to massive speed-ups in processing time by performing large numbers of tasks simultaneously.
Until a few decades ago, most computers were powered by a central processing unit (CPU) that could only perform one computational operation at a time. By the early 2000s, computer scientists had figured out how to create “multicore” CPUs that perform multiple computations in parallel.
The road to supercomputing clusters like the Kempner’s involved stacking several levels of parallel processing on top of each other. After the introduction of multicore CPUs, the next level of parallelism was enabled by the use of GPUs. Controlling the graphics on a computer screen requires large numbers of very similar computations that can be done simultaneously. For example, displaying a video game requires computing the brightness and color of millions of pixels up to 120 times per second. GPUs perform these numerous yet simple computations in parallel, freeing up the CPU to perform more complex computations.
Computer scientists realized that the capacity of GPUs to perform vast numbers of parallel computations could be repurposed for other tasks, such as machine learning. Running an artificial neural network such as OpenAI’s GPT or DALL-E, for example, involves vast numbers of mathematical operations that can be performed in parallel. But the parallelism doesn’t stop here: Yet another level of parallelism is enabled by linking multiple GPUs together in a network. The Kempner’s network involves hundreds of NVIDIA GPUs — 144 A100s and 384 H100s — that can work in concert. This multilevel parallelism empowers the Kempner’s researchers to perform the dizzyingly intensive computations involved in the study of natural and artificial intelligence and to develop new AI applications in areas such as medicine.
When it comes to fast and flexible experimentation, iteration, and computationally intensive research, the Kempner AI cluster is, in the words of Boaz Barak, “absolutely instrumental.” Barak, a Kempner associate faculty member and professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, says his lab group “relies on extensive computational experiments using the cluster” to study the mechanisms, capabilities, and limitations of deep learning systems. This, he says, allows his lab group to “hone intuitions and study questions as they arise.”
A powerful supercomputer, built to be green
Intentionally built for optimal energy consumption, the Kempner’s AI cluster is also setting a standard for “green” supercomputing. Modern machine learning has resulted in unprecedented advances in AI, but the methods are increasingly energy-intensive. Lowering the carbon footprint of AI is therefore crucial so that advances in AI do not come at the cost of exacerbating global warming.
Housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center (MGHPCC) along with other FASRC resources, and located in the town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the Kempner’s AI cluster uses a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to minimize energy usage and make every megawatt of power count. The center is powered by the Holyoke municipal electric company, which delivers 100 percent carbon-free energy through a hydroelectric power station and several solar arrays that they operate.
As the central computing hub employed by most of the state’s research universities, including Harvard, MIT, UMass, Northeastern and Boston University, the MGHPCC was the first university research data center to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, the highest level awarded by the Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Program. Moving forward, the Kempner’s partnership with MGHPCC will allow it to continue to grow with efficiency in mind, keeping the Kempner’s AI cluster green and efficient even as it grows into an even faster and more powerful tool for advancement in the field.
“Building an AI cluster that is not just blazing fast but also energy-efficient fits squarely into the Kempner’s mission, both to advance the field of intelligence, and to do so in a way that benefits people,” said Kempner Executive Director Elise Porter. “We have worked closely with MGHPCC to ensure this cluster is built with energy efficiency top of mind, and ranking as the 32nd fastest green supercomputer in the world is a testament to that work.”
Fast, green — and human
While landing a top spot on the TOP500/Green500 list is no small accomplishment, the real power of the Kempner’s work is knowing how to leverage its impressive computing resources to facilitate groundbreaking research. This involves more than building the AI cluster and giving researchers access to it. After all, researchers can’t just copy and paste old code into new machines — certain types of algorithms that work on traditional computers have to be reconceptualized and reformatted to be used with the Kempner’s computing infrastructure.
To this end, the Kempner has assembled a “full-stack” team of professional research engineers and research scientists with expertise ranging from distributed computing to data architecture to computational neuroscience. This Research & Engineering team develops codebases and standards, working with researchers to enable a seamless pipeline connecting scientific problems to computational solutions. The team also ensures that scientific findings are reproducible by helping students, fellows and faculty adopt industry-tested best practices for coding, testing, and maintenance of open repositories for models and data.
This human know-how is central to the ability of the Kempner community — and researchers all across Harvard University — to harness the scientific and technological potential of the green supercomputing power now available at its collective fingertips.
To find out more about the latest Kempner Institute research, check out the Deeper Learning blog.
How free-market policymakers got it all wrong for decades
Conservative economist says singular focus on deregulation, unfettered trade failed to deliver for American households
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
The free-market policymakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have “an empirical problem,” said Oren Cass, J.D. ’12, founder and chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass.
“The stuff they were doing on economics did not work.”
Cass’ ideas, anchored by social conservatism, are gaining traction with a younger set of policymakers on the right. But his pro-worker rhetoric overlaps at times with language used on the left. “Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance on one side and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other actually see a lot of the same problems in the economy and are willing to say it,” offered Cass, who rang a note of optimism over this “increasing consensus.”
Across U.S. history, he said, Republican presidents rarely fell in line with what many today consider GOP economic orthodoxy. Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and Richard Nixon all used tariffs to shore up domestic industry and protect the country’s wage earners.
Former President Ronald Reagan, celebrated by conservatives for his embrace of free enterprise, raised taxes at least five times and was far more protectionist than his reputation might suggest. Cass underscored this point by offering background on Reagan’s famous quote: “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Reagan uttered these words in 1986 while announcing record-breaking aid to American farmers, including drought assistance and price supports. “One of the very funny things about what we think of as Reaganomics, conservative economics — what I call market fundamentalism — is it’s actually a post-Reagan phenomenon,” Cass said.
How did the market fundamentalism come to dominate politics on the right? Cass, a policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, pointed to the distinct interest groups that comprised the famous “three-legged stool” of Reagan’s electoral coalition: social conservatives, economic libertarians, and national security hawks.
“What do these three groups have in common?” Cass asked. “They all really, really, really hate communists. And in the middle of the Cold War, in the context where the Democratic Party was — let’s be honest — a little squishy on communism, getting together everybody who really, really, really hated communism turned out to be a powerful strategy.”
This coalition collapsed in 1989 with the Berlin Wall, Cass continued. That left the three-legged stool in splinters, with each faction vying for supremacy. “That is the economic libertarians unchained from any actual Cold War just running amok,” he argued. “This is [activist] Grover Norquist getting everybody to agree they will never raise taxes under any circumstances.
“And by the time you get to the 2000s, you have a bunch of [President George W.] Bush tax cuts that bear no relationship to any economic priority and manage to send us back into debt while producing no economic growth whatsoever. You have several massive new wars starting to no apparent effect. And you have social conservatives sort of sitting there, losing on their priorities for the most part.”
For 30 years, that group ceded all territory on economic issues, Cass said. “And then they started to say, ‘Wait a minute. The economy that the economic libertarians are producing does not align with any of the things we actually believe equate to human flourishing.’”
Core to Cass’ critique is the economic libertarian focus on cheap consumer goods over building a labor force where workers can support strong families.
As evidence that the free-market era has failed to deliver for the average American household, Cass showed a series of charts detailing everything from the growing U.S. trade deficit to 50 years of stagnant wage growth even amid rising per-capita GDP. Over the same period, deregulation led to the rise of offshoring, while an increasingly dominant financial sector embraced high-speed trading and speculation over investments in U.S. communities.
Cass also shared a data visualization of America’s growing reliance on government transfers, recently published by a bipartisan Economic Innovation Group associated with Facebook founding president Sean Parker. The display can be read as a “massive victory” by free-market thinkers focused, above all, on individual purchasing power, Cass argued.
But he ventured that most Americans are unsettled by increased dependence on Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and other federal aid programs. “This is not actually a sustainable model for a thriving nation either socially or economically,” he said.
“This is not actually a sustainable model for a thriving nation either socially or economically.”
Oren Cass
Conservatives like to approach the market in definitional terms, Cass explained. What is the market, and what is it for? He rejected the terms put forth by former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey during a 2020 talk at the Heritage Foundation.“The market is … really just the name that we assign to the sum total of all the voluntary exchanges that occur every day by free men and women,” Toomey said.
“That’s not a market,” Cass countered. “A market is a much more complex mechanism that allocates labor and capital in response to conditions, rules, and institutions.”
What is the market actually for, in his view? “It’s not just for optimizing consumption,” Cass said. “We need to do a lot more than that, because we don’t want to rely on government to do everything else. We need it to empower workers to support their families. We need it to strengthen the social fabric. We need it to foster domestic investment and innovation.
“And if that’s the case, the role for policymakers isn’t as little as possible,” he concluded. “Their role is to create the rules and support the institutions that will lead to productive applications.”
Metabolic rates outpaced ‘couch potato’ primates thanks to sweat, says new study
Humans, it turns out, possess much higher metabolic rates than other mammals, including our close relatives, apes and chimpanzees, finds a new Harvard study. Having both high resting and active metabolism, researchers say, enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to get all the food they needed while also growing bigger brains, living longer, and increasing their rates of reproduction.
“Humans are off-the-charts different from any creature that we know of so far in terms of how we use energy,” said study co-author and paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.
The paper, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges a previous consensus that human and non-human primates’ metabolic rates are either the same or lower than would be expected for their body size.
Comparisons of resting, active, and total metabolic quotients among various species and human populations, as defined by the Harvard researchers’ new method.
Credit: Andrew Yegian
Using a new comparison method that they say better corrects for body size, environmental temperature, and body fat, the researchers found that humans, unlike most mammals including other primates, have evolved to escape a tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates.
Animals take in calories through food and, like a bank account, spend them on expenses mostly divided between two broad metabolic categories: resting and physical activity. In other primates, there is a distinct tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates, which helps explain why chimpanzees, with their large brains, costly reproductive strategies, and lifespans, and thus high resting metabolisms, are “couch potatoes” who spend much of their day eating, said Lieberman.
Generally, the energy animals spend on metabolism ends up as heat, which is hard to dissipate in warm environments. Because of this tradeoff, animals such as chimpanzees who spend a great deal of energy on their resting metabolism and also inhabit warm, tropical environments, have to have low activity levels.
“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates,” said co-author Andrew Yegian, a senior researcher in Lieberman’s lab.
“The result is that we are an energetically unique species.”
“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates.”
Andrew Yegian
The team’s analysis shows that monkeys and apes evolved to invest about 30 to 50 percent more calories in their resting metabolic rates than other mammals of the same size, and that humans have taken this to a further extreme, investing 60 percent more calories than similar-sized mammals.
“We started off questioning if it was possible that humans and other primates could have comparatively low total metabolic rates, which other researchers had proposed,” Yegian said. “We tried to come up with a better way to analyze it using quotients. That’s when we hit the accelerator.”
The research team — which includes collaborators at Louisiana’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the University of Kiel in Germany — plans to further investigate metabolic differences among human populations. For example, subsistence farmers who grow all the food they eat without the help of machines have significantly higher physical activity levels than both hunter-gatherers and people in industrial environments like Americans. However, all human populations, regardless of activity levels, spend similar amounts of energy for their body size on their resting metabolic rates.
“What we’re really interested in is variation among humans in metabolic rates, especially in today’s world of increasing technology and lower levels of physical activity,” said Yegian. “Since we evolved to be active, how does having a desk job change our metabolism in ways that affect health?”
Encounters with different perspectives are a key part of the learning experience, panelists say
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
An Ed School panel highlighted the critical role schools can play in helping students learn to listen to different perspectives and have conversations across divides in a webinar on Thursday.
“Schools are one of the places where people with diverse perspectives are often together,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer on education. “Other settings are often not diverse, or at least they’re contained or bounded in ways that schools are not … Schools can be laboratories of democracy.”
Led by Meira Levinson, Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society, the panel made the case for schools as ideal settings for lessons in compromise and civil disagreement.
“Schools are socializing agents,” said Carlton Green, an assistant clinical professor and co-director of Intergroup Dialogue Training Center at the University of Maryland. “That is where we learn some of the ethic around how to be in community with other people, especially people who are different from us.”
Educators help students learn interpersonal skills and how to navigate conflict, the panelists noted, fostering their social and emotional development. Although that work has been part of education for decades, the concept of “social-emotional learning” has recently come under attack by some conservative activists — and parents — who insist that teachers should focus strictly on academic learning.
Kara Pranikoff, an education consultant and coach, pushed back on that idea.
“We have this tendency to say that social-emotional learning is one thing, and academic learning is another thing,” said Pranikoff. “But we cannot separate our social-emotional selves from our academic selves. It’s just not possible, even if people report that it is. It’s not part of being a human. They go hand in hand.”
As microcosms of society, schools experience their own versions of national debates over issues such as religion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration, creating third-rail moments for teachers, the panelists said.
“There are things that you can say that are going to trigger a parent,” Weissbourd said. “Without support from your administration, these conversations become very difficult.”
But those conversations are important, said Weissbourd, who directs the Ed School program Making Caring Common, which provides resources for families and educators to help children develop empathy and other emotional capacities.
“It’s important to be able to mend fractures and for people to get along,” said Weissbourd. “But we want to have these conversations because we really believe in principles of human rights, justice, inclusion, and fairness. Part of the work, too, is how do you have conversations in ways that advance those principles?”
Educators should rise to their daily challenges by communicating with parents and building support from school administrators, Green said.
“I’d say to parents, ‘I think you want me to help your child be a good human, right?’ and if you have questions about me helping your child to be a good human in the context of the other little humans, I’m open to that, but that’s what I’m committed to doing,” said Green. “We are educating good humans here.”
Even with exercise, sedentary behavior can increase risk of heart failure by up to 60%, according to study
MGB Communications
4 min read
A new study shows that being sedentary increases the risk of the most common types of heart disease, even among those who get enough exercise.
Investigators at Mass General Brigham found sedentary behavior was associated with higher risks of all four types of heart disease, with a marked 40-60 percent greater risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death when sedentary behavior exceeded 10.6 hours a day. (Sedentary behavior is defined as waking activity with low energy expenditure while sitting, reclining, or lying down and does not include hours spent sleeping at night.)
Researchers also emphasized that meeting guideline levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be insufficient on its own to reduce cardiovascular risk if one is also sitting too much.
“Many of us spend the majority of our waking day sitting, and while there’s a lot of research supporting the importance of physical activity, we knew relatively little about the potential consequences of sitting too much beyond a vague awareness that it might be harmful,” said lead author Ezimamaka Ajufo, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“Sedentary risk remained even in people who were physically active, which is important because many of us sit a lot and think that if we can get out at the end of the day and do some exercise we can counterbalance it,” Ajufo says. “However, we found it to be more complex than that.”
Ajufo’s team, which included researchers from across MGB, analyzed one week of activity-tracker data from 89,530 individuals from the U.K. Biobank prospective cohort.
They looked at associations between daily time spent sitting and the future risk of four common cardiovascular diseases: atrial fibrillation, heart attacks, heart failure, and death from cardiovascular causes. The team used a machine learning algorithm to classify sedentary behavior.
Many of the negative effects of sedentary behavior persisted even among those individuals who achieved the guideline-recommended more than 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.
For example, although the study found that the risk of atrial fibrillation and heart attacks could be mostly eliminated by engaging in physical activity, the excess risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death could only be partially offset by physical activity.
“Our data supports the idea that it is always better to sit less and move more to reduce heart disease risk, and that avoiding excessive sitting is especially important for lowering risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, an electrophysiologist and faculty member in the Telemachus And Irene Demoulas Family Foundation Center for Cardiac Arrythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The research team hopes these findings will help inform future guidelines and public health efforts. They would like future prospective studies to test the efficacy of public health interventions that help people reduce the number of hours they spend being sedentary and see how that affects cardiovascular health.
Next, they plan to extend this research to investigate the impacts of sedentary behavior on a range of other diseases and for longer spans of time.
“Exercise is critical, but avoiding excessive sitting appears separately important,” said co-senior author Patrick Ellinor, a cardiologist and co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our hope is that this work can empower patients and providers by offering another way to leverage movement behaviors to improve cardiovascular health.”
Authorship: Additional Mass General Brigham authors include Timothy W. Churchill, J. Sawalla Guseh, and Krishna G. Aragam. Additional authors include Shinwan Kany and Joel T. Rämö.
Disclosures: Krishna G. Aragam receives sponsored research support from Sarepta Therapeutics and Bayer AG; he also reports a research collaboration with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Patrick T. Ellinor receives sponsored research support from Bayer AG, IBM Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk; he has also served on advisory boards and/or consulted for Bayer AG.
Researchers were supported by the John S. LaDue Memorial Fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine or Vascular Biology grant, the Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (521832260), a research fellowship from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (K23HL159262-01A1, 1K08HL153937, RO1HL092577, R01HL157635, and K23HL169839-01), the American Heart Association (19AMFDP34990046, 862032, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, and 2023CDA1050571), the President and Fellows of Harvard College (5KL2TR002542-04), and the European Union (MAESTRIA 965286).
5 in U.S. class, most for any institution, joined by 3 international recipients
FAS Communications
4 min read
Five Harvard College students are among the 32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars for 2025, the most awarded to any institution this year. Three international students in the College also received Rhodes Scholarships, bringing Harvard’s total to eight.
The students will attend Oxford University next year to pursue graduate studies in fields ranging from political theory to neuroscience.
Harvard’s 2025 Rhodes Scholars:
Matthew Anzarouth of Quebec, Canada, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. A former competitive debater, Anzarouth won the World Schools Debating Championship with Team Canada in 2020 and 2021, and competed for the Harvard College Debating Union in his first year at the University. During his time at Harvard, where he concentrated in social studies, he served as senior world editor at the Harvard Political Review, co-founded and co-hosted a podcast exploring political and philosophical issues, and coached debate for high school students. Combining his interests in political theory and Canadian politics, Anzarouth is writing his senior thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism. He plans to study political theory at Oxford.
Lena R. Ashooh of Shelburne, Vermont, designed a major in animal studies, with research in philosophy, psychology, biology, political science, and other disciplines. She has worked with land law examiners as an intern at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and has lobbied legislators as an environmental justice intern at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, a California nonprofit. Ashooh conducted field research on macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico, plays classical harp, and has created a stop-motion animation film about the ethics of eating animals. She plans to study political theory at Oxford.
Shahmir Aziz of Lahore, Pakistan, was named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan last month. He has conducted research in drug delivery and bio-nanotechnology. Outside the classroom, he is passionate about diplomacy and global governance, serving as a leader of the Harvard International Relations Council and Harvard’s Model UN Team. Aziz plans to continue researching bio-nanotechnology at Oxford while also studying diplomacy with a focus on global health to better understand how to cultivate cross-border ideas in biotech.
Thomas Barone of Little Falls, New Jersey, is a social studies concentrator focused on intellectual history, political rhetoric, and policy. He has interned at the national politics desk of ABC News and serves as editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson, where he won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards. Barone intends to study history at Oxford and plans to pursue a career in journalism.
Sofia L. Corona of Delray Beach, Florida, is studying applied mathematics and economics. She designed her course of study to develop a multidisciplinary perspective on issues in transportation policy, including infrastructure development, clean energy governance, and community decision-making. She worked on federal transportation oversight cases as a legal intern at the U.S. Department of Transportation; researched community participation and renewable energy implementation at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation in Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; and analyzed alternative vehicle upgrades for car models at BMW. She has climbed Aconcagua, Denali, and Mount Kilimanjaro. At Oxford, Corona plans to pursue economics and focus on development, sustainability, and enterprise.
Aneesh Muppidi of Schenectady, New York, is a concentrator in computer science and neuroscience. He has conducted research at the Computational Robotics Lab and the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, both at Harvard, and MIT’s Fiete Lab, and has been involved in AI policy discussions for New York State and the federal government. Muppidi served as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society, co-president of the Hindu Students Association, and president of the Harvard Spikeball Club. At Oxford, he will study advanced computer science and public policy.
Ayush Noori of Bellevue, Washington, is studying computer science and neuroscience. His research uses artificial intelligence to comb large-scale biomedical data for diagnosis and treatment options, and he has developed an AI model that can be deployed to predict treatment outcomes in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and neuropathic conditions. He has co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers and was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for natural sciences. Noori is co-founder and co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory. At Oxford, he hopes to complete degrees in clinical neurosciences and in physiology, anatomy, and genetics.
Laura Wegner of Walsrode, Germany, was one of two recipients of German Rhodes Scholarships. She studies economics and computer science and founded Mii, a digital healthcare passport that empowers patients to manage and access their health records anywhere in the world. At Oxford, Wegner plans to pursue graduate work focused on digital health care technology.
Read more about this year’s Rhodes Scholars at the Rhodes Trust.
Professor and former Treasury secretary discusses why Democrats lost election, need for more patriotism
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Democrats lost the 2024 election because they paid too much attention to positive macroeconomic trendlines and not enough to Americans’ economic reality, according to economist Larry Summers.
“In too many ways, Democrats have lost sight of the common man and woman in favor of the attitudes and philosophies of the faculty common room,” said Summers during a talk Thursday night on why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and the risks President-elect Donald Trump’s policy plans pose for the U.S. economy.
Many voters moved toward the Republican Party and Trump, who hammered Democrats over inflation, because they felt the GOP understood what they were going through better than Democrats, who strayed from their traditional focus on issues like kitchen-table economics, said Summers, who was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Federal Reserve also contributed to voters’ anger over inflation, he suggested.
In 2021, when $2.5 trillion in stimulus funding was flooding the economy, the Fed was still anticipating interest rates would stay at 0 percent through summer 2024 and buying back long-term Treasury debt by issuing “what was, in effect, floating-rate short-term debt.” This led to significant losses to the government that some estimate — in market value terms — at $500 billion to $1 trillion, before the Fed finally course-corrected, said Summers, who also served as director of National Economic Council during the Obama administration.
“I think that if there had not been hyper-expansionary policy in 2021, it would have been easier for Democrats to escape blame for whatever inflation took place,” he said.
Summers worries the Fed could err once again during the new administration given current economic conditions, and he warned Trump’s economic policy plans, such as raising or adding new tariffs, could worsen inflation.
“If President Trump does what he said he would do during his campaign, the inflation shock administered to the economy is substantially larger than anything that happened at the beginning of the last administration,” Summers said.
“He’s vowed huge deficit increases through continuation of his tax cuts and new tax cuts; he has trashed the idea of the independence of the central bank; he said that we should want to have a less highly valued currency, which means less valuable money [and] higher prices, and that’s just on the demand side,” he said.
More importantly, “He’s talked about a big tariff on every good that we import, which means higher import prices [and] also means higher prices for everything that competes with imports,” Summers said.
Summers criticized Trump’s promise to implement 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods, saying it will not only force American consumers to pay much higher prices, but will further strain U.S.-China relations. The U.S. ought to precisely “calibrate” its trade policies to the nation’s overall strategic objectives, he said.
“At a time when the Chinese economy is struggling, when there are very difficult economic problems, the worst thing we could do would be to make it completely easy for the Chinese government to scapegoat us for their own economic failings. And so, we need to be very careful that we are focused on our own security [and] … not pursue policies that can be interpreted as reflecting a generalized desire to suppress the Chinese economy,” he said, adding “That’s going to require subtle choices about policy and it’s going to require not bluster, but very careful communication.”
In addition, tightening U.S. borders is “clearly something we have to do,” he noted. “But if you’re talking about sending millions of people out of the country who are here now, that’s a prescription for large-scale labor shortages, and we’ve seen in the past what that does to inflation.”
Vice President Kamala Harris made a pitch to voters who “love our country,” a sentiment Summers said he’d like to see the Democratic Party and institutions like Harvard champion.
“I’d frankly like to see it as a value embraced more in our University, where it’s not something we talk about or celebrate or think about,” he said. “There’s plenty that we have done wrong in our history. But there’s something odd about the degree to which the history that is received in our educational system is as negative about our country as it is.”
The University needs to “find a way” to encourage patriotism as a positive principle on campus because the U.S. today faces “real threats” and because it is “an alternative to each subgroup of Americans embracing a particular identity, which leads to a great deal of divisiveness.”
What’s ahead for U.S. foreign policy in ‘Trump 2.0’?
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser predict push to end Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, instability for NATO
President-elect Donald Trump is moving swiftly to announce Cabinet and other appointments for a second term in office, which many observers expect to pick up where he left off in January 2021 on major policy issues like immigration, trade, and foreign relations.
What will be different, say veteran Washington journalists Susan Glasser ’90, and Peter Baker, is the speed at which Trump will move to advance his agenda, with a likely boost from a Republican majority in Congress.
“Trump 2.0 is Trump on steroids,” Baker, senior White House correspondent at The New York Times, told moderator Yevgenia Albats, Ph.D. ’04, a Russian journalist and political scientist. The discussion on Tuesday with Baker and Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, examined what U.S. policy with Russia, China, and the European Union may look like during a second Trump administration.
The pair, who are married, served in Moscow as co-bureau chiefs for The Washington Post from 2001 to 2004, and have written several books together, including “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution” in 2005 and “The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021” in 2022.
Unlike in 2016, when he ran as a celebrity businessman who wanted to shake up Washington, Trump will return to the White House in January having run on “an explicit campaign of revenge and retribution,” according to Glasser, and intending to take care of what he sees as “unfinished business,” namely to “fundamentally reorient” U.S. foreign policy to his own more isolationist view of the country’s role in the world.
Trump has more experience now in how to use the levers of presidential power. And his loyalist picks for secretaries of state and defense and national security adviser — Sen. Marco Rubio, Army veteran and Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, M.P.P. ’13, and Rep. Mike Waltz — lack deep experience in foreign policy and will likely do little to restrain Trump’s plans, unlike their counterparts in Trump’s first term, they said.
“If you look [at] who’s in the room making decisions right now, there is no dissent,” Baker noted.
The fate of Ukraine is likely to be among the first matters Trump takes up.
The incoming president, who has reportedly engaged in back-channel talks with Putin, made a campaign promise to end the Ukraine war quickly. He is almost certain to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine and try to broker a deal that will favor Russia, the pair told Albats, editor in chief of The New Times, an independent Russian language news outlet, and a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
NATO’s fate in a second Trump term is unclear. As the president-elect demonstrated in his first term, “He has no interest and no commitment whatsoever to defend, frankly, anybody, but especially the Eastern European countries,” said Baker.
Even without a formal withdrawal by the U.S., as Trump repeatedly threatened during his first term, NATO is already weaker than it was before Nov. 5, he said.
“If you’re an adversary of NATO, Article 5 [which calls for the nations to defend one another if attacked] is meaningless, because if it’s a conditional thing, depending on the mood of the president of the United States as opposed to a solid commitment, it’s a dead letter,” said Baker.
“He has, just by getting elected, undercut NATO in a way that it has not been undercut” since its beginnings after World War II amid concerns over the rise of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power, he said.
On the nights they attend A.R.T. performances, Lavine Learning Lab students welcome audiences to the Loeb Drama Center.
Photo by Lauren Miller
5 min read
A.R.T. and Lavine Learning Lab aim to create a space for intergenerational dialogue, deepen student engagement with theater
Supporting student engagement in live theater as it fosters lasting relationships between the two is the idea behind the American Repertory Theater’s Lavine Learning Lab. The new student initiative will, among other exercises, bring participating public high school students to an evening performance of every show in the company’s season.
Rooted in A.R.T.’s core values of inquiry and collaboration, the Lavine Learning Lab uses A.R.T. productions as the foundation for student workshops that bridge the arts, humanities, and social and emotional learning, fostering lasting relationships between the theater and its young audience.
“The theater is where we develop our muscles for inquiry, empathy, and debate,” said Artistic Director Diane Paulus ’88. “The Lavine Learning Lab will be a gymnasium where high school students will come to exercise their humanity so they can become the most impactful citizens and participants in our society.”
“The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives.”
Dayron J. Miles, A.R.T. associate artistic director
For each production, students participate in an introductory in-school workshop centered around the production’s “Essential Questions”; a pre-show workshop at A.R.T., held alongside a second Learning Lab school, exploring one of the production’s themes or elements, followed by dinner and a performance; and a post-show, in-school student-led workshop for students to unpack their own perspectives and those of others.
In addition, two educators from each participating school join a Professional Learning Community in which A.R.T. facilitates ongoing collaborative learning and provides professional development.
An important aspect of the program is Learning Lab students will attend evening performances of every show in A.R.T.’s season — instead of morning matinees traditionally designated for school groups. Students will sit in groups of two to four, alongside the general evening audience.
Students at a pre-show workshop with “Romeo and Juliet” actor Alex Ross.
Credit: A Priori Photography
“When we attend a performance, we aren’t impacted only by what we see onstage, but also by our fellow audience members,” said A.R.T. Associate Artistic Director Dayron J. Miles. “The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives. Empathy is a necessary tool for responsible democratic participation, and that’s what we can cultivate with this model.”
Evening attendance also builds familiarity with theatergoing and sense of belonging at the theater to cultivate a culture of lifelong theatergoing. To increase accessibility by removing common barriers, A.R.T. provides transportation between the schools and the theater and a pre-show dinner onsite.
The Lavine Learning Lab is supported by a $5 million gift from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, which was founded by Bain Capital Chair Jonathan Lavine, M.B.A. ’92, and Jeannie Lavine ’88, M.B.A. ’92, to support nonprofit organizations focused on leveling the playing field for individuals and families.
“We’ve been struck by A.R.T.’s commitment to expanding access to theater,” said Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine in a statement. “We are delighted to play a part in engaging Boston’s students and teachers in the essential questions sparked by A.R.T.’s world-class programming and in supporting A.R.T., whose work inspires people all throughout our city and this country.”
The Learning Lab exemplifies the type of community-centered, accessible programming A.R.T. will offer from its new home, the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance. Currently under construction at 175 N. Harvard St. in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, the center is expected to be completed in the fall of 2026.
A.R.T. facilitated a pilot with six public high schools during the 2023-2024 school year to develop the current model.
“I feel like a lot of my analytical skills have been reinforced and retaught in the Learning Lab, but I’ve also taken the vulnerability that I feel when I’m in the lab and applied it to other parts of my life,” said Malden High School student and pilot and Learning Lab participant Addison McWayne. “This experience has provided me with opportunities to speak up for myself and to share my opinion, which has made me a stronger and more confident person.”
“The lab is one of the ways that A.R.T. shares the resources of Harvard University with our community, but the A.R.T. community gains so much, too,” said Kelvin Dinkins Jr., executive director of the A.R.T. “The students bring their anticipation and excitement, which translates into a galvanizing energy on the sidewalk, in our lobbies, and in the theater itself that enhances the experience for everyone. Thanks to this incredible support from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, A.R.T. is positioned to bring our mission into public high schools across Boston for years to come.”
“When the Lavine Learning Lab works in Boston, we hope it will be a model for other cities, because A.R.T. has led the way in so many areas, and A.R.T. can help lead the way in providing this kind of access and inspiration to students all over the country,” said the Lavines.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
The average American consumes 41.8 pounds of cheese per year. We asked Harvard Chan School nutritionist Walter C. Willett about the health impact.
Whether cheese is good or bad for health depends on the comparison. It is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from great (nuts and soy foods) to processed red meat. Like other dairy foods, cheese does have nutritional value, including a high calcium content. However, our calcium recommendations are seriously overstated because they are based on studies of several weeks, which is far too short.
Current National Institutes of Health recommendations suggest Americans older than 18 get 1,000 mg of calcium daily. However, as little as 600 mg is probably enough for most people.
Of course, the amount of cheese makes an important difference, and it has become common to put a huge amount in sandwiches and salads. About one serving of dairy foods a day is probably a good target; some evidence suggests that yogurt has some health advantages, and cheese could be part of that mix. But if you are thinking of a cheese sandwich, consider peanut butter on whole grain bread as an alternative, or adding nuts to your salad instead of cheese.
Like other dairy foods, cheese does have nutritional value, including a high calcium content. However, our calcium recommendations are seriously overstated.
Americans consume about 1.5 servings of dairy foods per day, and the majority of this is now in the form of cheese. This is a major shift over the last several decades; the total amount of dairy foods consumed has not changed greatly, but until recently this was mainly milk. The USDA has been strongly supporting consumption of cheese (despite their own guidelines encouraging reduction in saturated fat), which has probably contributed to this trend.
Some of the increases in cheese consumption are probably due to more people reducing red meat for various reasons including health, animal welfare, and climate change, but the strong promotion of cheese by the USDA has very likely been an important factor. Starting with the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983, a small tax on sales of dairy has gone to the USDA to promote sales of dairy foods, creating a massive conflict of interest within the organization.
In the past, the vast majority of cheese consumed by Americans was cheddar, but we now consume a wider variety. There is no good evidence that one type or another is different for health.
The differences in nutrient content of cheeses are primarily due to the amount of water. Cottage cheese and other fresh cheeses with high water content have higher percentages of lactose — a carbohydrate that decreases with aging. As cheese ages and becomes hard like parmesan or manchego, the lactose is fermented and lost.
However, volume matters. We usually eat more cottage cheese than an aged cheese, so the amount of calories, calcium, and saturated fat can end up not being very different.
In addition to the direct effects of cheese on health, it is important to consider the implications for climate change because dairy production has a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and land use. In an analysis conducted as part of the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy and sustainable food systems, we found that if global production of dairy foods increased to 2 servings per day, limiting severe climate change would be difficult.
Many in Native communities applaud U.S. apology over boarding schools
President Biden speaking at the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Arizona, on Oct. 25.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Deloria, Gone say action over decadeslong initiative to forcibly assimilate children overdue, necessary
Philip Deloria and Joseph P. Gone had family members who were taken from their homes and placed in government- or church-run boarding schools as part of a decadeslong federal initiative aimed at forcibly assimilating thousands of Native children.
Late last month, President Biden made a historic apology to Native Americans on behalf of the U.S. government. “I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said during a visit to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. “But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
The gesture was applauded by many in the community, and for good reason, said Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History.
“Apologies have not exactly been forthcoming from the federal and state governments and the churches, and the various entities that have enacted some of these programs on any people over the years. Any time that there’s recognition of those histories, I think it’s really important,” he said. “For many Native people, the moments where the rituals of formal American diplomacy are actually visible is also recognition of Native nationhood and of Native continuities and futurities.”
“A lot of people will be grateful for this apology, irrespective of the motivators for it, and are grateful that he appointed Secretary [Debra] Haaland, because it wouldn’t have happened without her,” added Gone, anthropology professor and faculty director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Gone credited Haaland, the first Native American to serve as U.S. secretary of the interior, for making the “boarding school wound” a priority during Biden’s administration.
Boarding schools, which often kept children away from their families for long periods of time, forced American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students to speak English and prohibited them from speaking their own languages. These children were also banned from learning or practicing their own religions.
“The parts that are worth emphasizing are just the sheer brutality of many of these schools,” Deloria said. The children were subjected to physical and emotional abuse and sometimes served as free labor. Many died after contracting illnesses at the schools, he pointed out.
The federal initiative continued well into the 20th century. A July investigative report by Haaland’s department revealed that 19,000 Native children were forced into these boarding schools, with nearly 1,000 dying while there.
At the age of 5, Gone’s great-grandfather Many-Plumes was taken to a federally run industrial school in Fort Belknap Agency in Montana, where his name was changed to Frederick Peter Gone. There, the young boy was kept away from family and abused, he said.
“It colored his life and the life of our descendants ever since in part because of these experiences,” Gone noted.
Similar boarding or industrial schools were also run by Christian, Mormon, and Catholic churches. Deloria’s grandfather and great-aunts went to church boarding schools that were just “a little better” than other federal or religious-run institutions.
“There’s an entire theory of historical trauma, which is largely based around the kinds of ways in which boarding-school trauma suffered by these children is passed down to subsequent generations,” he said.
In 1928, the “Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration” highlighted the ineffectiveness of the boarding-school policy. Following reforms, some of the federally run schools transformed into places where Native students could interact with members of different tribes, Gone said.
“In the ’60s and ’70s, going to these schools sometimes could be more interesting than being in your tiny, little rural school on the reservation where you already know everybody,” Gone said. “One of the unintended consequences is you had a lot of intermarriage among Indian people who met at boarding schools.”
Despite reforms, the impact of boarding schools is felt to this day. In addition to calling on the federal government to apologize, Haaland’s report recommended creating a national memorial commemorating of Native children who died in the schools, and an investment in Native communities and their languages.
The Biden administration signed legislation that invested more than $45 billion in Native communities through the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Deloria and Gone suggested some of the funds should be invested in healthcare, particularly in a way in which tribal nations can retain their sovereignty and autonomy. “There’s no domain of Indian life that wouldn’t benefit from additional resources,” Gone said.
Biden’s apology came just days before the recent presidential election, but the two professors said the timing was unimportant to them. “It may be that this is like a capstone for Biden, and it may be a cynical gesture in relation to the election, but it may also be the beginning of something new that goes forward,” Deloria said.
Buttigieg urges focus on local, state projects that can win wide support
Transportation secretary discusses aviation, roadway challenges during his time in office, administration’s frustrations, issues awaiting new president
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
The deeply divided U.S. is like “two people locked in a wrestling match on the edge of a cliff,” said Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at a campus event Monday evening.
“The implicit working theory of our administration has been if we could just deliver on the basics,” such as safe roads and bridges and clean drinking water, “solving some of those basic problems would move our wrestling match a few feet from the edge of the cliff,” he said. “But as everyone has noticed, we don’t seem to be that far from the edge of the cliff.”
He noted that part of the problem for the Biden White House was time. “I would argue that we’ve made enormous progress, basically full employment,” he said. “But so many of the economic benefits that we’ve been working on are things that take years.”
Buttigieg ’04 returned to campus for a Harvard Kennedy School discussion before a capacity crowd with Setti Warren, Institute of Politics director, on his own work at the Department of Transportation, some of the issues awaiting incoming President Donald Trump, and the need for Democrats to focus on advancing priorities through projects on the local and state level that can win wide support.
The transportation secretary said that as he was speaking in his official capacity he would largely avoid talking partisan politics. And he spent much of this time detailing his time in office.
Problems with commercial aviation, he said, loomed large, with issues ranging from a lack of transparency about fees and passenger reimbursements to safety concerns, such as when a section of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane blew out during a flight in January.
In response, Buttigieg said, his department took a holistic response, from a package of consumer protections to a “dashboard” that tracks consumer complaints and airline compliance.
“First we used transparency to supply change, and now we have the letter of the [recently passed aviation] law” while also stepping up enforcement, he said, citing such regulations as new ones that make refunds automatic when flights are canceled (without alternatives being offered) or unduly delayed (three hours for a domestic flight, six hours for an international flight).
“We’re doing these things not against the airlines, but because we need them to deliver better service,” he said.
Ongoing issues include equal access for those with disabilities, he said, noting how some of those passengers say they dehydrate themselves because they know they will not be able to access airplane restrooms. Road safety, as well, remains a concern.
“We lose more than 100 people a day on our roadways,” he said. Comparing this statistic to the safety of air travel, with all its shortcomings, he concluded: “We should be able to do better with forms of transportation on the surface.”
Such basic concerns were the goals of the Biden administration, he said. Acknowledging issues with inflation even as the economy enjoyed robust employment, he explained that focusing on infrastructure improvements was viewed as a possible way to ease the country’s divisiveness.
Looking back on the past four years, the secretary noted the long-term nature of the majority of the Biden administration’s projects and how those have set up the Trump administration for its next moves.
Trying “not to sound bitter,” he pointed out that the incoming administration “will inherit a lot of groundwork that has been laid, jobs that were always expected to come online in 2026 and ’27.” This could provide the basis for a boom, he said.
“The building trades have a pipeline of work that they haven’t seen since before I was born,” said the 42-year-old, who also cited “interest rates ticking down.”
However, he added, the new administration may also create its own challenges. For example, he said, “if something disrupts our supply chains, such as mass deportations,” Americans may once again have to worry about the economy.
Looking ahead, Buttigieg saw common ground in “local voices.” “We’re doing 63,000 local projects,” he said, citing projects that came to the administration “because a state or a city or a tribe … wanted to get something done.”
He stressed the potential for Democrats to muster bipartisan support for such projects. “Principled conservatism has some regard for the local — if anything more regard than the left,” said the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “I am hopeful that that principle will survive.
“In moments like this our salvation will come from the local and the state level. A lot of the answers are going to come from mayors, from communities, from states.”
Bohdan Tokarskyi, new assistant professor, says he’s up to the challenge
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
At times this fall, Bohdan Tokarskyi has felt split between two contrasting worlds.
On one side is Cambridge, where he works as a new assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures. On the other are the sirens, bomb shelters, blackouts, and flattened universities that flash across his phone each morning when reading about Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships,” said Tokarskyi. “It is really humbling for me what impressive work the educators and students in Ukraine continue to do against all odds and in spite of the horror of the war. This is a gigantic reminder that education is a privilege.”
“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships.”
“I want to provide a bird’s-eye view of Ukraine’s centuries-long literature and culture,” said Tokarskyi, who was a fellow at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in the spring. “Because Ukraine’s lands have been subjected to different imperial powers over the many centuries, there has been a lot of oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture. In my course, I show to my students how time and again in Ukrainian literature we find themes like solidarity, human rights, the pursuit of justice, feminism and, of course, resilience.”
Literature has played a central role in shaping Ukraine’s history, Tokarskyi said, and still does. During the 2013-2014 Euromaidan demonstrations, graffiti portraits, and quotes from Lesya Ukrainka, Taras Shevchenko, and other writers were used as inspiration to protesters. This past January, poet Maksym Kryvtsov read works by the 20th-century poet Vasyl Stus in videos posted to social media. The very next day, Kryvtsov was killed on the frontlines.
“This reminds us that even nowadays Ukrainian writers are fighting and being killed defending their country and their culture,” Tokarskyi said. “But it also shows what great importance this cultural tradition has in Ukraine. It connects cultural thought across history, even when the producers of this culture were oppressed and executed.”
Tokarskyi is currently writing the first-ever English-language book on Stus, a dissident poet who spent more than a decade in Soviet prisons. He is also collaborating with poet and translator Nina Murray on an English-language volume of Stus’ selected works.
“Picture a poet of the stature of T.S. Eliot or Rainer Maria Rilke, working deep in the mines of a Gulag labor camp with an 80-kilogram-heavy rock bolt, managing nonetheless to produce some of the most exquisite post-war poetry in Europe,” Tokarskyi said. “You would expect that someone with a biography like that would create a work that is overtly political. But in his case, his response to the extreme conditions in which he found himself was instead producing this highly introspective poetry.”
“One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”
The book is a passion project for Tokarskyi, who said Stus’ work helped inspire him to switch fields and pursue literature after completing an international law degree at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2014.
“To me, Stus is a paragon of moral imperative and the pursuit of authenticity that is not only fighting against something but also asking oneself ceaselessly, ‘How can I become my true self?’ — and doing that by creating an absolutely innovative poetic language,” he said. “One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”
Next semester Tokarskyi will teach the graduate-level seminar “Modernisms: Ukrainian, Soviet, European.” Also on the agenda is a first-year seminar titled “Making the Self: Poetics of Authenticity,” which will examine how writers and philosophers seek to answer the question “What does it mean to be authentic?” which Tokarskyi says is all the more urgent in the era of social media and artificial intelligence.
Tokarskyi is excited about introducing graduate students to a “treasure trove” of potential Ph.D. projects. “My door is always open for students, and I cannot wait to help them explore and discover Ukrainian literature.”
New tool allows researchers to study gene mutation directly within living human cells
Gene mutations have consequences both good and bad — from resistance to conditions like diabetes to susceptibility to certain cancers.
In order to study these mutations, scientists need to introduce them directly into human cells. But changing genetic instructions inside cells is complex. The human genome comprises 3 billion base pairs of DNA divided across tens of thousands of genes.
To that end, Harvard researchers have created a tool that allows them to rapidly create mutations only in particular genes of interest without disturbing the rest of the genome. Described in Science, their tool, called Helicase-Assisted Continuous Editing (HACE), can be deployed to predetermined regions of the genome in intact, living cells.
“The development of tools like this marks a significant leap forward in our ability to harness evolution directly within human cells,” said first author Xi Dawn Chen, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student studying synthetic biology in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “By allowing targeted mutagenesis in specific parts of the genome, this tool opens the door to creating enzymes and treatments that were previously out of reach.”
“HACE combines CRISPR’s precision with the ability to edit long stretches of DNA, making it a powerful tool for targeted evolution.”
Fei Chen
Unlike current methods for mutagenesis, which involve inserting extra copies of genes or broadly mutating many different genes at once, HACE offers the advantage of being directed to locations — like going to a specific address, rather than a neighborhood. The team’s novel bioengineering involves combining a helicase, which is an enzyme that naturally “unzips” DNA, with a gene-editing enzyme. They then use the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 to guide the protein pair to the gene they want to mutate. As the helicase unzips the DNA, it introduces mutations into only that gene sequence.
“HACE combines CRISPR’s precision with the ability to edit long stretches of DNA, making it a powerful tool for targeted evolution,” explained senior author Fei Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and member at the Broad Institute.
To demonstrate the tool’s power in the lab, the scientists used it to identify drug resistance mutations in a gene called MEK1, which cancer treatments often target but frequently fail because the diseased cells mutate resistance mechanisms. Using HACE, the team sequenced only those mutated genes and pinpointed several unique changes associated with resistance to cancer drugs like trametinib and selumetinib, offering insights into how mutations affect drug performance.
They also examined how mutations in SF3B1, a gene involved in a biomolecular process called RNA splicing, affects RNA assembly. Mutations in this gene are common in blood cancers, but it’s been unclear which mutations cause the splicing defects; with HACE, the team could easily identify those changes.
And in partnership with Bradley Bernstein’s lab at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the researchers also used the tool to better understand how changes in a regulatory DNA region affect the production of a protein in immune cells recognized as a potential target for cancer immunotherapies.
Bernstein said tools like HACE could someday allow massive edits of gene regulatory sequences that could then be coupled with deep learning computation for deciphering. “One can imagine many new therapeutic opportunities that involve precise edits or tuning of these regulatory sequences to ‘fix’ gene activity and ameliorate disease,” Bernstein said.
This research was supported by multiple sources including the National Institutes of Health, the Broad Institute, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
Revealing twists, turns of evolution from sprawling to upright posture
Mammals, including humans, stand out with their distinctively upright posture, a trait that fueled their evolutionary success. Yet the earliest known ancestors of modern mammals more closely resembled reptiles, with limbs stuck out to their sides in a sprawled posture.
The shift from a sprawled stance like that of lizards to the upright posture of modern mammals, as in humans, dogs, and horses, marked a pivotal moment in evolution. Despite more than a century of study, the exact how, why, and when behind this leap has remained elusive.
A new study published in Science Advances provides fresh insights into this mystery, revealing the shift from a sprawled to upright posture in mammals was anything but straightforward. Using methods that blend fossil data with advanced biomechanical modeling, the researchers found that this transition was surprisingly complex and nonlinear, and occurred much later than previously believed.
Lead author and postdoctoral fellow Peter Bishop, and senior author Professor Stephanie Pierce, both in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, began by examining the biomechanics of five modern species that represent the full spectrum of limb postures, including a tegu lizard (sprawled), an alligator (semi-upright), and a greyhound (upright).
“By first studying these modern species, we greatly improved our understanding of how an animal’s anatomy relates to the way it stands and moves,” said Bishop. “We could then put it into an evolutionary context of how posture and gait actually changed.”
Evolutionary interrelationships of the modern (black) and extinct (gray) species investigated. The study revealed a complex history of posture evolution in synapsids, and that a fully “upright” posture typical of modern placentals and marsupials was late to evolve.
Credit: Peter Bishop
The researchers extended their analysis to eight exemplar fossil species from four continents spanning 300 million years of evolution. The species ranged from the 1-ounce proto-mammal Megazostrodon to the Ophiacodon, which weighed hundreds of pounds, and also included animals like the sail-backed Dimetrodon and the saber-toothed predator Lycaenops. Using principles from physics and engineering, Bishop and Pierce built digital biomechanical models of how the muscles and bones attached to each other. These models allowed them to generate simulations that determined how much force the hindlimbs could apply on the ground.
“The amount of force that a limb can apply to the ground is a critical determinant of locomotor performance in animals,” said Bishop. “If you cannot produce sufficient force in a given direction when it’s needed, you won’t be able to run as fast, turn as quickly, or worse still, you could well fall over.”
The computer simulations produced a 3D “feasible force space” that captures a limb’s overall functional performance. “Computing feasible force spaces implicitly accounts for all the interactions that can occur between muscles, joints, and bones throughout a limb,” said Pierce. “This gives us a clearer view of the bigger picture, a more holistic view of limb function and locomotion and how it evolved over hundreds of millions of years.”
While the concept of a feasible force space has been around since the 1990s, this study is the first to apply it to the fossil record to understand how extinct animals once moved. The authors packaged the simulations into new “fossil-friendly” computational tools that can aid other paleontologists in exploring their own questions, as well as help engineers design better bio-inspired robots that can navigate complex or unstable terrain.
The study revealed several important “signals” of locomotion, including that the overall force-generating ability in the modern species was maximal around the postures that each species used in their daily behavior. Bishop and Pierce say this made them confident that the results obtained for the extinct species genuinely reflected how they stood and moved when alive.
After analyzing the extinct species, the researchers discovered that locomotor performance peaked and dipped over millions of years, rather than progressing in a simple, linear fashion from sprawling to upright. Some extinct species also appeared to be more flexible — able to shift back and forth between more sprawled or more upright postures, like modern alligators and crocodiles do. Others showed a strong reversal toward more sprawled postures before mammals evolved. Paired with the study’s other results, this indicated that the traits associated with upright posture in today’s mammals evolved much later than previously thought, most likely close to the common ancestor of therian mammals.
These findings also help reconcile several unresolved problems in the fossil record. For example, it explains the persistence of asymmetric hands, feet, and limb joints in many mammal ancestors, traits typically associated with sprawling postures among modern animals. It can also help explain why fossils of early mammal ancestors are frequently found in a squashed, spread-eagle pose — a pose more likely to be achieved with sprawled limbs, while modern placental and marsupial fossils are typically found lying on their sides.
“It is very gratifying as a scientist, when one set of results can help illuminate other observations, moving us closer to a more comprehensive understanding,” Bishop said.
Filmmaker’s documentaries bring complex history to Busch-Reisinger
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Berlin-based filmmaker Hito Steyerl was 23 when she witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Some of her earliest films document this fraught period of Germany’s history, capturing the rise in xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic violence that followed unification. But that was more than 30 years ago, making the specifics a bit difficult to remember, she joked during an event held at the Harvard Art Museums on Oct. 29.
“It almost feels as if … a different person made these films,” she told those gathered. “It’s strange for me to try to talk about it; don’t ask me any details,” she added with a laugh.
“As an exhibition, [it] features artists from different backgrounds and generations and [has work] that complicates notions of German identity, especially the idea of ethnic and cultural homogeneity,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger. “We’ve seen that in recent months incredible conversations and questions around the question of national identity, both here in the United States and abroad.”
Steyerl was invited to speak as part of the annual Busch-Reisinger Museum Lecture series, which started in 2005 and is supported by the German Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. She shared her experience filming her early documentaries, and explained the connection between some of her modern work and Germany’s evolution as a country, historically and technologically.
Steyerl said that one of the films, “The Empty Center” (1998), took eight years to complete. At the time, she was working with Wim Wenders, a filmmaker she met while studying in Tokyo. He was shooting a film called “Until the End of the World” and was “too busy” to capture the fall of the Berlin Wall himself, so he gave Steyerl a camera and told her to go document what she saw. Over the course of eight years, she filmed the wall coming down in an area she called “no man’s land” — what used to be a minefield between the East and the West between the two walls — and its subsequent transition and real estate development. In many ways, she hoped to highlight the transition from going to one border system (a literal wall) to another (the borders of privatization and capitalism).
“That’s basically the organizing principle of that film,” she said. “The superimpositions [are] showing something which had remained the same … but everything else had changed a lot.”
Throughout her lecture, Steyerl showed clips of her older documentaries. She also shared portions of her more contemporary work, such as her 2015 film “Factory of the Sun,” which uses different forms of imagery — video games, drone surveillance, dance — to explore financial power, control, and the spread of information in our increasingly technology-driven world.
After the event, attendees were invited to explore the “Made in Germany?” exhibit, which includes three of Steyerl’s films. Other works on display include Katharina Sieverding’s monumental pigment-on-metal print “Deutschland wird deutscher XLI/92” (“Germany Becomes More German XLI/92”) from 1992; Ulrich Wüst’s hand-crafted leporello (accordion book) “Hausbuch” (“House Book”) (1989–2010); and a loan of East Germany-born Henrike Naumann’s “Ostalgie” (2019), a room-sized installation addressing the immediate post-Wall period in Germany’s “new” federal states. Additionally, a special “Made in Germany?” playlist featuring music from the 1980s to today is available on Spotify, as well as a print catalog accompanying the exhibit.
The exhibition is on view through Jan. 5, 2025, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery and adjacent University Research Gallery on Level 3 of the Harvard Art Museums.
Former Saudi intelligence chief urges greater international role in Gaza war
Al Faisal calls for Israel to reduce civilian casualties, lays out plan for U.N.-brokered two-state solution
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Editor’s note:This story has been updated to correct the death toll in Gaza. The territory’s health ministry reports that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, but it does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants.
A former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief called international inaction in Gaza “criminal” and called on Israel’s sophisticated military to employ more targeted methods to reduce civilian deaths in its conflict with Hamas.
“What we need there is for both sides — not just the Israelis but also the Arabs — to say enough is enough and to turn to wiser heads and more capable leadership around the world to bring an end to the cycle of tit for tat and death for death and destruction for destruction,” said His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal, who served for 24 years as head of the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Presidency before stepping down in 2001.
Al Faisal, current chair of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, also proposed a U.N.-brokered process for a two-state solution during the Middle East Initiative’s “Middle East Dialogues” last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School. Hosted by Tarek Masoud, the initiative’s faculty chair, the series brings prominent actors from across the Middle East to discuss the war in Gaza and broader regional issues.
“This is something we began at Harvard last year to bring to this University genuine, candid, open conversations with people who hold wildly varied but widely shared views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the causes of that conflict and how it might be brought to an end,” said Masoud, who is also the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, as he introduced the event, the first of this school year.
Al Faisal, a member of the Saudi royal family and former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K., said that Hamas — whose Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sparked the war — is a terrorist group, but argued that if Hamas mingles with civilians and digs tunnels under hospitals and mosques, Israeli soldiers should fight in the tunnels, not bomb indiscriminately.
Al Faisal called for establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem to resolve the conflict as part of the creation of a two-state solution, with talks guided by the United Nations and participation of global powers.
“Part of the U.N. setup would be an article to come out in the United Nations Security Council resolution barring anybody on the side of the Palestinians and Israelis who does not accept a two-state solution from being in negotiations for a two-state solution,” Al Faisal said, adding that that would include even major players like Hamas and Hezbollah. “A mechanism should be put in place to get only those committed to the principle of peace between Arabs and Israelis to be party to the negotiations.”
Masoud described Al Faisal as “one of the broadest minds in our region, if not our planet” and as “not just a witness to history, but a shaper of it.”
Despite repeated calls for peace, the war has killed thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands. It has expanded in recent months into southern Lebanon after Iran-backed Hezbollah repeatedly fired rockets into Israel. Concerns about the war widening further have risen as Israel and Iran exchanged rocket fire.
In response to Masoud’s questions, Al Faisal said the ongoing fighting is planting seeds of anguish and anger among today’s children in Gaza. Those seeds will fuel the continuation of the long-running cycle of violence that has plagued the region.
“My view is even one death on both sides is not worth the destruction that is taking place,” Al Faisal said. “There is a verse in the Quran which says, ‘The killing of an innocent person is like killing all mankind.’ That is the attitude I think a state with the recognition that Israel has in the world should take into consideration.”
Al Faisal also addressed Saudi Arabia’s approach to relations with Israel, saying normalization by other nations like Egypt and Jordan has had no impact on the fighting, so Saudi Arabia shouldn’t pursue it until the fighting has concluded, and a Palestinian state is assured.
Asked why Saudi Arabia hasn’t responded as it did to U.S. support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when it imposed a painful oil embargo, Al Faisal said that times have changed. Such an approach today would be ineffective, he said, largely because the U.S. has become a major oil-producing nation.
Prior speakers in the Dialogues series included Jared Kushner, former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump; Matt Duss, executive director of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; and Einat Wilf, a political scientist and former member of the Knesset.
Al Faisal also addressed broader issues outside the conflict and praised the recent loosening of cultural rules in the kingdom and its more welcoming approach to outsiders. He also said there are opportunities for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to cooperate more. Saudi Arabia is a significant provider of international aid, he said, and together the two could make a difference on international poverty.
“We are an evolving country, like all countries are,” Al Faisal said. “It’s not going to be a matter of a top-down decree on what to do, but rather an integration of the sense of what people want and what leadership can provide them.”
Tarek Masoud, organizer of Middle East Dialogues, wanted to show that Harvard could confront the tensions around Israel-Gaza without vitriol or shouting. So far, it’s worked.
Study pinpoints optimal timing for RSV vaccine during pregnancy
Five weeks before giving birth best transfers maternal antibodies to the fetus, say researchers
MGB Communications
4 min read
To better protect newborns from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the leading cause of hospitalization in U.S. infants, pregnant women should receive a vaccine five weeks before delivery, according to new research led by investigators at Mass General Brigham.
RSV typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most adults but can be deadly for infants. While current guidelines recommend a vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy, new findings suggest that vaccination closer to 32 weeks could provide the best protection. Results of the study are published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
To assess whether maternal vaccine timing is an important consideration for RSV vaccination, the investigators measured RSV antibodies in the umbilical cord at the time of delivery among 124 women who received the RSV vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy and in the blood of 29 2-month-old infants of these mothers.
All study participants were receiving care at MGH or Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. Levels of RSV antibodies can predict protection against RSV infection in infants too young to yet receive their own vaccines.
The investigators found that maternal RSV vaccination at least five weeks before delivery led to the most efficient transfer of maternal antibodies across the placenta to the newborn, compared with maternal vaccination at two to three or three to four weeks prior to delivery.
In an additional analysis, RSV antibody levels in maternal and cord blood after RSV vaccination were compared with RSV antibody levels in 20 unvaccinated mothers. Maternal RSV vaccination resulted in significantly higher and longer-lasting maternal and cord RSV antibody levels.
“Our findings suggest that being vaccinated earlier within the approved timeframe allows for the most efficient placental transfer of antibody to the newborn,” said senior author Andrea Edlow, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They also may have implications for when the RSV monoclonal antibody, Nirsevimab, should be administered to newborns. Similar research should be conducted for other vaccines administered during pregnancy.
“This work provides much-needed data to guide physicians in counseling patients about RSV vaccine timing during pregnancy,” Edlow added.
The investigators noted that additional studies are needed to determine the minimum amount of antibody transfer and/or infant blood antibody levels to adequately protect infants against RSV. It will also be important to understand the potential additive protection for infants provided by breastmilk from RSV-vaccinated mothers. This study was designed to measure antibody transfer, but larger studies of infants 2 to 6 months of age will be needed to determine the extent to which this leads to enhanced protection.
Disclosures: Outside of this work, Edlow serves as a consultant for Mirvie, Inc. and is a consultant for and has received research funding from Merck Pharmaceuticals. Additional disclosures can be found in the paper.
Authorship: In addition to Edlow, Mass General Brigham authors include Olyvia J. Jasset, Paola Andrea Lopez Zapana, Lydia Shook, Emily Gilbert, Zhaojing Ariel Liu, Rachel V. Yinger, Caroline Bald, Caroline G. Bradford, Alexa H. Silfen, and Lael M. Yonker.
This work was funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (1U19AI167899, R01AI171980), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5K12HD103096 to L.L.S; NIH/NHLBI: R01HL173059 to L.Y.; MGH ECOR: MGH Research Scholar Award to A.G.E., Claflin Award to L.L.S.; Binational Science Foundation Award number 2019075 to L.K.) None of the funders had any role in the design of the study; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.
Did Trump election signal start of new political era?
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Analysts weigh issues, strategies, media decisions at work in contest, suggest class may become dominant factor
President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was made possible partly by a significantly expanded coalition of multi-ethnic, working-class voters, signaling a potentially seismic shift in the American political landscape, according to a political analyst.
“I believe that we are in a new political era in which class will be the dominant factor in political divisions,” said William Galston, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, during a panel discussion Thursday hosted by the Center for American Political Studies.
Analysts at the election post-mortem, moderated by Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus, noted Trump made gains with voters in every age group, across racial and ethnic demographics, particularly Hispanic and Black men, and even improved over 2020 with women.
Class and gender were more determinative than race and ethnicity this year, Galston noted, with class, as defined by educational level rather than income, being the most important. The split between people with higher and lower levels of education is a development the country “will be wrestling with for the next generation with consequences that I can’t begin to predict,” he said.
Moderator Harvey Mansfield (from left) and panelists Bill Kristol, William Galston, and Ross Douthat.
The group noted the Trump campaign correctly predicted wide-ranging voter discontent over the economy and immigration would override any misgivings about their candidate’s personality or behavior. And Trump’s recent pledge to veto a national abortion ban appeared to allay concerns with many voters over an issue Democrats had expected would drive turnout their way.
They also noted the campaign’s media strategy proved very effective. TV ads attacking Harris as being too liberal did some damage. And the unconventional decision to put less emphasis on mainstream news outlets in favor of more friendly, less overtly political settings, like “The Joe Rogan Podcast,” along with aggressive use of social media influencers, crypto and gambling events, and internet memes, helped the campaign reach likely supporters, the panelists said.
The Harris campaign had much to overcome, tied as it was to the coattails of a deeply unpopular administration that was blamed for the nation’s high inflation and problems with border security and immigration, the analysts said.
President Biden ran on restoring normalcy to the pandemic-battered U.S. economy and using his considerable foreign policy chops to cool global hotspots and repair international relations damaged by Trump, said Ross Douthat ’02, opinion columnist at The New York Times, who anticipated that Trump would prevail.
Instead, he said, voters faced much higher prices on essentials like gas and food and witnessed a botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and two wars erupt in Ukraine and in the Middle East.
Trump “said a lot of wild and deplorable things over the course of the 2024 election but having lived through the first Trump administration in which there was a huge disconnect between Trumpian rhetoric and the actual realities of governance, I don’t think it was that surprising that the voting public [told themselves] if we went through this for four years and things were OK, and Donald Trump did not become a fascist dictator, we can go through it for four more years’” because he offers better prospects than the alternative, Douthat said.
In addition, Biden’s seeming retreat from his 2020 pledge to be a one-term “transitional president,” waiting until July to step aside, gave Harris no time to introduce herself to voters and to lay out and sharpen the substance and presentation of her agenda in just three months put her at a great disadvantage from the outset, said Galston.
Without a primary, Harris also had no real chance to establish an identity independent of Biden, making it easier to tie her to everything voters disliked about his administration. And arguments that Harris and Democrats thought would be key, such as reproductive rights and Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, proved less powerful than hoped.
“There is a mountain of political science evidence to the effect that for people who feel hard-pressed economically or insecure physically, democracy is a luxury good,” said Galston.
Then there was the appeal of Trump himself. The president-elect has had 50 years as a celebrity, skillful marketer, and TV performer, so it’s not surprising that he excels at creating effective political images and viral content, like pretending to serve McDonald’s french fries, that cut through today’s fragmented media landscape and deliver his intended messages, said Bill Kristol ’73, Ph.D. ’79, a longtime conservative intellectual and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, who became a critic of the Republican Party under Trump.
He said Trump returns to office with a more supportive Republican majority in the Senate and possibly the House, expanded presidential protections conferred by the Supreme Court, and a plan to purge the federal government of those who would try to block his initiatives. And so, he appears much more powerful than he was in 2016.
Referencing Karl Marx’s famous quip about history repeating itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Kristol said about a second Trump term: “What makes me most worried about the next four years is that it could end up being ‘first time farce, second time tragedy.’”
Researchers say new AI tool sharpens diagnostic process, may help identify more people needing care
While earlier diagnostic studies have suggested that 7 percent of the population suffers from long COVID, a new AI tool developed by Mass General Brigham revealed a much higher 22.8 percent, according to the study.
The AI-based tool can sift through electronic health records to help clinicians identify cases of long COVID. The often-mysterious condition can encompass a litany of enduring symptoms, including fatigue, chronic cough, and brain fog after infection from SARS-CoV-2.
The algorithm used was developed by drawing de-identified patient data from the clinical records of nearly 300,000 patients across 14 hospitals and 20 community health centers in the Mass General Brigham system. The results, published in the journal Med, could identify more people who should be receiving care for this potentially debilitating condition.
“Our AI tool could turn a foggy diagnostic process into something sharp and focused, giving clinicians the power to make sense of a challenging condition,” said senior author Hossein Estiri, head of AI Research at the Center for AI and Biomedical Informatics of the Learning Healthcare System (CAIBILS) at MGB and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”
“With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”
Hossein Estiri
For the purposes of their study, Estiri and colleagues defined long COVID as a diagnosis of exclusion that is also infection-associated. That means the diagnosis could not be explained in the patient’s unique medical record but was associated with a COVID infection. In addition, the diagnosis needed to have persisted for two months or longer in a 12-month follow up window.
The novel method developed by Estiri and colleagues, called “precision phenotyping,” sifts through individual records to identify symptoms and conditions linked to COVID-19 to track symptoms over time in order to differentiate them from other illnesses. For example, the algorithm can detect if shortness of breath results from pre-existing conditions like heart failure or asthma rather than long COVID. Only when every other possibility was exhausted would the tool flag the patient as having long COVID.
“Physicians are often faced with having to wade through a tangled web of symptoms and medical histories, unsure of which threads to pull, while balancing busy caseloads. Having a tool powered by AI that can methodically do it for them could be a game-changer,” said Alaleh Azhir, co-lead author and an internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.
The new tool’s patient-centered diagnoses may also help alleviate biases built into current diagnostics for long COVID, said researchers, who noted diagnoses with the official ICD-10 diagnostic code for long COVID trend toward those with easier access to healthcare.
The researchers said their tool is about 3 percent more accurate than the data ICD-10 codes capture, while being less biased. Specifically, their study demonstrated that the individuals they identified as having long COVID mirror the broader demographic makeup of Massachusetts, unlike long COVID algorithms that rely on a single diagnostic code or individual clinical encounters, skewing results toward certain populations such as those with more access to care.
“This broader scope ensures that marginalized communities, often sidelined in clinical studies, are no longer invisible,” said Estiri.
Limitations of the study and AI tool include that health record data the algorithm uses to account for long COVID symptoms may be less complete than the data physicians capture in post-visit clinical notes. Another limitation was the algorithm did not capture possible worsening of a prior condition that may have been a long COVID symptom. For example, if a patient had COPD that worsened before they developed COVID-19, the algorithm might have removed the episodes even if they were long COVID indicators. Declines in COVID-19 testing in recent years also makes it difficult to identify when a patient may have first gotten COVID-19.
The study was limited to patients in Massachusetts.
Future studies may explore the algorithm in cohorts of patients with specific conditions, like COPD or diabetes. The researchers also plan to release this algorithm publicly on open access so physicians and healthcare systems globally can use it in their patient populations.
In addition to opening the door to better clinical care, this work may lay the foundation for future research into the genetic and biochemical factors behind long COVID’s various subtypes. “Questions about the true burden of long COVID — questions that have thus far remained elusive — now seem more within reach,” said Estiri.
Support was given by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) R01AI165535, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) OT2HL161847, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) UL1 TR003167, UL1 TR001881, and U24TR004111. J. Hügel’s work was partially funded by a fellowship within the IFI program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well by the German Research Foundation (426671079).
So, here’s the thing about women comedians that isn’t funny
Veteran stand-up headliner Iliza Shlesinger details self-censorship, social media, and double standards in Mahindra talk
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Comedian Iliza Shlesinger doesn’t jot down her jokes — she stores them in her head until showtime. Even her setlists are just single-word prompts, like “giraffe” (for her baby giraffe impression) or “armpit” (she has joked that no man has ever dumped a woman over armpit stubble).
But that doesn’t mean her routine is mostly impromptu, or “unfiltered,” a label Shlesinger told a Paine Hall audience last Wednesday is overused for female comedians. In reality, she said, most audiences don’t realize how much stand-up material is edited and refined before it’s delivered.
“When you do stand-up, it’s a polished piece of art,” said Shlesinger, a national headliner who has starred in six of her own stand-up comedy specials on Netflix (considered a top-notch venue for comedians) and has toured internationally to sold-out theaters. “Every laugh that is elicited is purposefully placed. I know where the tension is. It’s a symphony.”
“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend.’”
Iliza Shlesinger
At the Hauser Forum for the Arts talk hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center, Shlesinger spoke with comedy writer Bess Kalb about self-censoring, comedy in the age of social media, and double standards for female comedians.
Shlesinger said that when it comes to the balancing act between not offending and not allowing public opinion to ruin a good joke, female comedians are always judged more harshly for their choices. She believes this could discourage them from wanting to make art.
“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend,’” Shlesinger said. “We love to pick apart people and women. We do it deliciously. We love the schadenfreude of ‘I know that all she said was she loves fluffy clouds, but she didn’t say she loved rain clouds also, which means you hate the rain, which means you love climate change.’”
Kalb, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer who has written for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and The New Yorker, said she’s witnessed this double standard firsthand while writing for an all-female comedy special.
“It was at the same network where there were men who had their own specials, and the notes that we got about what all these women could and couldn’t say were astounding,” Kalb said.
Part of the reason behind the nitpicking, Shlesinger believes, is that social media algorithms have normalized content tailored to individual tastes.
“We all have our own personalized channels on Netflix, and we all have our own personalized comedians because we have so much to pick from on social media,” Schlesinger said. “That’s just not the way the human brain works. How could I tailor something that 100 percent speaks to you?”
Female comedians are often disproportionately expected to pull out anecdotes about trauma onstage to be relatable, said Shlesinger, who added that she speaks about her own experience with miscarriage during stand-ups. Kalb dubbed these moments “trauma gems.” Still, Shlesinger said, vulnerability onstage is important for engaging an audience.
“I always think if I’m feeling this, particularly when it comes to the experiences of being a woman, everybody else is feeling this,” Shlesinger said.
Though she knows her jokes won’t land with everyone, Shlesinger said she works to find the common denominator for her audience in whatever venue she’s in.
“At the end of the day, we are all people, and we do all go through the same things,” Shlesinger said. “When you can tap into that, which I always strive to do, that’s how you’re able to play Kuala Lumpur and also Ireland and also Tokyo. You’re reaching a very human thing.”
Singer Davóne Tines ’09 and violinist Jennifer Koh discuss ‘Everything Rises,’ their work about race, complex ties to white world of classical music
Jennifer Koh stood onstage in Paine Concert Hall and lifted her bow to her violin, drawing out the first haunting notes of a Bach sonata.
The back door of the hall then opened, and Davóne Tines ’09 entered singing a Handel aria, his rich bass-baritone interrupting Koh’s performance as he walked down the aisle. They traded notes in call-and-response until Tines joined Koh onstage, and the two performed a duet from Holst’s Songs for Voice and Violin, Op. 35.
The performance was the artists’ re-enactment of the real-life moment Tines and Koh met and began collaborating on “Everything Rises,” a staged performance that premiered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2022. Tines and Koh told the audience at a recent evening talk hosted by the Department of Music how they created their show, which traces their family histories of racialized trauma and their own experiences navigating racism in the majority-white, tradition-bound world of classical music.
“Oftentimes things that are traditional or a part of the core of what institutions uphold go unexcavated, which is really detrimental,” Tines said, pausing to note the names of white European composers like Haydn, Schubert, and Wagner written on the walls in Paine Hall. “We say, ‘Oh, this Beethoven symphony is nonpareil, the best thing that you could be listening to’ so the institution doesn’t go to the lengths of actually self-reflecting to tell the audience why.”
“Oftentimes things that are traditional or a part of the core of what institutions uphold go unexcavated, which is really detrimental.”
Davóne Tines
Tines, who concentrated in sociology, was a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and sang his first opera, Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress,” his senior year with the Dunster House Opera Society. Currently he combines opera with gospel and spirituals, and often uses art to highlight and confront societal issues.
The award-winning Tines recalled meeting the violin virtuoso Koh backstage at the Paris Opera several years ago, and when they spotted each other, the only two people of color in the room, each felt an immediate connection.
“We banded together and went to dinner, and continued to get to know each other,” Tines said. “As we compared and contrasted our life experiences, we found that we had a lot of similarities in our journeys as artists of color within classical music.”
Soon after, they began working on “Everything Rises” and slowly assembled a team of collaborators, including composer Ken Ueno, Ph.D. ’05. They approached the show through a lens of lineage, telling the stories of Koh’s mother, a refugee from North Korea during the Korean War, and Tines’ grandmother, who holds vivid memories of anti-Black discrimination and violence in the U.S. Recorded interviews with the two women are included in the show.
“[Famed cellist] Yo-Yo Ma often says that it takes three generations to make an artist: the first generation to pull the family out of poverty, the second generation to become educated, and then the third generation then has the freedom and foundation to have creative pursuits,” Tines said.
The lyrics of one song by Ueno, “Story of the Moth,” comes directly from frustrations Tines expressed about feeling objectified as a performer.
“Those words, which might seem affronting or surprising — ‘dear white people,’ ‘money, access and fame’ ‘I yearn for your validation’ — these were all things I’ve actually felt,” Tines said.
Tines and Koh adapted a setting of the 1930s anti-racism protest song “Strange Fruit” — which they also performed in their show — into a film for Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope” series. That project came together shortly after the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. In it, their music accompanies a gallery of racist political cartoons and CCTV footage of anti-Asian violence.
Jennifer Koh.
Koh said she’s noticed a clear difference in audience enthusiasm when she performs, say, a work by Tchaikovsky as opposed to a socially and politically charged piece like “Embers,” which was inspired by her years of anger and frustration over anti-Asian hate in the U.S.
“As performers, of course [we hope] you guys will clap at the end,” Koh said. “But to a certain degree, art is not about entertainment. It’s about confrontation of oneself. It’s not only an excavation of our own experience, but something, I think, for the audience to experience as well.”
One of their biggest challenges was finding the perfect way to end their show. At first, Tines said, he had suggested ending with the triumphantly hopeful “Ode to Joy” — both the Beethoven and the gospel hymn version — to suggest a move toward unity.
But Koh disagreed, saying that type of resolution would be letting the audience “off the hook.”
Tines turned to her. “Another thing you said was, ‘Davóne, you don’t have to give that to them. That can be for you,’” herecalled. “’You can find resolution and hope for yourself, but the audience will continue to contend with what was presented.’”
Ultimately, they went with an original composition by Ueno titled “Better Angels” (a reference to Lincoln’s first inaugural address), which they perform directly to each other, a choice Tines felt struck the appropriate chord.
“You want people to go to places that are doubtful,” Tines said. “You hope that those things sit with them, but you don’t want to let them off the hook. You don’t want them to eviscerate what actually has been built in the performance.”
U.S. fertility rates are tumbling, but some couples still go big. Why?
Economist's ‘Hannah's Children’ is an up-close look at large families
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Birth rates are falling globally. In fact, the fertility rate in the U.S. hit a record low of 1.64 expected births per a woman’s lifetime in 2020.
At the same time, about 5 percent of women in the nation currently have five or more children. Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D ’10, a Catholic University economist and mother of eight (and stepmother of six), wanted to find out why, both academically and personally. Her new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” offers an intimate view into the lives of families around the country who have decided to pursue large families.
Pakaluk spoke with the Gazette about what she learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What drew you to this topic, and why do you think it’s an important one to talk about in the current moment?
As an economist I’ve been interested in questions related to population growth as it relates to labor market and human development for a long time. But in the last 10 years, especially since the Great Recession, it’s become increasingly a puzzle: Why have birth rates been declining so rapidly and why aren’t they responding to some of the [policy] things that we would assume they would respond to? I thought this was really interesting.
I’m also interested in women’s choices and labor market choices. I was noticing that around the world, countries are about to get kind of bossy about women having children. They’re applying bigger and bigger incentives to try to get people to have kids. It’s becoming a mounting policy concern, with nations wanting people to have kids. That always sounded a little alarming to me, so I wanted to see what we could learn. Falling birth rates represent one of the main concerns for the contemporary political economy, mainly because the social welfare programs [like Social Security] are creaking and straining under these decreasing birth rates.
In your book, you talk to women who are defying the birth rates by having five or more children. You found that they faced misperceptions by those around them about why they had so many children. What were they?
The main misperception would be that the kind of women who decide to have a lot of children — whether they have careers or not — must be part of religious cults or are people who lack full human agency. That’s concerning that the assumption is that other people are making decisions for these women, be it their religious leaders or husbands. That’s not the case.
The other main misperception that I heard commonly is that women who have a lot of children probably reject modern forms of birth control, either because they don’t know how to access it or don’t believe in it. I knew that wasn’t true in my life, but I thought it was worth exploring.
Nobody I talked to said that not using birth control was the reason for their family size. Some women did prefer to use fertility awareness methods for spacing their children, but I found that whether they did or didn’t use birth control they truly and intentionally chose to have their children.
Did you find any connection between religion and family size?
What I found (and this will sound very economist-y of me) is that the choice process followed a cost-benefit, rational choice model. In that framework, when people make a decision they weigh the expected joys or benefits with the expected costs.
In the case of women making purposeful decisions to have large families, they definitely described the costs in their choice. What I heard was an acute description of the costs, which didn’t seem to be expense-driven, but were more about waking up every two hours for a long time, the effects on their bodies, the trade-offs made in regard to their personal identities.
But when it comes to faith and religion, what I heard was a uniting around the idea that children are a great blessing. That provided a huge benefit to the women in my study that outweighed the significant personal costs. Faith played a role of tipping the scales toward having more children.
I will say, I didn’t talk to people who had smaller family sizes. That wasn’t the purpose of this project. But this group was a group of people who really felt that they began their families intentionally, experienced great joy, felt the blessings were tangible in their lives, so they decided to keep going.
Studies have shown many women want more children than they eventually have — you call this the fertility gap. What’s causing this?
If I could easily answer what’s causing the gap, I’d probably be a candidate for the next Nobel Prize. But in all seriousness, I think of recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s work, which helps us see what’s going on. I would point back to her work on the “Power of the Pill” and what the pill does in shaping the lives of American women. It opens the choice set, right? And, of course, I think her more recent work on women’s labor is so insightful and helps us see that when you change the choice set for people, who are rational agents making decisions, you create a new comparison class for the goods that you can choose.
What hormonal contraception did in the 20th century is it provided women with more choices. If you wanted to pursue a career, you didn’t have to give up marriage. In the past, if you wanted to go to college or have a profession, you had to give up marriage and partnership. What ends up happening when you broaden the choice set is that a lot of people want both. And so they end up choosing a little bit less of each. So if, objectively speaking, you might have chosen three kids, you might be okay with the trade-off of fewer children to also have a profession.
What we’re seeing is the outcome of a constrained optimization. People are choosing the bundle career and family, and in this constrained world there’s only so much time. One of the women in my study said, “Look, there’s some things that are best done young.” She says, of her medical training, “I would never want to go through that later in life.” But it’s also the easiest time to build the family size that you might want to have. So you have these two things that are in tension. I don’t think that’s an enormous mystery.
Most of the families that you talk to in the book describe themselves as happy and healthy. Did you speak to any who are struggling — economically, emotionally, physically — with dealing with a larger family?
My sample is not representative, and people volunteered to talk to me. So I’m sure, in that sense, there’s a bit of a bias in favor of people who are pretty happy with how things were going. But within that sample, I intentionally looked for families who are at all ends of the wealth distribution. I talked to families who were either on food stamps or eligible for food stamps or other forms of income supplements.
I also spoke to people who were going through postpartum depression, women who were struggling to manage ongoing mental illness, depression, or anxiety. But I would say that everybody that I talked to, mostly due to the study design, felt that whatever troubles they experienced were worth it. I certainly don’t believe having a large family is any guarantee that everything will work out well. However, the purpose of the book was to examine motive: What could lead people to have more children than normal?
The women you spoke to were fully on board with their decisions to devote so much of their lives to their families, even while acknowledging that it took incredible sacrifice. Is there anything policymakers can glean from their experiences that can help make things better for parents and families overall?
I don’t think women have children thoughtlessly. I think a lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into the decision. And I would say that the same thing must be true for people who choose not to have children.
The sometimes flippant nature of political discourse on women’s family and fertility decisions doesn’t take the issue as seriously as it should. The idea that we could influence a couple with $1,000 more of a tax break or a baby bonus is almost offensive. Or even to say you can influence people with a lot of money, like $200,000 to $400,000 per baby, that it would move the needle. I think this is a really sacred and private decision.
So if we know that, what could make things easier? One thing that came out of this work was the story of faith, but I think that story has just as much to do with community and social support. Where can we put our dollars (in a fiscally responsible way) that helps people in this way?
What I took away from my study was that whatever we can do from a policy perspective to protect and enlarge spaces — religious or not — for people to grow and develop, those are the kinds of things people should think about.
I also think about role modeling. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice” is so interesting. They look at these deep-seated fears that people have about making the choice to have children. But if you can see others who have gotten over the hurdles, you might be more open to it. I think policymakers could think harder about how we treat faith institutions and think about them as a favored means to provide support to families.
What do you hope readers take away from the experiences of the women in your book?
I wanted to leave people with a message of hope. These are serious topics. But if there’s some people out there defying the odds and not undershooting their own fertility desires, here’s a model of people who are pulling this off.
A lot of times you read the news and see how nobody’s having the families they want to or it’s getting harder and harder. It’s helpful to realize that trends in society are measured in averages. But in fact, many people live lives that are very different from the average.
If we’re interested in building a family, I think there are some concrete lessons from people who have done it. It shows that what’s happening with family size isn’t deterministic. I hope people feel hopeful and optimistic about it, and not like these falling birth rates have to be the whole story of the future.
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 5, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Dale W. Jorgenson was an economist of prodigious energy and creativity, remarkable discipline, and extraordinary productivity and impact. He pioneered combining rigorous theoretical modeling with careful empirical work to develop economic models that both enhance our understanding of the economy and provide directly applicable quantitative guidance to economic policy. He led the way in developing rich, theory-informed data sets that can be used to answer important empirical questions in economics, inspiring a movement to improve national economic measurement. He was also a bulwark of the Harvard Department of Economics and helped to transform it — and the field itself — into one in which empirical research is careful, relevant, and grounded in economic theory.
Jorgenson, an only child, was born in Bozeman, Montana, on May 7, 1933. A former Ph.D. student John Fernald recalls Jorgenson saying that “Montana was a pleasant place, especially if you like winters,” to which he added, “I don’t.” Jorgenson was nominated for a scholarship to the Naval Academy but was refused admission because of his poor eyesight; instead, he attended Reed College, where he became fascinated by economics. At the advice of his undergraduate thesis advisor, Jorgenson entered the Ph.D. program at Harvard, where, after three and a half years, he received his Ph.D. in 1959 under the supervision of Wassily Leontief.
Jorgenson’s first academic appointment was at the University of California, Berkeley, where, after four years, he was promoted to full professor at age 30. In 1969, Jorgenson was recruited back to Harvard as a key part of Henry Rosovsky’s plan to modernize the Department, which included recruiting Zvi Griliches and Kenneth Arrow and promoting Martin Feldstein. In 1971, Jorgenson received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded (then biennially) to the most intellectually significant American economist under age 40, for marrying economic theory and econometric analysis. One of us had the honor of promoting Jorgenson to University Professor in 2002 to recognize his lifelong research program that changed the discipline.
A scholar of prodigious energy and generosity, Jorgenson held multiple important service positions in the economics profession, including President of the Econometric Society in 1987, President of the American Economic Association in 2000, and Chair of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis from 2004 to 2011.
Of Jorgenson’s many intellectual contributions, he will be remembered particularly for three. First, in a 1963 article, he developed the modern framework for analyzing firms’ investment decisions. This paper transformed the then-murky topic into one guided by a precise, implementable formula for a key determinant of investment, the user cost of capital.
Second, Jorgenson is a founder of modern growth accounting. He provided a framework — the so-called KLEMS system of capital, labor, energy, materials, and services — for measuring the determinants of economic growth. Jorgenson’s vision, combined with his passion for getting the details right, created a global society dedicated to measuring, comparing, and using these determinants of growth.
Third, Jorgenson was a pioneer in econometric modeling, especially of producer and consumer behavior. Starting with the oil crisis of the 1970s, he developed economy-wide models that linked energy prices and production to overall economic growth. He and coauthors used a descendant of this model in a pioneering 2013 book, which analyzed how the revenue from a carbon tax might best be used to foster economic growth, and the lessons from that research remain relevant today.
Altogether, Jorgenson authored 300 articles in economics and authored or edited 37 books, undertaken with more than 70 collaborators. His final edited volume appeared in 2016, when he was 83.
Connecting all this work was an abiding commitment to developing rich data sets, grounded in economic principles, that could be used to estimate econometric models. In so doing, Jorgenson moved economic measurement from the dull work of government statisticians to be a central part of modern economic research.
Jorgenson and his inseparable wife, Linda, were dedicated to the welfare and betterment of the Department of Economics. He chaired the Department from 1994 to 1997. Linda, in turn, was its social glue, as outgoing and ebullient as was Jorgenson reserved. Linda and Dale hosted countless events at their apartment for students and colleagues. Linda reached across the lingering barriers of seniority and status to ensure that all members of the Department knew they were valued personally as well as professionally. Jorgenson’s mentorship, combining high standards with personal support, and Linda’s warm embrace were deeply helpful to many junior colleagues.
Jorgenson’s work at Harvard extended beyond the Department. He directed the Program on Technology and Economic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School from 1984 to 2007. He helped lead the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from its founding in 1993, advising a stream of economics students from China and working with economist colleague Mun Ho until spring 2022. Jorgenson was also a Faculty Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Harvard Environmental Economics Program, in which he was also active until shortly before his death.
One of Jorgenson’s greatest legacies is his legion of students, both undergraduate and graduate. Jorgenson had a formal and dispassionate public demeanor: graduate students regularly presented him as Mr. Spock of Star Trek at the Department’s annual holiday skit party. In reality, however, Jorgenson was warm and supportive of his students and junior colleagues, with a wry sense of humor. His former students include Robert Hall and Ben Bernanke, two of the leading economists in the profession, and two consecutive Harvard senior classes voted him to be one of their favorite professors.
Economics is a different and better discipline, and Harvard is a better place, because of Jorgenson Jorgenson. Economic measurement is now recognized as an important part of the work of the profession and as something that can be, and indeed must be, infused with theory. From the cost of capital, to the KLEMS approach to production, to his many other contributions, the Jorgenson approach to economics lives on.
Respectfully submitted,
Michael McElroy Lawrence H. Summers James Stock, Chair
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 4, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Otto Thomas Solbrig was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Otto Thomas Solbrig was born in Buenos Aires in 1930 and died in Massachusetts in 2023. He was trilingual as a child, speaking English with his mother, German with his father, and Spanish with his siblings. From 1950 to 1954, he studied for an undergraduate degree in agronomy at the National University of La Plata, where he was active in student politics. By order of the government of Juan Péron, Solbrig was expelled from the university and was imprisoned for three months without trial in 1955. After his release, but before the fall of Péron, and without completing the formal requirements for his undergraduate degree, Solbrig emigrated to the United States to study botany at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral thesis in plant systematics was advised by Lincoln Constance, Herbert G. Baker, and George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. Solbrig then served as a curator in Harvard’s Gray Herbarium for seven years (1959–1966) before accepting a faculty position at the University of Michigan. Three years later, he returned to Harvard as a tenured professor of biology, where he remained until his retirement in 2002.
Solbrig’s research focused on the lives of plants in ecological communities. He is best known for his work on dandelions, in which he used isozyme patterns to show that multiple genotypes existed within local populations. In seemingly simple habitats like lawns, he found that there was not one “general purpose genotype” superior to all others but rather multiple genotypes that were better suited to different microenvironments. One factor that helped maintain the genetic diversity of dandelions was the pattern of human perturbation. Some genotypes were better adapted than others to frequent disturbance. Solbrig thus placed earlier theoretical work on “life-history strategies” on a firm genetic basis.
Throughout his career, Solbrig was prominent in the organization of international collaborative research, both on biodiversity and on tropical agriculture. During the 1970s, he was an administrator of the International Biological Program’s Convergence and Divergence of Ecosystems project, which compared the desert floras of Arizona and Sonora with those of northern Argentina and influenced a similar comparison of the Mediterranean floras of Chile and California. During the 1980s, Solbrig served as president of the International Union of Biological Sciences and directed its Decade of the Tropics program. He also served on the International Coordination Council and on the General Scientific Advisory Group for UNESCO’s Program on Man and the Biosphere. In the 1990s, he was the chair of the first Internationally Commissioned External Panel of the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, with headquarters in Colombia.
Solbrig’s international activities took him to many countries, including the Soviet Union and China, but he always maintained a special love for Latin America. He taught courses on tropical ecology in Costa Rica and Venezuela for North American students, and he taught many courses for Argentinian students in his beloved Argentina. After returning to Harvard in 1969, Solbrig was active in the community of Harvard faculty interested in Latin America. He taught regular courses on the geography and environment of Latin America and was a member of the first Executive Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He organized the Rockefeller Center’s first international conference, Towards a Sustainable and Productive Agriculture in the Pampas.
In 1998, Solbrig received the International Prize for Biology, bestowed by the Emperor of Japan, for his work on the biology of biodiversity, with his work on dandelions singled out for special mention. Among other honors, Solbrig was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, Mar del Plata, and Lomas de Zamora.
Solbrig is survived by his children from his first marriage, Hans and Heide, and by Dorothy, his wife of more than 50 years.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Ashton Noel Michele Holbrook Naomi E. Pierce David Haig, Chair
When your goal is literally sky-high — and you reach it
Faith Schmidt ’25 inside St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Nick Economides
4 min read
Third-generation military, Faith Schmidt ’25 is set to soar
When field hockey midfielder Faith Schmidt ’25 graduates in the spring, she will carry on a storied family legacy, one that takes place 45,000 feet in the air.
The Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadet recently received her pilot slot from the Air Force. Soon after Commencement, she will find out her base assignment, or where she will spend roughly the next two years in flight school and training.
“I applied for the pilot slot my junior year, one of the most competitive slots to get,” the St. Louis, Missouri, native said. “I knew I had a competitive package and there were some good signs coming in. When it was signed, sealed, and delivered, I was so happy, celebrating with my fellow cadets.
“I FaceTimed with my dad, and he just hopped out of a fighter jet at Boeing. He flipped the camera around to the fighter jet and told me, ‘You’ll be in there one day!’”
Schmidt standing next to an aircraft known as a French fighter trainer.
The engineering sciences concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences comes from a family of veterans. Her father spent more than 20 years as a fighter pilot for the Navy, and now works as a test pilot for Boeing. Both her grandfathers and her godfather also served in the military.
“When my dad was growing up, my grandpa would tell him about the aircraft carriers he worked on during the Korean War,” Schmidt said. “My dad was fascinated by that experience, and he joined Navy ROTC halfway through his college experience. There is a long line of military history in my family, but just looking at their passion for service, the dedication for the people around them, all that really pushed me to go the military aviation route.”
Her earliest impressions of life in the clouds began in early elementary school when she watched her dad and her uncles, also pilots, fly together. When her father would ask his children who wanted to go up in the air, her hand immediately shot up. “I knew I wanted to go, and those little moments throughout my life pushed me to fly,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt with childhood friend Kate Oliver, a junior on the team. “We are both from St. Louis, and grew up playing club field hockey together since we were in middle school,” said Schmidt.
“Faith has been climbing high and jumping off those heights since she was a toddler, ranging from gymnastics, competitive diving, and pole vaulting,” said her mother, Cathy Schmidt.
During her senior year of high school, Schmidt applied for ROTC scholarships as she found another reason to be drawn to the Air Force: the design of fighter jets. At Harvard, she balanced her engineering course load with commitments as a cadet, field hockey player, and member of the Catholic Center.
“Harvard is one of the only places I could have gone where everything works all together,” she said, expressing gratitude for her coaches and teammates.
“They have been such a backbone for me, I don’t think I could’ve done ROTC and engineering without them,” Schmidt said. “Just having two hours of practice every day, with some of the most amazing women I know, is such a great reset. I’ve been grateful for all the smiles in the locker room and having the opportunity to chase that common goal. Whenever they see me on campus in uniform, they hype me up.”
“We know some of the sacrifices that lie ahead for her,” Schmidt’s mother said. “We respect her decision to face those challenges with courage and commitment. We could not be more proud that she has chosen to serve in this honorable profession.”
Ed Somuk ’27 (from left), Alexandria Durrant ’28, and Shane Rice ’25.
Courtesy photos
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Number of armed services veterans at Harvard on the rise as University ramps up outreach, support
Shane Rice ’25 was visiting his parents in Virginia and preparing for his first combat deployment. Alexandria Durrant ’28 was recovering after a 12-hour medical shift at a military base in Hawaii. And Ed Somuk ’27, a retired Marine, was busy potty-training the youngest of his three children.
“I looked at my phone, and all I could register was: ‘Congratulations. Harvard. Welcome Class of 2027,’” recalled Somuk, 49, a history concentrator who recently retired as a master sergeant after 26 years of service. “I had about six seconds to immerse myself in it. And then I had to get into that bathroom because I had a kid in there.”
The number of U.S. military veterans at the College has climbed in the last half-dozen years, thanks to stepped-up outreach and word of mouth. In 2018, a total of eight veterans were enrolled at the College. This fall, 21 started as first-year or transfer students, with a total of 78 current students having completed service in the armed forces.
Ed Somuk.
Photo by Grace DuVal
“Our veterans bring a diversity of perspective to Harvard College and make deeply valued contributions here,” said Joy St. John, director of admissions. “Additionally, public service is core to our mission, and time in the armed forces constitutes one of the most meaningful acts of service. Our commitment to recruiting and admitting more veterans is motivated by this.”
There is a thread of military service running through Harvard’s long history. That legacy is written all over Memorial Hall, its walls etched with the names of 136 Harvard associates lost during the Civil War. Likewise, the walls of Memorial Church bear hundreds of names representing faculty and alumni killed during World War I and World War II.
The presence of U.S. service members on campus began fading around the Vietnam era, but the trend started to reverse early in the 21st century. In 2005, Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, started bringing veterans to campus for summer opportunities via the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.
“We found these veterans brought an uncommon skill set in terms of maturity and work ethic,” remembered Parker, who is also a colonel with more than 30 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve. “You’ve got to stay past midnight to get an experiment working? It’s no problem if you’ve been in the military. Night ops is what we do!”
Parker went on to join efforts by 2022 Harvard Medal winner Tom Reardon ’68 to improve support for veterans campuswide while easing obstacles for those applying. “Maybe they were late bloomers academically, but something about their military records revealed a potential, a talent, a desire, and certainly a focus,” Parker said.
Additional efforts were made to support soldiers returning from the American-led global war on terror launched after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2006, Reardon, who served in the Army during Vietnam, established the Harvard Veterans Alumni Association, which seeks to strengthen connections between veterans on campus and in the alumni community. President Drew Faust announced in 2009 that the University would participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program, helping veterans to pay tuition costs exceeding what is covered under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
Alexandria Durrant stands among the names of Harvard veterans in the Memorial Church.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“At one point in the 2000s — between Harvard College students, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and staff members I had hired — there was more combat experience in my laboratory than most infantry platoons in the Army,” Parker said.
The 2010s saw the University deepening its commitment. In 2014, Harvard started partnering with the Warrior-Scholar Project, a nonprofit offering free academic boot camps at top U.S. universities.
Attending a week-long session at Columbia University last summer gave Durrant, 24, the confidence to apply to Harvard. “It taught me to challenge myself and to understand that being an active-duty veteran is not a weakness; it’s actually a strength,” said the first-year who grew up in North Carolina and fell in love with healthcare while serving as a Navy hospital corpsman. “Right now I’m leaning toward a concentration in government with a secondary in global health and health policy. However, I still want to be ambitious and get the prerequisites for medical school.”
In 2017, Harvard College joined Service to School’s VetLink program, which provides free counseling for veterans applying to college. Somuk had mentally bookmarked its resources after seeing ads on social media. In 2021, he was freshly retired and living with his family near Fairbanks, Alaska, when his wife, an attorney with the Air Force JAG Corps, received orders to head to Hanscom Air Force Base about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Somuk, who grew up in Connecticut, gave Service to School a call.
“Have you ever thought about Harvard?” asked the first counselor he reached.
“I think of Harvard all the time,” Somuk remembered joking. “I think it’s a great institution that will never, ever let me inside their gates.” Today, the Dudley Co-op affiliate commutes to campus from Hanscom, often making the 40-minute trip multiple times per day while juggling courses and study halls with family obligations.
Veterans of militaries worldwide eventually organized a Harvard College student group, which was officially recognized in 2018. Rice, 25, was still stationed in Okinawa, Japan, when he stumbled upon the undergraduate-run organization five years ago. The anthropology concentrator and Cabot House resident remembered sitting in his barracks one day when he grabbed his phone and typed: “good schools USA.”
Shane Rice.
Photo by Jon Ratner
Harvard popped up. Rice, who was at the time a mortarman on his second deployment, did a bit more searching on the application process. “But never did I take it that seriously until I found Harvard Undergraduate Veteran Organization,” recalled Rice, who is studying abroad this semester at Trinity College in Dublin.
A former HUVO president even took the time to offer a bit of counsel over Zoom. “He was also a Marine, so we clicked over that,” Rice said. “That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a pipe dream. People have done it!”
Another support arrived in 2020 with the appointment of the College’s first program manager for military student services. Craig Rodgers, Ed.M. ’96, a former reservist who matriculated in the Army ROTC program at MIT, works to counsel and connect veterans and ROTC cadets on campus.
“He does a really good job of letting us know what’s going on in the veterans’ community,” said Durrant, who underscored the comfort she finds in gathering with this group. “Sometimes it’s nice to just be able to talk in military jargon with people who understand.”
The College isn’t the only Harvard School with strong U.S. military representation. At the Kennedy School this fall, 76 students are on active duty or veterans. The Law School has 70, and the Extension School counts 423 veterans or active-duty U.S. military members taking courses this semester.
Parker emphasized that more can be done to support this growing population. Adding accessible family housing options near campus would make admission possible for a greater number of veterans with physical disabilities. Bolstering mental health supports would serve those dealing with post-combat stress. He called for a greater awareness of how the Americans With Disabilities Act uniquely impacts war veterans.
But most will find the campus welcoming, with military training increasingly understood as an academic asset, he said. “It’s a great time to be a veteran at Harvard.”
Humanity is doing better than ever yet it often doesn’t seem that way. In podcast, experts make the case for fact-based hope.
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
It may feel like the world is slowly devolving into one big dumpster fire. But that’s hardly the case.
“For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse,” said Steven Pinker, Ph.D. ’79, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. “Things really have gotten better [and] not by themselves; it’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment.”
In many measurable ways, global progress has far exceeded failure. Jane Nelson, the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, points out that of the United Nation’s 24 indicators of their Sustainable Development Goals, 18 have improved since 2015. During her career she’s seen enormous changes for the better, and that gives her hope when she looks to the future.
“We know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives?” she said. “It’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.”
Tal Ben-Shahar ’96, Ph.D. ’04, who directs the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University and formerly taught at Harvard, said embracing “evidence-based optimism” grounds us in reality. Alternatively, when we experience “detached optimism,” it can lead to toxic positivity. This “just be happy” attitude pervades our culture and can ironically lead to hopelessness and despair.
“Two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism,” he said. “[We can] believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time … see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.”
In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas speaks with Ben-Shahar, Nelson, and Pinker about choosing optimism.
Transcript
Steven Pinker: When you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse.
Laine Perfas: Things aren’t what they used to be: They’re actually better. Yet even though many measures show how much progress we’ve made, many people feel like things are worse than ever. It’s led to a cycle of pessimism that leads to further despair and anxiety.
How do we break this cycle and intentionally choose optimism?
Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by:
Jane Nelson: Jane Nelson, and over the past 20 years I’ve served as the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School.
Laine Perfas: She’s spent her career figuring out how companies, communities, nonprofits, and governments can work together to create a more equitable and sustainable world. Then:
Tal Ben-Shahar: Tal Ben-Shahar. I spent 15 years at Harvard as an undergraduate and graduate student and then taught two classes on positive psychology and the psychology of leadership.
Laine Perfas: He’s currently the director of the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University. And finally:
Pinker: Steve Pinker. I am a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard.
Laine Perfas: Pinker’s books include the bestsellers, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” His work shows that progress isn’t just a mindset, but a statistical reality.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the value of optimism and how to embrace it when it feels like things are falling apart.
I thought it would be good to talk about how each of you think about optimism. Is it simply trying to be positive all the time or is it something more?
Steven Pinker: I’ve often been called an optimist because of the hundred or so graphs in the two books showing that when you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse. And I prefer to talk about progress because optimism, for some people, can be depressing. If the best you can tell me is, “Put a smile on your face and have a happier attitude and see the glass is half full” … I think those can’t be helpful. But the point is that objectively speaking, as best we can determine, things really have gotten better. Not by themselves. It’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment. But it is easy looking on the undeniable problems today to assume that things were better in the past, whereas I think objectively the conclusion we have to come to is it’s the other way around.
Jane Nelson: From my perspective, I see two causes for sort of evidence-based optimism despite challenging times we face. And I think first, as Steve says, there’s very compelling evidence that things have got better and that we’ve made enormous progress, certainly in my career in the last 30 to 40 years in improving quality of people’s lives, livelihoods, their rights, their opportunities. If we look at the Sustainable Development Goals, colleagues of mine at Brookings recently did some research showing that of 24 indicators, 18 of them have improved even since 2015, which has been a more challenging period. So I think that the fact that we know it’s possible, we know what is possible and what can be achieved is cause for optimism. And then to me, I think the second cause for optimism is that we know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives? We know many of the technologies, whether it’s food systems or health systems or energy systems that can make a difference; it’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.
Tal Ben-Shahar: Now, what both Jane and Steve are talking about is “evidence-based optimism” or “grounded optimism,” and it is important. Why? Because what we see around us is a great deal of “detached optimism,” which leads to what has become known as toxic positivity. So once we detach optimism from reality, we have a problem. Because we know that if we’re just told to, “Oh, smile, everything will be just great; if you think positive, things will be positive.” And many of those self-help mantras, we know that they’re actually harmful, that they hurt us more than they help us. And therefore, we need essentially the synthesis that leads to realism. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And these two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism: to believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time to also keep our eyes wide open and identify and see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.
Laine Perfas: I think that gets at something that I’ve struggled with. I often joke with my friends that I’m not really an optimist, I’m a depressive realist and that it is hard to embrace the “be happy all the time” attitude that I think is very pervasive in our culture, but the reality is that things are objectively, statistically speaking better now than they have been maybe ever, and yet it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like we’re living in a dumpster fire all the time. What do we do with that disconnect?
Pinker: We have to be aware of why it often feels like we’re in a dumpster fire, where it feels like things are getting worse. And there are both psychological biases, such as the fact that we are more attuned to negative events than positive ones, particularly recent negative events. We often remember things that went wrong in the past, but we don’t remember how bad they were at the time. As in the quotation from Franklin Pierce Adams, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. It has a lot of psychological truth to it. But, and while also realizing that a rich diet of media stories is, in some ways, not the best way to have an accurate appreciation of the world, because there are some built-in distorters. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen, and it’s about things that happen suddenly and that are unexpected, and so there will be a natural pessimistic bias built into the news, even if none of the editors or journalists themselves are pessimistic. Simply because if you’re reporting something that happened yesterday, it’s more likely to be bad than good. Because bad things can happen quickly. A building can collapse, a war can be declared, a terrorist can attack, a school shooter can attack. But good things often consist either of things that don’t happen, like there are no wars going on in the Western Hemisphere or in Southeast Asia: historically unusual. Or things that build up a few percentage points a year and compound, such as the decline in extreme poverty that Jane alluded to. Max Roser, an economist who set up the invaluable website Our World in Data, once said that the papers could have had the headline, “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day, for the last 30 years.” But they never ran the headline, and so a billion people escaped from extreme poverty and no one knows about it.
Nelson: I very much agree with that. There’s that drumbeat of negative news and a sort of an element of unease that comes with that. There’s also the challenge, in many cases, of unrealistic expectations because of social media, celebrity lifestyles, that sort of sense that other people’s lives might be better or progress is being made and one’s own isn’t. And if you combine that with concern about change and the speed of change that is happening, I think, in a lot of communities around the world, it sort of layers on to each other in terms of a sense of unease. And then if one has leaders and in any sphere who are exerting a sort of negative narrative that compounds it further.
Pinker: Yes, and I’m an avid consumer of the positive news sites, but although there is a danger there, if positive news is perceived as human-interest fluff: a puppy defends orangutan, a cop buys groceries for a single mother, then people read it and say, “Oh, geez, is that the best you can do? Is that the best that’s happening on Earth? Now I’m really depressed.” But there are some sites that actually concentrate on truly consequential positive developments.
Ben-Shahar: And I think the first thing is that we need to be aware of the fact that the media does not provide us with a looking glass. Rather, it provides us with a magnifying glass and what it magnifies is the negative. And that’s a problem because when we assume a negative mindset, that actually can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, today we see it, you know, what we focus on are the negative elements of politics and the politicians. As a result of that, good people don’t want to enter politics.
So the question is, what do we do it about it? On the individual level, it’s what has become probably the best known, by now cliched, intervention in positive psychology, which is writing a gratitude journal. Appreciating. I love the word appreciate because it has two meanings. The first meaning, of course, is to say thank you for something. The second is to grow in value. And the two meanings of the word appreciate are intimately related because what happens is that when I appreciate, the good appreciates. Unfortunately, the opposite is also the case. When I do not appreciate the good, when I take it for granted, it depreciates. So before I go to bed, I write three things at least for which I’m grateful and I do it regularly. That can be a sort of an antidote against the negative bias, or if we do it as a family or if schools introduce it or even in organizations, if employees write, “What progress have we made today?” That can go a long way in rectifying the bias.
Laine Perfas: There was something you said, Tal, that stuck out to me when you were talking about politics and this idea that pessimism, there can actually be negative consequences. For example, politicians fighting all the time. If you are then a citizen who cares about the world, you’re a little less likely to be involved because, what’s the point? Politics are a mess anyway. Are there other negative consequences or dangers to pessimism?
Pinker: There are two big ones. One of them is fatalism. Why bother trying to make the world a better place if, despite decades of effort, things are worse than ever? And the other could be radicalism. If we’re living in a, as one commentator put it, a late capitalist hellscape, or as from the other end of the spectrum, we’re living in a disaster like very few people have ever seen before, then let’s smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn everything to the ground in the hopes that anything that rises out of the ashes will be better than what we have now. But, if you have enough, I don’t want to call it pessimism, but I’ll call it realism, that things by themselves don’t get better, that the universe has no benevolent interest in our well-being, things fall apart, disorder increases, there are more ways for things to go wrong than to go right, we’re living in a hostile ecosystem where itty bitty little parasites and pathogens are constantly evolving to attack us from the inside and they have the advantage that they can evolve faster than we can … if you start off with what I think of as realistic expectations, namely, we’re in a hostile universe, we’re flawed humans. If we achieve any progress at all, that is something to be grateful for and that we should calibrate our expectations. That, especially if, as we have been emphasizing, there actually has been progress then, let’s not dismantle the system. Let’s constantly improve it, because nothing is optimal, and even if it were, the world changes, so we constantly need to reform things. But let’s build on the successes that we’ve had, and not be so fatalistic and cynical that we give up, or hope that things just naturally get better, which they do not.
Nelson: Both toxic optimism and to a large degree pessimism prevents us from asking the difficult questions that we need to ask of ourselves and our colleagues and families. I think it prevents us from making the changes that often need to be made. And it also often prevents us from taking the precautions that need to be made in terms of navigating challenging environments. So I feel where evidence-based optimism can play a critical role is in being solutions-oriented and having the confidence to try things even if we’re not sure that they’re going to work out and to be looking the whole time whether it’s at a micro community level or a new policy level or even a global governance level, what are new solutions we can try and building a sense of shared purpose and common goals around those potential solutions?
Ben-Shahar: A concept that for me has been very helpful in understanding optimism has been hope. Rick Snyder, who is one of the founders of the field of positive psychology, identifies two separate elements that make up hope. The first element is willpower. So hope is about saying, yes I can, it’s possible, I’m going to do it, or things are going to turn out well, which is more or less what we associate with an optimistic mindset. But there is a second element to hope, according to Rick Snyder, and that is way power. Way power is how I’m going to do it. I was watching an interview with Serena Williams. This was years ago and it was one of her great comebacks. And the interviewer asked her, “How’d you do it? So often you come from the brink of defeat, and you win.” And she said, “Every time I go on court, I have a Plan A and I try it, and if that doesn’t work, I always have a Plan B. And if that doesn’t work, I have a C, a D, and an E.” That’s way power. So it’s not just, yes, I can win this game. There are also alternative pathways that will help me succeed.
Nelson: And I think that the power then of what one could call collective willpower and collective way power is remarkable. I was in Tanzania over the summer visiting some of the hospitals there and 10 years ago the central hospital in Tanzania didn’t have an emergency department. And a small group of four or five doctors and a couple of nurses got together, got some support from a U.S. based company, the Ministry of Health, some American medical schools, and they built an emergency care residency program. They built the department. They’ve now built an emergency care professional association to cover the entire country, and they’re building out hospitals now all over the country. And it was a group of four or five people who started it. And over the period of less than 10 years, it’s now a nationwide program. And I think we see examples of that again and again. And I think to Tal’s point, some things didn’t go right and they reoriented and tried different pathways, but that sense of purpose and willpower, and then collectively developing those sort of shared pathways and vision, I think, can be very powerful.
Laine Perfas: Jane, a lot of the work that you’ve done over the last few decades has been basically based on the idea of cooperation. I’m thinking about another aspect of humanity, which is competition, and I’m wondering if there are times where it can lead to this sense of one-upmanship and everyone just looking out for themselves. Do you see a tension between those things, between cooperation and competition?
Nelson: I mean, certainly in my case, there are tensions. But I think even in the most competitive industry sectors, I’ve seen industry competitors coming together around issues like safety, human rights, living wage, decent work. And then, equally, you’ll see other companies and other industries where competition is the absolute driving force, and then they’re not willing to cooperate even on a sort of precompetitive basis to make the broader human rights environment, operating environment, and environmental issues better for everyone. So I think a lot of it comes down to the leadership. I think if you’ve got a set of leaders who recognize that there’s always going to be competition, but that there are certain fundamental values and goals for human well-being and safety and welfare that are more important than the competition.
Pinker: An understanding of where competition is inherently zero-sum and it’s actually positive sum and there’s overlaps of interest. So in professional sports, for example, it’s set up to be zero-sum in terms of winning a championship. If one team wins the World Series, that means another team doesn’t. On the other hand, there are also common interests in keeping the sport entertaining for everyone, and so all of the team owners can get together and decide baseball games are taking too long and they’re too boring, and we’re all losing as people are sick of watching players adjust their gloves before a pitch is thrown, so how can we change the game in a way that benefits all of us, even as we compete against each other?
Jane mentioned the sustainable development goals, which is easy to neglect, but it’s an astonishing achievement that I think it’s, was it 191 of 193 U.N. members voted for it? In an era in which there seems to be rampant nationalism and polarization and mistrust, everyone agrees it’s better if fewer babies die. It’s better if fewer mothers die. It’s better if more people have access to electricity. And against the cynicism that the world is falling apart, it is astonishing that the Sustainable Development Goals really were things that all of humanity agreed on. And that’s essential to not mistakenly see every competition as zero-sum.
Ben-Shahar: What’s very important here also is how we frame our goals. There’s fascinating research by the late psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues on framing. So they basically divided a large group into two subgroups. One group, they told them, “You’re going to be playing a game now. It’s called The Wall Street Game.” And they interacted. And then they took the second subgroup and they said to them, “You’re going to play a game now. It’s called The Community Game.” Now, even though they played the exact same game, there was much more competition among the participants in the first group, The Wall Street Game versus the second group that were much more likely to cooperate, to help each other, to work together. So merely framing our goals, our objectives, our projects in a different way can sometimes make all the difference between cut-throat competition and benevolent cooperation.
Laine Perfas: Even though things globally are a lot better now than they’ve been, there’s still a lot of suffering in the world. It made me wonder if optimism is a privilege, if it’s a privilege to be able to feel optimistic even to the point where maybe you take progress for granted?
Pinker: I think it’s the other way around. In fact, if you look at measures of optimism across countries, it’s the rich countries that are pessimistic. That’s the luxury. In fact, I think the most pessimistic country in the world is France. That’s a pretty nice place to live. And the most optimistic, for a while it was, I think it was China. And I think Kenya was pretty optimistic. Partly it’s the slope. It’s the trajectory. The improvement that people see in their lives. But, and this goes back to Tal’s point on the salubrious effects of gratitude and appreciation. I hate to say, this is a national stereotype and a cliche to say that the French are spoiled. But by human standards, they have it pretty good. But in many ways it’s pessimism that’s the luxury, at least if it comes in the form of blowing off the good fortune that your ancestors worked very hard to attain. Because again, good things don’t happen by themselves. It’s easy to pocket the gains and forget that they’re not the natural state of affairs, but they themselves are the hard-won achievements of our predecessors.
Nelson: And I think Tal’s framing of toxic optimism, I think if you have toxic optimism amongst elites, there is a danger of lack of empathy and compassion. And, the infamous, the poor can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and total lack of understanding that they don’t have bootstraps and probably not boots. And that so many communities do need support and help.
Ben-Shahar: The key to my mind here, the emphasis needs to be on effort. So when you have a country emerging from poverty, there’s a great deal of effort that millions and sometimes billions of people have to invest. And why is effort so important? Steve, we were talking earlier about, how you can have a national character that is spoiled. Why? Because in some ways, not in all ways, but in some ways, things have been too easy. Now, if we go to the gym and all the weights are on zero, and we lift those, we’re not going to get stronger. In fact, our muscles over time are going to atrophy. In other words, we need resistance in order to grow stronger. We need hardships and difficulties in our lives to a point.
Laine Perfas: How do we break out of this pessimistic cycle that we have found ourselves in?
Pinker: I would like to see the news media have a bit more of a historical perspective. And by that I don’t mean going back to the writings of de Tocqueville in the 19th century or ostentatiously erudite allusions to the Romans but just in presenting an event, you put it in statistical context, put it in the context of the last five years, 25 years, 50 years. I would like to see the news section of the paper take some lessons out of the business section and the sports sections, where they present everything in statistical context. The sports page is not optimistic in the sense of only reporting when your team wins or pessimistic in only reporting when it loses. Either way, it gets reported and you read the standings every day. Likewise, the stock prices and commodity prices and so on. I think there should be realism in terms of opinion journalism and the opinion industry in general of what we can reasonably expect. That is, can a politician really solve the problems of unemployment and inflation and energy and national well-being? It’s a recent idea that that is part of the job description of a president, to control the economy and the national mood. But just to remember, our politicians themselves are humans, with all their flaws, with many constraints, and not to lead to a situation where trust in all institutions is plummeting, in part because our expectations are that they have near magical powers, which they can never live up to, leading to this cycle of cynicism and fatalism.
Ben-Shahar: Steve, I love the fact that you essentially recommended reading the sports section of the newspaper, which I must admit is my favorite. And then on top of that, what I would add is, the approach of the field of positive psychology and what’s unique about it is that it changes the questions that we ask. Traditional psychologists or psychotherapists would begin perhaps the session by asking, “What’s not working in your life?” Or, “What’s wrong?” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s not working in your relationship? What do you want to fix?” Positive psychology takes these questions and changes them. And a therapist, positive psychologist, would first ask, “What’s going well in your life? What’s working? We’ll of course get to the problem. We’re not ignoring them. But let’s begin with what is going well.” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s working in your relationship? You wouldn’t be here if nothing was working.” And what the evidence shows is that when we start with these questions, we energize the individual, the relationship, the team, we’re in a much better place from which we can deal then with the difficulties, hardships, and failures.
Nelson: My former boss, the late Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the U.N., used to talk about coalitions for change. And I think coalitions, whether they be within a community or they’re within an industry sector or at a national level, if one can build coalitions with initially a small group of people who have that sense of purpose, I think that’s another way to overcome cycles of pessimism and to build larger groups around a common agenda.
Laine Perfas: For my last question, I wanted to get a little bit personal, not too personal, but as you all navigate the world, I’m sure you’ve got your rough days. I’m sure you’ve got your days where you’re like, this is a mess. How do you stay hopeful?
Pinker: I try to compartmentalize. Ignoring worries won’t make the problems go away. They have to be dealt with, but not to let them invade your consciousness 24/7, as much as possible, to decide when you’re going to be in problem-solving mode. I try not to deny myself simple pleasures. There’s some things in life that are just guaranteed to make you happy: good food and good company, and you deserve those too. Put things in perspective: What’s the worst that can happen if I don’t solve this problem or if this fear comes to pass, will I fall apart? Prioritize what’s important in life: human relationships, being a person that I can respect, accomplishing my longer-term goals, and try not to get sidetracked by distractions that ultimately won’t count for much. A set of tricks like that, but not least, not depriving yourself of sources of guaranteed pleasure because the world has no shortage of stressors and toxic stimuli.
Nelson: To me, it’s family and friends and trying to be very intentional every day. And I travel a lot and being very conscious of checking in with people I love and who I know love me. I, like Tal, journal and have a gratitude journal. And I think, doing that very consciously every day, one realizes just how blessed we are and how much joy we often have in our lives, even when things are challenging and difficult. I meditate and I love getting out in nature. And then I think just the constant reminders of encounters with people who have demonstrated amazing resilience or courage in overcoming challenges. And in my work, I am incredibly blessed and privileged to meet a lot of people like that. And just a reminder of just how many amazing, remarkable, inspiring people are there in the world. And those numbers definitely outweigh the people who are bad and, being constantly aware of that is what keeps me very positive and hopeful for the future.
Ben-Shahar: So I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal since the 19th of September, 1999. Not because I read the research then. The research didn’t come out until 2003. But because Oprah told me to do so, actually on one of her shows she mentioned the gratitude journal. And I thought, wow, what a lovely idea. And I tried it and again, I didn’t need the research that came much later to convince me how helpful it is, but there is another thing that I do. And I credit one of my other teachers with that, and that is the late Daniel Wagner. His research on ironic processing points to a very important point within the field of positive psychology, and that is that the first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness. The paradox is that when we experience sadness or anxiety, and our response to that is, “I shouldn’t be sad or I don’t want to be, or I shouldn’t be anxious,” the sadness and anxiety only intensify. The paradox is that when we accept and embrace them, when we give ourselves the permission to be human, that is when they do not overstay their welcome. Simply observe. Simply accept. Simply be with the emotion. The first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness.
Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this really great conversation.
Nelson: Thank you.
Pinker: Thanks, Jane, Tal, and Sam.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to see all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.
We ingest equivalent of credit card per week — how worried should we be? In ‘Harvard Thinking,’ experts discuss how to minimize exposure, possible solutions.
Russian policy expert examines recent deployment of North Korean troops, possible fallout of U.S. elections
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
The recent deployment of North Korean troops to aid Russia against Ukraine and the weak response from the international community could lead to a potential escalation of the conflict, warned Russian policy expert Alexandra Vacroux.
“The deployment of North Koreans to fight in the war is an escalation of exactly the kind Russia has been warning NATO not to consider, which is to say, ‘Don’t put foreign troops on the ground,’” said Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Vacroux spoke from Kyiv, where she is spending her academic leave as vice president for strategic engagement at the Kyiv School of Economics.
“And what has been the U.S. response?” she asked. “Well, pretty much so far, the geopolitical equivalent of thoughts and prayers. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had said that this was very, very serious. Apart from that, there has been no reaction.”
During a Monday webinar, Vacroux spoke about the current state of the war in Ukraine as it nears the third anniversary of the Russian invasion and the future of the conflict in the aftermath of the U.S. elections. She called on the U.S. and the international community to help end the war with security guarantees that can deter future Russian aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine’s long-term security is not only in that nation’s interest but also in ours, she said.
“It is in the interest of the United States to defend democratic values and stand up to dictators,” said Vacroux. “You might not care about Ukraine all that much, but if you care about a stable world order, American trade and influence abroad, and about reducing Russia’s influence in American politics, you should be wondering what we can do to help Ukraine negotiate a just and secure conclusion to the war, and be grateful that the Ukrainians are fighting and dying so that we don’t have to.”
The conflict is largely taking place in the southern part of Ukraine, where Russia has seized 18 percent of Ukrainian territory and subjugated around 5 million people, she said.
U.S. officials estimate as many as 115,000 Russians have been killed and 500,000 wounded so far. And they put Ukrainian casualties at more than 57,500 killed and 250,000 wounded.
The situation may get worse as Russia has intensified drone and missile attacks against Ukraine. Citing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vacroux said that Russia this past week launched 900 guided aerial bombs, 500 drones, and 30 missiles against Ukraine.
“Apartment buildings are being hit regularly, and particularly in the East, in Kharkiv, for example, and civilians in Kherson, which is in the south, report that they’re being chased in the street by armed drones,” said Vacroux, who spent part of this past Sunday in her closet during a five-hour Russian air raid and drone attack.
Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August managed to bring the war to Russia, and even though the territory taken was small, the offensive had an important symbolic value, said Vacroux.
It is unknown what effect the North Korean deployment ultimately may have. That nation has been providing artillery shells to Russia since 2022, noted Vacroux.
Vacroux also discussed the potential impact of the U.S. elections on Ukraine’s support. American funding is critical for Ukraine to keep fighting against Russia. Congress appropriated more than $113 billion to support the country’s response efforts, and so far, the U.S. has sent more than $60 billion in military and humanitarian aid to help the embattled country.
Former President Donald Trump has said that he views Ukraine as mainly Europe’s problem, which could affect future U.S. funding if he becomes president. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the situation may look more promising for Ukraine, but there are no guarantees if Congress ends up being divided after the election.
In her final remarks, Vacroux praised the resilience of Ukrainian society, and asked for more international pressure on Russia and renewed military and diplomatic efforts to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.
“Ukraine will only stop fighting if it can be sure that Russia will stop fighting and not use a ceasefire to rearm and reattack where the world has moved on,” said Vacroux. “Ukrainians are resilient but exhausted, and many people have been displaced more than once … They’re very strong … they’re very motivated, but the stress and the trauma of the past three years are so deep. More than 80 percent of Ukrainians have lost someone that they loved in the war … It’s amazing that they continue getting up, going to work, and fighting for their country in whatever way they can.”
Economics concentrator, Crimson guard also sells custom sneakers to college, pro athletes
Gabby Anderson’s dorm room desk does double duty: homework central for microeconomics and statistics during the week, art studio on the weekends.
Her principal medium? The same sneaker models she wears playing guard on the women’s basketball team — along with those she custom designs for clients, including some high-profile professional athletes.
On a recent afternoon Anderson ’26, who lives in Kirkland House, unpacked her brushes and acrylic leather paints from their plastic crate and unboxed a pair of fresh white Nike Air Force 1s. Dipping her flat paintbrush into the red pigment, Anderson began applying the first layer of her planned design: floral patterns and song lyrics set against a background of fiery red and yellow hues.
“My favorite part is learning peoples’ stories behind why they want their design,” Anderson said. “As I’ve continued to create for people, presenting them with their shoe that expresses exactly what they want brings me so much joy because you see people light up when you do something for them like that.”
Anderson is an economics concentrator with a studio art secondary, balancing academics and athletics with her creative financialendeavor. Her work is recognizable for its bright colors, bold lines, and playful animated style.
Graffiti by Gabby started in 2020 as a pandemic hobby when Anderson was taking high school classes from home in Ohio. Inspired by a design she saw on social media, Anderson decided to paint a pair of her own sneakers.
“Then I had a friend ask me to make them a pair of shoes,” she said. “After that, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of fun, maybe I’ll do it some more.’”
After starting an Instagram page to showcase her work, her designs began getting attention. Her first request for a custom pair of sneakers came during the summer of 2020 nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. Nicki Collen, then head coach for the Atlanta Dream, asked Anderson to design her a pair of sneakers to commemorate Breonna Taylor.
“I was so excited. I remember she was on ESPN, and they mentioned my name while I was watching,” Anderson recalled. “I freaked out in the car. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my shoes are on ESPN. They just mentioned me,’ And that’s when it hit that I’m doing an actual thing, and this is probably an actual business, and I need to take it seriously.”
While still in high school, she was commissioned to paint sneakers for then-Seattle Storm star Sue Bird, Golden State Warriors’ Moses Moody (who was then at Arkansas), and Delaware Blue Coats’ R.J. Hampton Jr. She designed shoes for a Nike campaign with Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving, and did a series of commissioned paintings for Walmart’s “Beauty in Color” campaign.
In 2020, she also painted sneakers for all 15 members of Texas A&M University women’s basketball team, designs that reflected a range of messages the players wanted to promote, from heart disease awareness to Indigenous pride and female empowerment.
“Each girl gave me a list of things that they were very passionate about, something that they wanted on their shoe, and I followed up with each of them and was like, ‘Can you tell me more about this?’” Anderson recalled. “I got to learn not only their stories and where they came from, but what makes them who they are, what drives them to play basketball.”
Harvard women’s basketball vs. UMass on Nov. 4, 2024.
She has branched out from sneakers. As a first-year, she painted cleats for New England Patriots player Deatrich Wise Jr., as part of the NFL’s “My Cause, My Cleats” project. Last year she designed 10 pairs of skates for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
Gabby Anderson at her desk.
Design plans for a project.
A blank canvas.
Anderson painting a pair of sneakers.
She also last year launched her own line of kids’ school supplies — backpacks, lunch boxes, and pencil pouches — tailored toward African American children and emblazoned with the slogan “Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.” The line was inspired by a pencil pouch Anderson had as a child, which had a picture of a little girl who looked like her.
“I want kids to walk into a store and not just see one backpack with a Doc McStuffins or a Princess Tiana on it, but someone who represents them in their youthfulness,” Anderson explained. “I also wanted it to inspire them to be more than just what they see on that bag, which is where I came up with ‘Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.’ I really wanted kids to understand that you can be all three, and being all three is what’s going to help you thrive in whatever space you’re in.”
Anderson said that school, athletics, and Grafitti by Gabby actually mesh more easily than one might expect.
“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes.”
“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes,” she said. “Working with athletes ties directly back into basketball, and my own experiences from that can help me relate to these professional athletes I’m working with.”
‘Rigor of Angels’ author explains how a Borges character with perfect memory illuminates work of Heisenberg, Kant
The title character of “Funes the Memorious,” a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, suffers a head injury that renders him incapable of forgetting even the smallest detail. Forced to perceive everything at every moment in sharp relief, Funes grieves the ability to experience the world, as others do, in abstractions.
This story of the “perfect observer” helped author William Egginton better understand German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s principles that helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics. It also inspired Egginton to write a book exploring the nature of reality and the different ways humans grasp it through the lenses of three great thinkers: Borges, Heisenberg, and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Egginton, the Decker Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and author of several books that cross philosophy and science, called attention to the key theme of epistemic humility, or the idea that there is a fundamental limit to how much we know.
“But we have a tendency to override those limits,” Egginton offered. This is a central idea in Kant’s body of work, known as critical philosophy, and arguably in the literature of Borges and the science of Heisenberg, he said.
The mysteries of quantum mechanics can be summarized, Egginton continued, by the double-slit thought experiment (which later became an actual experiment), in which particles like electrons and photons become wave-like when not being observed, only to revert back to particles when measured. Heisenberg declared that “a particle has no path until we observe it.” Albert Einstein was famously uncomfortable with the notion.
Being perfect in knowledge meant Funes the Memorious could not generalize ideas and experiences, which he experienced as imprisonment — even torture. Egginton likened Funes’ fate to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in which observation of a physical phenomenon automatically constrains our view, putting natural limits on what we can call “reality.”
“We need to remind ourselves that what we’re studying is not nature itself,” Egginton said. “We’re studying nature as it reveals itself to our instruments of knowledge … and this is exactly what Kant was ultimately saying about science, too. It’s not that the world out there doesn’t exist in some kind of radical, solipsistic sense at all. We’re accepting that when you’re trying to do science, you’re doing science about the world as it exists for beings like us.”
Scenes from the week of the 2020 presidential vote, clockwise from top left: CNN covers the ongoing race two days after Election Day; workers tally ballots in Pennsylvania; media organizations gather outside the White House; and an Associated Press editor calls Florida’s results.
Images from AP Getty Images; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Lesson about election night for media? Winner should be American democracy.
News outlets taking greater care in close, fraught contest, experts say, but moving away from horse-race coverage is healthy idea anyway
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Every four years, major news organizations spend millions to create a dazzling spectacle out of what broadcast news pioneer Reuven Frank once called “a TV show about adding.” At the center of election night coverage is the race to be first to correctly call who will be the next president.
This year, in particular, news outlets are treading carefully. Polls are showing a virtual toss-up in the combative race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Early voting across the U.S. has been heavy. Rules differ from state to state and have shifted considerably since the 2020 election. Add to that the likelihood of post-election legal challenges and even unrest, television and print news organizations are preparing for a dramatic finale that likely won’t conclude Tuesday night.
“The theater of election night coverage” makes it look as if declaring winners and losers that night is the norm and if that doesn’t happen, “something must have gone wrong,” said Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine and now the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
“It is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations.”
Nancy Gibbs
So there’s “an enormous obligation on journalists” to inform and remind people again and again that all 50 states have their own distinct rules about when and how votes are counted “and therefore, it is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations,” she said.
To guard against that, organizations such as The New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press, and ABC News are taking steps to be more aggressive in explaining the variable state regulations to prepare voters for why there may be delays and to be vigilant on election night for signs of misinformation.
“That’s a major worry, that the period between when people vote and when there’s a decision is a very, very troublesome time for misinformation and for manipulation, and I think news organizations are super focused on that,” said Sally Buzbee, formerly a top editor at the Associated Press and until June, executive editor of The Washington Post.
Since 2000, U.S. elections have been “improbably close” Electoral College contests compared to prior elections, which makes tabulating delays “much more likely,” said Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS.
“I think the important thing is for there not to be an information vacuum” that bad actors can fill with confusion and disinformation. While it may not be as splashy or entertaining, news outlets can do a lot of civic good while votes are being counted to minimize predictions based on things like exit polls and instead, get “in the weeds” about state election rules and how that affects the vote counting and validating, he said.
The 2020 election between former Vice President Joe Biden and Trump serves as a kind of cautionary tale for news organizations. It took four days to call the election for Biden.
The tally was slowed by a record number of mail and absentee ballots cast due to the pandemic and ended in a close finish with a margin of victory of just 113,000 votes combined in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
While votes were still being counted election night, the Trump campaign prematurely declared victory. Even after Biden was declared the winner, the campaign, along with some supporters, pushed false accusations about widespread voter fraud, which were later disproved by investigations and recounts and rejected by courts but nonetheless persist to this day.
“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency.”
Sally Buzbee
The very notion of an election night where the results are known hours after the polls close is relatively new. For most of the nation’s history, voting results always took time to come in.
“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency,” said Buzbee, currently a Nieman visiting fellow.
The expectation that voters would learn who won sometime after 9 p.m. election night began with the emergence of television in the 1950s.
The industry is now going through a “sea change.” Most major news organizations know “there is still demand for election night and for some spectacle around election night, but … are [also] now keenly aware that there isn’t an Election Day, there’s an election couple days or weeks,” said Buzbee.
Outlets are hoping to head off a repeat of the last election but face some challenges. Newsrooms have seen significant layoffs over the last two years. Some, like NBC, ABC, and the BBC, cut hundreds of jobs in the last two months. Election coverage is expensive, takes many months of careful planning, and isn’t necessarily a money-maker. Still, news organizations think it’s worth the investment and effort.
“You’re building credibility if you do a good job on election night. If you are accurate, if you are compelling … on election night, then you are doing a good job with a big audience and what you hope is that translates into credibility long term,” Buzbee said.
Gibbs agrees.
“At the most basic level, what is a bigger news story than who is going to be the next president of the United States, who’s going to control the Senate, who’s going to control the Congress, who’s going to be confirming the next Supreme Court justices? Those outcomes have enormous impact on people’s lives and prosperity and health,” so it’s not surprising that news outlets devote so much time and resources to election coverage, she said.
Even if news outlets, especially TV networks, suddenly changed their approach, “even if somehow we dismantled the entire machinery of election night and made it ‘election week,’ I don’t think that that would change the fact that more and more people, especially people who are under 30 or even under 50, have many, many other sources where they’re going to be getting their information,” she said.
Many election officials learned from 2020 and are doing significant public outreach to provide greater clarity around their state’s rules and procedures, hoping to tamp down misinformation and reassure voters that their election is secure and fair, said Fung.
But the responsibility should not be shouldered solely by officials and journalists.
“I think every organization in society, whether it’s a business, or colleges and universities, or high schools, or nonprofits, should do their part to make our democratic institutions work. Obviously, a big part of that is encouraging people to participate in the democracy. But now, more and more, a bigger part [is] keeping people informed and updated” about what’s going on and why, said Fung.
“But I think we all have an individual responsibility as citizens, and then an organizational responsibility, to try to turn down the temperature and keep people informed in this moment of high anxiety on almost all sides.”
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Gibbs and Fung will join other HKS panelists for “Democracy 2024: The Day After” in the JFK Jr. Forum at 1pm.
WOLF lab is working to document, preserve Native languages
At Harvard, the Linguistics Department wants to revitalize Alabama in Texas
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
It’s one thing to be immersed in a language. It’s another to speak it. And Ava Silva ’27, who grew up in the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe’s, wasn’t fluent in Alabama.
“My áapo’s first language is Alabama,” said Silva, using the Alabama word for grandmother. “I could never fully understand it, but … I loved sitting beside her and just hearing her talk.”
At Harvard, Silva quickly connected with Assistant Professor of Linguistics Tanya Bondarenko. Within months, Bondarenko’s WOLF Lab (Working on Language in the Field) began studying the innerworkings of Alabama. Over the summer, Bondarenko and five linguistics students traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to document, preserve, and revitalize the endangered language.
Alabama is no longer naturally transmitted to Alabama-Coushatta children, Bondarenko explained. “In my community, language is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also a point of pain,” Silva said.
“To know the language is to know the culture, and the culture feeds from the language.”
Ava Silva ’27
For those in her grandmother’s generation, enrolling in primary school brought their first encounters with English. “They were hit with rulers and dealt with some stuff trying to adapt into this English-speaking society,” Silva said. “So there’s a lot of people who didn’t teach their kids [Alabama] because they have that pain with them.”
The pattern sounded familiar to Bondarenko, who specializes in syntax, semantics, and linguistic fieldwork. “These are the stories we encounter all the time,” she said. “Other people come and take their land, try to take everything else from them, try to prohibit people from speaking their language and from doing their cultural practices. It’s heartbreaking, and an important factor in why languages cease to be spoken.
“A lot of languages in the world are endangered, around 44 percent,” she continued. “If the work is not done, we will just lose the languages and even information about those languages completely.”
WOLF Lab provides opportunities for linguists interested in field work and understudied languages. During their visit with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe this summer, the team worked on elicitations with 19 native speakers to learn how Alabama is spoken today and gather recordings of the language in use. The team collected more than 140 hours of recordings that were already shared with the community and are now being analyzed in Cambridge.
As a community coordinator, Silva helped WOLF Lab identify native speakers. She also partnered with the morphology team to research the verb conjugations.
“To be able to do this project and say, ‘This language is so beautiful and I’m sorry that anyone ever made you feel like it wasn’t,’ has been something I love,” Silva said. “You see them light up and have this moment of healing.”
Jacob Kodner, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and member of the lab, noted that many linguistic theories are based on English or other Indo-European languages. “For me, as a linguist, it is particularly important to look at languages that are not Indo-European,” he said. “If we want to have a theory of how language works well, we have to have a better sample size.”
He underscored how many Indigenous languages spoken in North America are “critically endangered,” with low numbers of native speakers. While many North American linguists opt to pursue their studies abroad, he argued they can make a greater impact working with Indigenous communities on this continent.
“That’s the beautiful thing about the study of linguistics, to learn more about what these languages have in common and how they differ,” Kodner said.
Findings and future plans were presented to the tribal council. The linguists plan to return to the reservation for further field work over the winter and next summer.
As an Indigenous person and a linguist, Silva also believes it’s crucial to document, preserve, and revitalize Indigenous languages such as Alabama. She argued that revitalization work, in particular, helps Native communities come together. But the work carries deep cultural value as well.
“To know the language is to know the culture,” she said, “and the culture feeds from the language.”
Scholars at Harvard tell their stories in the Experience series.
Robert Putnam is that rarest of academics: a crossover star.
Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus, grew up in postwar Port Clinton, Ohio, a working-class town on Lake Erie. The kids played Little League together, parents were on the PTA, and everyone in the community gathered in groups to worship, play bridge, and help solve local challenges.
Memories of his youth would become Putnam’s intellectual lodestar for a life of pioneering scholarship and lead to a landmark book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” in 2000, which made him one of the world’s most famous political scientists.
Putnam argued in “Bowling Alone” that the glue that holds communities together comes not from formal institutions, but from social ties forged at places like churches, Elks Club meetings, and bowling leagues. That book, along with his earlier work identifying a now-widely used conflict resolution theory known as “the two-level game,” won him his field’s most prestigious honors. His desire to turn theory into problem-solving policy earned him the ears of Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama.
Putnam, now 83, came to Harvard’s Government Department in 1979. In addition to research and teaching, he held several administrative posts, including dean of Harvard Kennedy School (1989-1991), associate dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Putnam retired from teaching in 2018 but remains a member of the Kennedy School faculty.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
You’re best known for your work on the important effect that community and social connection have on American society. Tell me about your family life growing up in Port Clinton.
Port Clinton was a small town. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. I was born in 1941, so I’m a pre-Baby Boomer. My parents were both fairly well-educated. My dad had a master’s degree in business and was the first in his family to go to college. He graduated from the University of Michigan right in the middle of the Depression, so the first 10 years of his career he was looking for jobs.
Then he went into the Navy when the war started, and he lost a leg in the war. Back in the day, military veterans had very little support. He spent a year in the hospital in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
After the war, he had a wife and a young child — me — and no way to make a living. But my dad was a talented, hard-working guy, and within a couple of years he had started a small construction company from scratch. As a start-up contractor he built houses on spec. He was outgoing and soon became one of the town leaders, very much involved in civic life. But in 1962, while I was in college, there was a big national housing recession, and he went bankrupt.
In short, I grew up in a fairly comfortable life, but that happened to have been the only 10 years of my family’s life when we were comfortable. Shortly after he went bankrupt, he died of a heart attack, so he died very young, leaving me the sole support of my chronically ill mom.
Robert (from left), Ruth, Elaine, and Frank Putnam, Port Clinton, Ohio, 1954.
Was your community a “Leave It to Beaver” kind of place—homogenous racially and economically?
No. It was actually very mixed. On the one hand, it was a farming area. I could walk out my back door into farmland. But it was also part of Greater Detroit. There was one big factory in town, Standard Products, which was a supplier to Detroit. They made the little rubber molding around car windows.
Many of the dads of my classmates were UAW workers, so it was solid working class. And then, some kids in my class were kids of farmers, and some were poor. Nobody was very rich and nobody was very poor.
The town was small, and it was very cohesive. We all played on the same basketball teams and Little League. So, growing up in a close family and a close community, I was conscious of the importance of community, even though I wouldn’t have had the words for it.
The school was integrated; my bowling team was integrated — three white members and two Black members. The president of the student body was Black, and the second-ranked student in my class was Black. We were all friends.
Were you socially active?
By personality, I’m shy. I was precocious, if I can put it that way. I was focused on books. My mom didn’t want me to be spoiled, so she kept telling me, “You’ve got to get out and join things!”
When I was in grade school, I didn’t play sports. So early every morning, she would get up and play catch with me in front of our house. Ruth Putnam was bound and determined that Bobby Putnam was not going to be an aloof intellectual.
In high school, I belonged to everything. I was in sports; I was in debate; I was in band; I was in the science club; and I was in chorus. I was doing that despite the fact that, inside, I was shy.
Also, I was trying to be one of the guys, so even though I was not a natural athlete at all, in my junior year I went out for football. I had very poor eyesight, so the only position I could play was a position in which you didn’t have to see anything. That meant I was on the offensive line, where all you had to do was try to block the guy in front of you. And I was awful. I was like fifth string or something.
What I didn’t know was that all my classmates were watching the fact that though I was good in school, I had put myself in a position in which I was not good. And, for that reason, they elected me president of the student class. Now, I’m not bragging about that. I’m trying to say, Here’s this little kid. He’s basically shy. His mom is pushing him to get involved in community. He takes on that lesson. And moreover, it turned out the community was a welcoming community not just to me, it was welcoming to everybody.
Putnam (center) with the Port Clinton Ohio Junior High School Bowling Team, c. 1955. “My bowling team was integrated … We were all friends.”
Courtesy of Robert Putnam
You enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1959. What was campus life, especially the political mood, like back then?
Let’s look at Bob Putnam at this moment: He’s a hick from Ohio; he’s a science nerd; he’s a Methodist; and he’s a moderate Republican. In the summer of 1960 — this now sounds crazy — I would write to the Nixon campaign, volunteering.
Swarthmore was small. It was homogeneous socially and intellectually and even politically, and it was intense. And very intellectual. Sophomore year, the fall of 1960, I had to take a distribution course, so I took a course in political science. There were two guys running for president — Kennedy and Nixon.
Swarthmore was very left-wing. It was very socially conscious. Kennedy was a little conservative for many people at Swarthmore.
In this poli-sci class, there was this cute coed named Rosemary sitting in front of me. After class, we started hanging out together. She’s Jewish [Putnam would convert after they married], she comes from a big city — Chicago. Her parents are very clearly New Deal Democrats. We got talking. Of course, we were talking a little bit about politics because that was the class we had just come from.
For our first date, she took me to a Kennedy rally. Sort of, “In your face, Putnam!” And, of course, the next week, I invited her to a Nixon rally. Those were our first two dates. We got along pretty well, and by the election, I was a Democrat.
On Jan. 20, 1961, we said, “What the hell? It’s not that far down to Washington. We’ll go to the inauguration.” We heard Kennedy say with our own ears, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I thought he was speaking just to me. And I thought, “I’ve got to do something about America. I have obligations to this country.”
“We heard Kennedy say with our own ears, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ I thought he was speaking just to me. And I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something about America. I have obligations to this country.’”
Putnam in his Cambridge home.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Not long after, you switched your focus in college to psychology, history, and political science. Who were some of your mentors back then?
In social psychology, I was lucky enough to have two excellent professors. Dean Peabody was one. He was not well known then, but he became a very well-known social psychologist. And Solomon Asch, who at the time was the leading social psychologist in the world. He was a great teacher; he taught small seminars. He was most famous for something called the Asch Social Pressure experiment, which was about the effects of conformity.
Another was Roland Pennock, who was a very distinguished political philosopher. He was known globally, even though he taught at a tiny liberal arts college. I also became quite close to Chuck Gilbert, another Swarthmore professor. The relationships you had with your mentors there were very intense.
After Swarthmore, you studied at Balliol College, Oxford, on a Fulbright scholarship and then headed to Yale for your master’s degree and doctorate. What drew you there?
Yale happened at that point to have the best political science department in the world. They had extremely good political scientists — Bob Lane, Karl Deutsch, and most of all, Bob Dahl, who were the giants of the ’60s and ’70s in political science. We studied in small seminars, so I benefited enormously from working with them.
What was your first big break as a young political scientist, the thing that put you on the professional map?
Professionally the first paper that I wrote as a graduate student was called “Political Attitudes and the Local Community.” It was on this issue of how the community affects the individual. That paper was published in the APSR [American Political Science Review]. That now sometimes happens, but then it was unheard of for a graduate student to publish a paper in the American Political Science Review or World Politics or whatever. It proved to me that I could play in the big leagues in professional terms.
At the time, the Yale paper was just one more term paper. I did not think my whole career was going to be about community. But looking back on it now, I can see, going all the way back to Port Clinton, I was always drawn to these issues. There was something in me that was interested intellectually in the connection between individuals and the community.
Another lucky thing: When I was going on the job market in 1966, ’67, there were very few Ph.D.s coming out then. My birth year was at the end of the baby dearth, during the ’30s and early ’40s, so I had almost no competitors.
But right behind me, universities could see this enormous wave of Boomers entering college. It meant that before I had written a word of my dissertation, I had many tenure-track offers — from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, UW-Madison, the University of Michigan. This was not because of me; it was because of the times. So, we had all these choices. We could have gone almost anyplace. But Rosemary and I were Midwesterners, and we had parents whom we were close to, so we went to Ann Arbor. That felt like going home.
I’ve always been aware that I am influenced by my environment. So, I choose environments where I’d be led in a certain direction. When I went to Ann Arbor, I knew it was the most quantitative place studying social and political science in the world. I was not that good, but I knew that if I’m there, I would become so — by osmosis. And I did.
“I did not think my whole career was going to be about community. But looking back on it now, I can see, going all the way back to Port Clinton, I was always drawn to these issues.”
After Yale, you joined the Michigan faculty where you taught for several years before taking a detour to work at the White House. You served on the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter’s legendary national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. How did that come about?
In about the middle ’70s, I still thought maybe I should be in public service, not just an academic. I got an opportunity to work for a year in the government, and, as it turned out, in the White House. I did that thinking, “Let me put myself there and see whether I like that. Maybe I’ll like it even more than academics or maybe I’ll learn something while I’m there.”
I worked on the staff of the National Security Council for the calendar year 1978. It turned out to be a really important year, and it had a powerful effect on my work in many ways.
It was amazing for me recently to read my own notes from that year, because I could see how much of the whole rest of my career had been affected by that service. I’d never been in government before. I could have taken the Kennedy admonition in that direction. I could have said, “Go into government.” I didn’t. I went into academics.
I took handwritten notes of conversations between the President of the United States Jimmy Carter, and the chancellor of Germany, which, at the time, would have been very highly classified. We were dealing with Iran; we were dealing with nuclear arms control negotiations and U.S.-European relations and U.S.-Soviet relations.
I was just a novice, so I was always working with somebody who knew a lot more than I did. The field I was supposed to be working in was called “global strategy,” but global strategy then actually meant sticking it to the Soviets. So we spent all of our time figuring out — if the Soviets did X, what should be the U.S. response? It was exciting and remarkably interesting.
Did that experience shape any of your subsequent work?
I did some quite significant work based directly on what I learned in Washington. I later invented something called the two-level game model. It turned out to be, in academic terms, a really big deal. The two-level game is what got me into the National Academy of Sciences, not my work on social capital. It came directly out of my service on the NSC.
The other thing that happened was that I was working with Sam Huntington, a famous Harvard professor. He was my boss at the NSC. Somewhat to my surprise, he came away thinking that I was really good. After I finished my time in the NSC, he persuaded Harvard to make me an offer. It seems silly now, but my first thought was, “Why would I want to go to Cambridge? I’m happy. We’re loving it here in Ann Arbor.” But I’ve been at Harvard ever since — nearly half a century.
This idea you’re best known for — that social capital plays a very important role in society — came out of an academic study in Italy that you had worked on for many years. How did that happen?
Most people who know of my work now know only of my work after 1990, when I was already 50 years old. In between the two-level games and “Bowling Alone,” there was this long-term study about Italian regional government. Among academics, it’s at least as well-known as “Bowling Alone.” The book was called “Making Democracy Work.”
If you’re a political scientist and you wanted to study the development of political institutions, logically, you’d like to take the same organization, with the same powers, and the same money and so on, and put it down in different social and economic and political contexts, so you could see which governments flourished and which faltered. That would give you a clue as to how the environment affected the development of these institutions.
Normally, political science is not an experimental study. But while Rosemary and I and our kids were in Italy in 1970, the Italians, without knowing it, created exactly the basis for this kind of study. They created, for the first time, a set of regional governments that had never existed before.
On paper, they were all identical, but in economic and political and cultural and social terms, were vastly different. That unexpectedly turned into a 25-year-long study to measure the success or failure of those new governments.
We had many different hypotheses. We didn’t guess for a long time what turned out to be the critical ingredient — choral societies and football clubs. To what extent did people in a given region join together in things, not just politics, but these informal kinds of connections. We gradually realized, “Whoa! It’s not the education; it’s not the wealth. It’s the choral societies and these informal connections.”
And at the very end of that study, I was a visitor at Oxford and was living in Nuffield College. Late one night, I couldn’t get to sleep. I looked for some book that would put me to sleep. In the library I found this big, thick book of sociological theory called “Foundations of Social Theory” by James Coleman. I thought, “I’ll read this, and I’ll be asleep in 10 minutes.”
I came to this chapter in the book called “Social Capital.” That was the first time I’d ever heard the term, which Coleman used to refer to social connections. Almost immediately, I realized that what I’m talking about in Italy is social capital. It’s these connections, which turn out to be valuable. I ended up not sleeping at all that night. I was so excited.
Up until then, the only people who cared about my work were the half-dozen political scientists in the world who cared about Italian regional government. But now, because I’d introduced the idea of social capital, it got a lot of attention. An Economist review said I was one of the leading social scientists of the last 100 years! That review was another big turning point.
President Barack Obama laughs with Robert Putnam as he awards him the 2012 National Humanities Medal during a ceremony at the White House.
AP File Photo/Carolyn Kaster
As you were finishing that project, you began to see that this idea about social capital might also explain the political, racial, and social divisions that seemed to be underway in the U.S. beginning in the early 1990s?
Yes. We lived in Lexington at that point. I came down to breakfast, and Rosemary showed me a story in The Boston Globe about how the Lexington PTA didn’t have as many members as it used to. And I thought, “Doesn’t everybody always join the PTA?”
I had a research assistant, so we gathered a little data, and it turned out it wasn’t just Lexington, it was everyplace. PTA membership was falling off. I’d grown up in the ’50s, when all parents belonged to the PTA. And I thought, “What’s going on here?” My dad had been in Kiwanis; I wonder if it’s true in Kiwanis? And sure enough, we got the data on Kiwanis membership. It was also declining. That led me pretty soon to say, “I think I’ve stumbled onto something here.”
I had had lunch with a Harvard donor friend of mine, who happened to own a chain of bowling alleys. I said, “It looks to me like people are not bowling in leagues anymore, but they’re still bowling.” He said, “You’ve stumbled onto the major economic problem facing the bowling industry.”
It turns out if you bowl in a league, you drink four times as much beer, and you eat four times as many pretzels. The money in bowling is not in the balls and shoes, it’s in the beer and pretzels.
So his industry was in the strange situation of having more people coming through the door, but revenue was falling because they weren’t drinking as much beer and eating as many pretzels. When I recounted that story to a colleague at the Kennedy School, Jack Donahue, he said “My goodness, you mean they’re bowling alone?”
Soon I delivered a paper at a research conference in Sweden sponsored by the Nobel Foundation. As a joke I titled the draft “Bowling Alone.” It got published in a tiny little journal that had a circulation of about a dozen called the Journal of Democracy. It was published on Jan. 1, 1995, and the same day, the two leading political commentators in America said in their New Year’s columns, “This crazy professor at Harvard has just discovered this amazing effect.”
Within a week, my mailbox, email, and real letters went through the roof. Within about two weeks, I was invited to Camp David to talk with the Clintons. And within about three weeks, Rosemary and I were profiled in People magazine.
Rosemary and Robert Putnam in 1962.
Courtesy of Robert Putnam
Why do you think “Bowling Alone” caught fire so quickly?
I had stumbled onto something that most Americans actually knew privately. I was pretty confident that I was right because thousands of people wrote me saying, “My father was in Rotary, or he was in the Elks. I was proud of him for being in the Elks. I’m not in the Elks. I know I have good reasons, but I kind of feel sorry, and you’ve now helped me understand my personal problem.” For a long time, the academics were skeptical. But underneath, all those thousands of letters suggested to me that I was onto something.
It’s quite unusual for an academic to produce work that’s taken seriously by peers, butalso crosses over into the popular culture. What was that like?
I know it’s unusual. There are some advantages and disadvantages to it. I told you about going to the John F. Kennedy inaugural. I wanted to make a difference in America. So, at some level, I welcomed it.
Once the book was published around 2000, I became a kind of celebrity. That gave me a standing to reach to a larger audience and to at least fool myself into thinking that I was actually making a difference. Not change history. The way my team and I talked about it is, we were going to try to bend history. Maybe, at the margins, we could help things a little bit.
You did get some pushback. Some questioned the 1995 paper’s accuracy, and for a while it looked like that might flatten enthusiasm for your findings. What happened?
Early on, I discovered that there had been a methodological mistake in the original article in the Journal of Democracy — not that I had made personally, but I’d used some data from a data archive, and the archive data was wrong. Fortunately, I caught that before anybody else did. But still, if you corrected that mistake, then it was not at all clear that I was right.
At one point, there was a newspaper story saying, “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk.” That was deeply depressing — clinically. I went through this long depression in which I thought, “Maybe I’m completely wrong.” And then I discovered two data archives, and it turned out I was righter than I’d even suspected I was.
After the publication of this journal article, I got a very generous book deal. I thought I was going to publish it in six months, but I spent the next five years trying to figure out whether it really was true that social capital was declining in America. And if so, why it was true? Did it matter? And what could we do about it? Once the book came out, I did not want to have another “‘Bowling Alone’ is bunk” headline.
I had a big research team by this point. Most social scientists then were doing it like artisans — one person doing all the work. By the time I got to “Bowling Alone,” I was doing industrial social science, if I can put it that way. So, it took me five years, but then it came out, and it was a big hit again. Probably right now, I’m better known than I have been in my whole life even though I’m in my mid-80s. That’s fundamentally because the ensuing years have shown that I was right. I was saved by the data.
In “Join or Die,” a new documentary about your work, there’s an old clip where you lament, “We’re watching ‘Friends’ instead of having friends.” Are you disheartened that the downward trends around community and social connection you identified and warned about in the 1990s have perhaps gotten worse?
Things have gotten worse and when I’ve said that I often leave people with the impression that I think I’ve been a failure. I don’t think I’ve been a failure. Even forgetting about my academic successes, I think I’ve been reasonably successful in raising the alarm about this. But I’ve not found the solution.
Over the last 20, 25 years, most of my time has not been spent on research or writing. It’s been spent on outreach. I have worked with hundreds of grassroots groups all across the country, in every state in America, trying to explain what I’ve found and trying to encourage them to think about what they could do to turn this around. You’d have to ask them to be sure, but I think you would find that they would say, “Putnam has not fixed the problem, and we have not fixed the problem, but he’s put us on the right track.”
The second thing I’ve done is to speak to thousands of journalists and public officials. I’ve tried to make use of the fact that I’ve become something of a celebrity. I could tell you how I spent today, which is in four or five Zoom meetings with somebody from New Hampshire who wants to talk about what they can do here to fix things, and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s team to find out what they could do in Pennsylvania to fix these things, and so on. If I could speak to 500 people a year for 25 years, that’s a lot of people.
“Things have gotten worse and when I’ve said that I often leave people with the impression that I think I’ve been a failure. I don’t think I’ve been a failure. I think I’ve been reasonably successful in raising the alarm about this. But I’ve not found the solution.”
Political scientists aren’t expected to fix the things they study. But you have worked with U.S. presidents and world leaders, policymakers, local officials, and communities to help them address these challenges. Did that come from your desire to live up to President Kennedy’s call to service?
Actually, I do want to fix America! (Laughter.) The irony of all this is: I haven’t quite fixed it, but underneath, that’s been my real motive.
There’s an approach to social science now, which is to say, “We just do the facts. It’s not our business to say what people should do, much less get out and work with them to do it.”
I strongly disagree with that. Of course, there’s a role for people who just do the math. That’s fine. I admire that. Once upon a time, I did it myself. So, I’m not saying political scientists or social scientists shouldn’t do high-tech, quantitative stuff. I’m just saying that, as a group, social scientists should not be focused just on description. They should also be focused on, in some sense, taking a more active role, trying to change. One way or another, ordinary Americans help to fund what is a pretty cushy life for academics like me, and I think we have some obligation to work on problems that concern them.
In the early 2000s, you launched an initiative to convert ideas about social capital into practical solutions, called the Saguaro Seminar. In a recent interview with The New York Times, you called it your biggest failure. Why?
It turned out the problem was too vague. We had this idea — it came from some experts at the Kennedy School — of so-called executive sessions in which you bring together some academics and some practitioners and try to figure out what to do about a problem. And it works for quite specific problems, like crime. We had a report, but the report did not have the impact that we hoped it would have. In retrospect, I think our hopes were exaggerated.
Lots of people have invested a ton of money in having some kind of national commission on one of these big problems — the national commission on polarization or national commission on inequality. None of them have solved the problem. That’s because, I think, fundamentally it’s not an absence of good ideas, it’s an absence of grassroots efforts. Everybody in that group worked hard, and we had some good ideas, but ideas are not enough.
We did make one really good decision. It was made by a guy named Tom Sander, my No. 2 for about 20 years. We were trying to get together a bunch of practitioners from across the nation. We wanted to have a very diverse group. He heard of this young lawyer who was then working as a community organizer in Chicago. And he came back and said, “I think this guy might be our guy.”
Let me guess: His name was Barack Obama?
He was younger than almost anybody else in the group, and he was super smart and very ambitious. Just lovable. We all liked him because he’s very likable and smart. His nickname was “the governor” because we thought, “You’re so good. Maybe someday you might end up being elected governor of Illinois.” Imagine that! (Laughter.) Within five years, he was president of the United States.
While he was president, quite often, he invited me to the White House to speak. In his second term, he awarded me the National Humanities Medal for my work on community. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say some of his main initiatives came from my talks with him at the White House. And all of that was because Tom Sander, this colleague of mine, had gone looking for a bright young organizer in Chicago.
So, at every stage of my career, I benefited from somebody else. I was lucky in the mentors and colleagues and friends and students that I had. I was lucky that I met my wife. It was not moments in which I was brilliant, it was moments in which I recognized that somebody else had come up with a good idea.
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Photo by Dylan Goodman
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Elections and public opinion expert details lessons learned since 2000, rise of absentee voting
Election night 2000 represents a difficult chapter in the history of broadcast news.
Exit polls showed a tight presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush. Just before 8 p.m., NBC News projected a Gore victory in the pivotal state of Florida, with all the other major television networks closely following. Two hours later, all retracted their forecasts as Gore’s margins narrowed with the reporting of additional votes.
Just after 2 a.m., the networks felt confident calling the state — and therefore the presidency — for Bush. But two hours later, they had to backtrack again when it became clear Florida was headed for a recount.
“The media had a vulnerability in understanding the changing nature of how elections are actually run,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government, reflecting on Florida’s razor’s edge results, which exposed the networks’ reliance on outdated statistical modeling.
Five years later, Ansolabehere, an elections and public opinion expert, joined a team of social science Ph.D.s charged with improvingdata journalism and election forecasting for CBS News. “I’ve been there ever since for every midterm and presidential election as well as the primaries,” he said.
We caught up with Ansolabehere, mastermind of the long-running Cooperative Election Study, for a lesson on the evolving nature of real-time vote projections and a preview of election night 2024. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did TV journalists get it so wrong in 2000?
That election exposed a lot of administrative failures in the U.S. electoral system — from voting machines to registration to management of polling places. But the networks relied on the same old statistical models to ingest data — and then they just put that out. They stationed journalists in various areas to report on local results, but they weren’t necessarily placed where the problems were.
There was also a rush to report. The television networks were basically racing each other. Don’t get me wrong. There was certainly an ethos of getting it right because calling the election can have a big impact — it can shift how legal strategies are pursued by the campaigns afterwards. That was very much the case in 2000 and 2020. It was almost the case in 2004.
Journalists know it’s a big responsibility. But for me, it’s also this very cool problem.
Say more about that.
The very cool problem is, you’re shown in real time little portions of something that has occurred — the election. At 7 p.m., you get to see, say, 10 percent of what has happened. At what point can you make a decision? Do you need to see 50 percent of the data? Do you need 90 percent? It’s a missing data problem. It’s a forecasting problem. And it’s forecasting things that we political scientists care about, like turnout, vote shares, and how different groups voted.
How has the rise of absentee voting complicated this work?
In 2000, one in eight ballots nationwide was cast absentee or early. In 2016, 40 percent of ballets were cast absentee or early. During COVID, more than 60 percent were. That makes it really challenging to understand what’s going on during election night. In particular, there have been a bunch of studies that say making absentee voting easier doesn’t increase turnout. But since the states made absentee voting easier, turnout has gone up a bunch.
Many will recall from 2020 that there are idiosyncrasies with how absentee ballots are reported. How has that affected your work on election night?
Our old data models were based on [electoral] precincts. There are about 180,000 precincts in the U.S. — each a tiny place, with about 1,000 people — and we could see in each one how things had shifted from one election to the next.
But absentee ballots are not reported at the precinct level. They’re usually reported at the county level. There are 3,000 counties in the U.S., and they are very heterogeneous. That makes it very difficult to understand which little pieces of the missing or obscured puzzle have been revealed as the votes are reported.
Absentee voting was also politicized in 2020. How did that affect your team?
Up until 2020, we were lucky because absentee voting was pretty much like in-precinct voting. That is, it was unrelated to how people voted. But when we started getting the data streams in 2020, Biden would be up by something like 20 points in the absentee ballots, because that’s usually what gets dumped first on election night. You’ll see zero precincts reporting, but 20 percent of the votes are in — that’s the absentees from the county.
The problem was particularly vexing out west, because there you have these big urban counties that count for something like 75 percent of the state’s population. Think Maricopa County where Phoenix is in Arizona or Clark County with Las Vegas County in Nevada. We were, on the fly, trying to partition the data based not on the presidential vote. We could see that, say, the round of absentee votes that came in at 10:05 EST p.m. also had a reported vote from a certain state legislative district. That gave us some information about what part of Maricopa County the votes were from.
When did you know the results of the 2020 presidential election?
By about 1:30 a.m., I knew Biden had won.
But it took days for the media, including CBS, to declare a winner.
Everyone on the Decision Desk team was just racking their brains through midnight — can we figure out anything about where these absentee ballots are coming from? CBS staffer Kabir Khanna and I finally hit on a model where we could understand not so much what data we already had, but what data we didn’t yet have — how Democratic or Republican were the areas that hadn’t reported their absentee counts. And given how things were trending, what that must mean for the outstanding ballots.
At 1:30 it became obvious to me, at least, that Biden would win Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.
What will you keep your eye on when you’re back at the Decision Desk?
One of the things we’re starting to look at right now is what’s the absentee ballot yield — that is, how many people have returned their absentee ballots — by party registration. A lot of states, not all, report party registration. But almost all of the states where the race will be close do.
And on Election Night itself, the first reporting we get is the 5 p.m. exit poll. If the Democrats aren’t up by five [points] in the raw exit-poll data, I’m going to guess it’ll be bad night for them. That’s what happened in 2016. The exit-poll data came back with Hillary Clinton up by five.
Why would the exit polls favor Democrats?
Raw exit-poll data always overstate the Democrats by five. We’ve studied it. We found things to explain little parts of it, but nobody really knows why. It’s been that way since the 1970s.
‘A sense of illumination, if not calm, about the fate of American democracy’
Lawrence Bobo (from left), Mina Cikara, Eric Matthew Nelson, Jill Lepore, and Theda Skocpol speaking during the event.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Social Science faculty lend insight, analysis ahead of election
With another presidential election at America’s doorstep, Lawrence D. Bobo, the dean of Social Science, last week gathered four of his division’s faculty members — Mina Cikara, Jill Lepore, Eric Nelson, and Theda Skocpol — to discuss the state of the U.S. political system.
“We don’t have enough occasions in the social sciences to share ideas across our disciplines, across our methods, and across our different perspectives to understand key issues,” offered Bobo, who is also the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, at the top of the conversation. He hoped that the interdisciplinary panel’s expertise — in history, sociology, government, political theory, and psychology — would yield “a sense of illumination, if not calm, about the fate of American democracy.”
Drawing on field research with American voters and the history of U.S. political thought, the symposium quickly surfaced disagreement over the source of recent dysfunction.
Borrowing from a lecture she delivered last month upon winning the American Political Science Association’s James Madison Award, Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, shared with the panel a timeline of recent actions by the Republican Party that in her view are aimed at undercutting U.S. elections and accountable governance.
“We’re in a period of radicalization to the point of authoritarian, anti-democratic commitment by one of the two major political parties,” she said. “Ironically, it’s the party that started out in the Civil War-era celebrating freedom and opposing slavery.”
Skocpol, co-author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” (2012) and “Rust Belt Union Blues” (2023), distributed a handout listing 18 examples since 2000 of what she termed “legal hardball,” a concept she credited to her Government Department colleagues Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose book “Tyranny of the Minority” (2023) details how Southern Democrats used “constitutional hardball” during Reconstruction to disenfranchise Black voters and secure their own power.
Nelson, Robert M. Beren Professor of Government, offered “a modest dissent, or at least a friendly amendment” to Skocpol’s account. “There’s no question that the Republican Party has become deeply radicalized,” said Nelson, author “The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God.” (2019). “But I think the phenomenon that we’ve seen is a spiral, and in order to diagnose it correctly you have to realize that the dynamics require a kind of tit-for-tat on both sides.”
Democrats were the first to break with norms around judicial appointments, he argued, with Democratic senators lining up in 1987 against President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. “Republicans then responded and began abusing the confirmation process, particularly for lower court federal judges,” he said.
Democrats, he said, then eliminated the filibuster for lower court appointments in 2013. Republicans, in turn, refused to give President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a SCOTUS hearing in 2016 and eliminated the filibuster for nominations the following year.
As a result, presidents no longer nominate justices who are “at least minimally acceptable to those in the minority,” Nelson said. Democrats have become increasingly outraged by the succession of Supreme Court decisions that followed. “And the Democrats now propose to violate the Constitution by having Congress pass a bill that pretends to have the authority to impose term limits on justices,” he concluded.
Also documented by Skocpol is an uptick in what she called “extralegal” threats and violence following false claims about the 2020 election results. Her examples included harassment of public officials as well as the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress for much of the period she analyzed, Skocpol said. “I think the timeline here raises the possibility that an outright offensive authoritarian movement has emerged that wants to take it all and to turn elections into, at most, decorations — and to deploy harassment and threats of violence regularly along with quasi-legal tactics,” she said.
Insights from the event’s other two speakers looked beyond partisan politics. Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, drew from her 2020 book “If Then” to review six decades of technological change and what she sees as its corrosive effect on all levels of government. Cikara, a professor of psychology who specializes in intergroup conflict and polarization, spoke to a hopeful body of research on altering people’s “meta-perceptions,” or an individual’s ideas about how others regard them and their identity group.
With both Harvard students and faculty in attendance, the Oct. 21 symposium featured a lively Q&A section, dominated by fears of constitutional crises and democratic collapse.
Nelson shared his concerns that this year’s election results could set off “terrifying sorts of constitutional impasse” and “dangerous levels of instability and dysfunction.” Nevertheless, he lamented all the talk of existential danger this election season. “It reminds people of things that were said in 2016 and 2020,” he said.
It has become the “standard get-out-the-vote rhetoric” on left and the right alike, Lepore added. “I think there’s a lot of really important work about the stakes, and the stakes are extremely high, but I think that rhetoric is fundamentally incendiary.”
“But why would it be rhetoric to identify those threats and try to communicate them?” Skocpol wondered.
“The argument is that it has a perverse effect,” Nelson replied. “At this point, there’s been so much of it that people tune it out and don’t take the actual threat sufficiently seriously.”
Bot’s literary analysis wasn’t ‘brilliantly original’ — is that beside the point?
Writers Claire Messud, Laura Kipnis debate AI’s merits as a reading companion
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
This summer, cultural critic and author Laura Kipnis wrote about her experience being hired by an AI app to record 12 hours of commentary on “Romeo and Juliet” to train a chatbot to impersonate her. For a fee, the app lets users read a classic book in the public domain while chatting with an AI “guide,” such as Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay, or Salman Rushdie. The goal, Kipnis explained, is to replicate the experience of a one-on-one tutoring session.
“The assignment was to be interesting more than it was to be an expert,” said Kipnis, who spoke at Harvard last week about the experience and the larger impact of generative AI on literature. “There were no parameters. Anything, however tangential, that I wanted to comment on about the play was OK. They were looking for voices that are kind of quirky and engaging for readers.”
The Department of English debate titled “Should You Become a Literary Bot?,” which was part of a campus initiative to boost civil discourse and intellectual vitality, featured an discussion between Kipnis and Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction, on whether AI chatbots are a good tool to help us analyze literature.
Kipnis, who learned in 2023 that her own books were among the thousands used without permission to train generative artificial intelligence, said she wouldn’t go so far as to call technology “neutral,” because it can be developed for social purposes that fall across the moral spectrum.
Claire Messud (left) and Laura Kipnis.
But she also doesn’t believe AI has an inherent social purpose baked in, which she says is the fear behind most of the “hand-wringing” about AI’s future.
“New technologies are going to reflect and intensify existing social forces and relations of production,” Kipnis said. “I don’t think they themselves create those relations — at least, so far.”
She suggests treating AI as a public utility and regulating it like one, though she is skeptical that the political will exists to do that.
“At what point do you think you are making a difference by not participating in something? We’re enrolled. We’re enlisted. There’s no standing outside.”
Laura Kipnis
“It seems currently a given that AI will take over the project of milking maximum profits from every last corner of social and private life for short-term gains in even more creatively nefarious ways,” Kipnis said. “Resisting AI isn’t going to change that dynamic if the culprit is not the technology.”
Messud pushed back on Kipnis’ assertion that adopting AI is a “given,” saying that attitude only perpetuates the idea that using AI is inevitable. She also pointed out that the Rebind app for which Kipnis recorded commentary is an example of the capitalist profit-chasing she was critiquing.
“At what point do you think you are making a difference by not participating in something?” Kipnis argued. “We’re enrolled. We’re enlisted. There’s no standing outside.”
In the Q&A portion, some audience members debated what such tools could or should replace, whether it could bring equity to public education in under-resourced areas, or if it distracts from the actual need for a better-funded education system.
The “Romeo and Juliet” Kipnis-bot hasn’t been published yet, but the audience examined an example of a chatbot on the same app that impersonates Irish author John Banville and, though still in beta, offers commentary on James Joyce’s “Dubliners.” As Kipnis prompted it with questions about the role of masculinity and sex in Joyce’s era, the bot, trained on Banville’s 12 hours of recorded commentary, infused its answers with much of the author’s signature witty humor.
“I always felt that Freud should have been a Catholic because psychiatry is akin to the Catholic confession box: ‘Be quiet and listen,’ until they get on to the subject of sex, and then they say, ‘Oh, tell me more,’” the bot quipped in the middle of its answer about the influence of religious doctrine on Irish society.
Messud criticized the Banville-bot’s multi-paragraph responses, which often repeated ideas and even phrases, calling them intellectually thin with a “high blather quotient.”
“So much of what’s interesting when I read is to know that an individual consciousness has chosen the words.”
Claire Messud
“So much of what’s interesting when I read is to know that an individual consciousness has chosen the words,” Messud said. “I’m really interested in the fracturing, in the weird decisions and the words that don’t quite fit, in the idiosyncrasies of it.”
Kipnis said Messud might be setting the bar too high in expecting a chatbot that is designed for interaction to also be “brilliantly original.”
“I think the idea is that it promotes or helps people engage who might not otherwise engage in classics,” Kipnis said. “People who just want a different experience of reading.”
IGs oversee most federal agencies. Why not the Supreme Court?
Glenn Fine.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Inspector general would boost accountability, trust in federal judiciary, argues Glenn Fine in talk promoting new book, ‘Watchdogs’
Inspectors general are placed in most federal agencies to promote efficiency and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and the U.S. Supreme Court would benefit from having one, said former inspector general of the Department of Justice Glenn Fine.
There are 74 offices of inspectors general across the federal government, but the federal judiciary, which includes the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. District Courts, has none. With roughly 2,000 judges, 30,000 employees, and an $8 billion budget, the federal judiciary is a huge operation that lends itself to fraud and waste, which only an independent internal overseer can evaluate and investigate, said Fine ’78, J.D. ’85.
“Justices are human, and some may commit misconduct, and some may be accused of misconduct unfairly,” said Fine during a conversation with Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “I believe an inspector general would be good for the U.S. Supreme Court and it would help improve trust in the court.”
Fine’s proposal for the Supreme Court was one of several he offered during the talk about his new book, “Watchdogs: Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government,” which highlights the critical role of inspectors general in promoting efficiency and government accountability.
Established by Congress in 1978, the office of inspector general and its role is still not well understood by the public or even by government officials, said Fine, who hopes his book underscores the critical work they do. As independent, nonpartisan overseers within their agencies, inspectors general can conduct audits, evaluations, and investigations to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse, providing an essential check and balance in government. IGs report to their agency heads and to Congress and must make public reports with recommendations.
“We do need a better answer to the question of who is watching the watchdogs, both in terms of when there’s actual misconduct committed and also when an IG is just not that effective.”
Glenn Fine
“They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of, and that’s true,” said Fine. “When I was the IG of the Justice Department, I worked with five attorney generals, and when I was the acting IG of the Department of Defense, I worked with four secretaries of defense, and even they did not understand the independence of the IG.”
As inspector general of the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2011 and acting inspector general of the Department of Defense from 2006 to 2020, Fine served during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. In April 2020, Trump ousted Fine as the Pentagon’s acting watchdog, and subsequently removed him as the head of a panel tasked to oversee the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package. At the time, Trump also removed four other inspectors general, including the Intelligence Community IG and the State Department IG.
During his tenure at the Justice Department from 2000 to 2011, Fine’s office oversaw investigations of the ways in which the FBI missed and failed to connect the dots before the Sept. 11 attacks, the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the failure of FBI internal security procedures to detect agent Robert Hanssen as a spy working for Russia for over two decades, among many others.
From 2006 to 2020, Fine’s IG office at the Department of Defense investigated the use of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan, as well as the wars in Iraq and Syria, and the “Fat Leonard” case, the worst corruption scandal in Navy history.
During his talk, Fine also proposed reforms to improve the IG’s office, including setting a term limit for inspectors general, preventing them from holding multiple positions at the same time, and establishing a better system to oversee inspectors general.
“We do need a better answer to the question of who is watching the watchdogs, both in terms of when there’s actual misconduct committed and also when an IG is just not that effective,” said Fine.
Goldsmith, who interacted with Fine at the Justice Department when Goldsmith was the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, from 2003 to 2004, had words of praise for inspectors general.
“Inspectors general are feared in agencies because of their independence and because they could go anywhere and do anything within the department,” said Goldsmith. “It’s hard to exaggerate how important these institutions are to the functioning of the executive branch and how successful they are.”
The work of inspectors general makes government accountable and promotes democracy, said Fine, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School. They should strive to be timely, transparent, and make actionable recommendations, and most importantly, they should be independent and stand up to potential challenges by government officials.
“Don’t expect to be popular,” said Fine. “You can’t try to please one side or the other because that’s a recipe for disaster, and your credibility is shot. That’s the only thing that matters: your credibility or independence … the belief that you’re doing this in a nonpartisan, credible way, relying only on the facts.”
Time for ‘emergence of a new and better democracy’
Civil rights attorney and Howard professor Sherrilyn Ifill details need for national reckoning, greater civic involvement
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
“We are at a perilous moment in our country,” celebrated civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said Tuesday evening before hundreds at Klarman Hall. And the factors that brought us to this point of divisiveness are more persistent and pervasive than “any one man or any one election.”
“We’re here because over decades, we’ve left the foundations of our democracy largely unattended” and “embraced an anemic and vapid form of citizenship,” she said. “We’re here because as a nation, we have been too weak to face the truth of our history and the truth of our national identity,” one rooted in slavery and continued through systemic racism and white supremacy, realities the nation looked past for too long.
President Alan Garber and chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri A. Charleston welcomed Ifill, who was president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 2013 to 2022 and is now a professor at Howard University Law School. Ifill was selected to deliver the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, which honors an individual whose public service, scholarship, or activism advances King’s lifelong work around racial justice, equality, and democratic ideals.
In her address, “Reimagining a New American Democracy,” Ifill said, “We are here because far too many have convinced themselves that the disease that is embedded in the DNA of America, racism and white supremacy, can coexist with healthy democracy. It cannot.”
Ifill reflected on how her life and the opportunities she had growing up in the 1960s and ’70s were profoundly different from those her nine older siblings and parents had, thanks to the victories won by previous generations who “found the courage to fight for a world they had never seen.”
“And that is what we are being called to do today. This is the work, as I have said, of founding a new American democracy, and it’s hard work,” said Ifill, who taught a seminar on the 14th Amendment at Harvard Law School last fall and will chair Howard’s new 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy, a multidisciplinary initiative focused on promoting equality and justice. “The emergence of a new and better democracy will come at a cost, but it will come.”
She criticized business leaders for enjoying the fruits of democracy but then saying they’re “agnostic” when things get messy, and took citizens to task for being eager to point out the flaws and failures of democracy, but not thinking they had any responsibilities to it beyond jury duty and voting every four years.
“We don’t show up for a school board meeting; we don’t show up for a city council meeting; we don’t call our representative; we don’t call our senator — we don’t do any of that stuff,” Ifill said. “We just expect them … ‘We voted for you; now make it happen.’ And then we love to be outraged when they don’t make it happen.”
The MLK lecture, which takes place in the fall in memory of King’s visit to Harvard Law School in October 1962, is an initiative launched three years ago by then-President Larry Bacow. His purpose was to offer a “new way for Harvard to participate in a critical and ongoing national conversation about racial justice, equity, and opportunity.”
Toward the end of this year’s event, Ifill had a discussion with David B. Wilkins, Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Wilkins, an expert on the legal profession, asked her what role lawyers play in the quest for a healthy, truly inclusive multiracial democracy.
Though some have damaged our norms and institutions in recent years, most “lawyers are leaders” and problem-solvers who are grounded in facts and the rule of law, which are foundational building blocks of any democracy, she said.
But it’s not their job alone. “Democracy is an ecosystem” in which we all have to do our part, Ifill said.
“I think we can all see that we need a fresh, new iteration of our democracy. Who’s going to do that — somebody else?” she said.
“We need to decide that we are going to be founders and framers of this new democracy, and that means behaving as though we have the right and the ability to literally shape this democracy.”
Warning for younger women: Be vigilant on breast cancer risk
Pathologist explains the latest report from the American Cancer Society
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Breast cancer rates rose by 1 percent a year from 2012-2021 for all American women combined, but steeper increases were seen for women under 50 and Asian American and Pacific Islander women, according to the American Cancer Society, which released its biennial report earlier this month on the state of the disease in the nation.
Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, second only to lung cancer. Overall mortality rates, however, have fallen by 44 percent since 1989 because of advances in treatment and earlier detection.
But the new figures also show there remain significant racial and ethnic disparities. There has, for instance, been no change in mortality rates for Native American women over the past 30 years. And Black women have a 5 percent lower incidence rate than white women but are 38 percent more likely to die from the disease, a trend of divergence that began after 1980.
Laura Collins, a physician who specializes in breast pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor at Harvard Medical School, spoke to the Gazette about the report and its findings. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Did anything in the latest report surprise you?
The piece of the report that caught the headlines was the increasing incidence found for breast cancer in young women. It was interesting to see that data captured in this report. Certainly anecdotally, we’ve been diagnosing breast cancer in younger women in the patient case mix coming through our practice. So in some ways it wasn’t surprising, but in others, it was a surprise to see it documented in this important paper from the American Cancer Society.
“We were seeing a decline in incidence in the 2000s, but we are now seeing a slow rise again, with that increase more dramatically present in younger women.”
Laura Collins
Do we have a sense of why that is?
People have many thoughts about this. Certainly there are changes in lifestyle that could impact the incidence of breast cancer, things like deferring childbearing to later in life, increasing obesity rates, people are walking and moving about less — we know that exercise is protective for many types of cancers, but certainly for breast cancer.
And then there are other environmental factors that we’re less certain about, and those need to be investigated further. The recent concern that people are thinking about is microplastics. These chemicals are everywhere, and it’s been found that we are ingesting them too. And so we need to figure out what harm they do and how we can avoid them.
While rates for younger women are on the rise, it looks like the overall rate of increase in breast cancer cases remains fairly stable. Have we made progress, or should we be worried?
Breast cancer is still one of the leading cancers amongst women and causes of death from cancer amongst women, but certainly with the introduction of widespread screening mammography we have increased detection at earlier stages.
We did see a decline in breast cancer rates because of improvements in diagnosis, treatment, and better understanding of the different types of breast cancers that women get. We’ve seen a decline in the mortality rate. We were seeing a decline in incidence in the 2000s, but we are now seeing a slow rise again, with that increase more dramatically present in younger women.
Are there other demographics of women who are more at risk than others?
It was outlined in the report the different populations for whom the increases are more marked, with the caveat that the ethnicities may not be as accurately captured as one would like.
There are differences in rates between white, Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander women, attributed in part to ongoing issues of systemic racism and access to care. For example, Black women often present at a higher stage, as well, we see biologically more aggressive cancers in that population.
Additionally, depending on where a person lives and their ability to access care, it can be a factor in the stage at which a woman’s breast cancer is detected. These are challenges that we need to figure out and resolve to create equity of care for all.
For young women who develop breast cancer, what are some additional challenges they face with their diagnoses and care?
Because we think of breast cancer as a cancer of older women and postmenopausal women, when young women present with a breast mass there’s a tendency to think that it’s something benign and very unlikely to be cancer. And often that is the case — it is much more likely to be a benign rather than malignant tumor.
But what this report tells us is that we can’t ignore these things. We can’t have this assumption that there’s nothing to worry about in younger women. The report should be a consciousness-raising issue, that we need to make sure that if a young woman presents with an abnormality there is prompt follow-up with necessary steps, whether it’s with imaging studies or a biopsy so there can be pathologic confirmation that either it’s benign or malignant.
And if it’s malignant, that the patient can be referred promptly for appropriate care. It’s important we don’t delay treatment.
What advice would you give to younger women when it comes to breast cancer awareness and how they might begin to advocate for themselves?
The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force lowered the age for biennial screening from 50 to 40 years of age. If you’re younger than 40, knowing if you have a family history of breast cancer is important because you may have an increased genetic predisposition to cancer. That would be a conversation to have with your healthcare provider.
And then knowing other risk factors, like if you’re having children later in life, your exercise levels, weight, things like that are factors for you and your healthcare provider to consider in guiding screening. If you feel an abnormality in your breast, make sure you speak to your healthcare provider about it. Because we are seeing increased breast cancer in younger women, it is important to advocate for yourself to ensure further examination or work-up is not delayed.
What gives you hope that we will continue to improve our capacity and ability to detect and reduce occurrences of breast cancer?
There’s a lot of work going on in the arena of breast cancer research. I know that the Harvard hospitals have a strong commitment to taking care of young women with breast cancer. I think there’s a big effort to understand the differences in the biology of breast cancer occurring in young women compared to cancers that occur in older women. That exploration and research is important to understanding how best to treat women with breast cancer.
Additionally, there are many different psychosocial factors that impact young women with breast cancer compared to older women, such as impacts on career, fertility concerns, or coping with cancer treatments whilst caring for young children, so attending to those issues is important and there’s lots of work going on in those areas as well.
Horror writing instructor defends prestige of ‘genre that bites back’
Self-described “former spooky kid” Katie Kohn teaches the class “Advanced Fiction: Writing Horror” at Harvard Extension School. The Gazette interviewed Kohn, a doctoral candidate in the Art, Film and Visual Studies program, about people’s fascination with scary stories, the difference between bad and good horror, and what the genre can teach us about ourselves.
What makes horror stories different from other stories?
All stories are rooted in conflict; they promise us that things will go wrong. But horror stories do two things that I truly think are unique. For one, horror tends to destabilize the very binaries out of which other stories source their tension. It’s not just about playing good against evil, the familiar against the strange. Horror complicates. For instance, we use the term “uncanny” to describe a breakdown between something we recognize and something we don’t. It’s neither simply familiar nor strange; it’s somehow both. Horror loves to take us to these places where nothing is certain, where it feels like the rug is always about to come out from under us.
That’s the other effect horror stories promise: uncertainty to the very end. Horror asks us to accept the prospect that things might not turn out well. If other stories overcome challenges or resolve tensions, this one might be as raw and as confrontational as life can be, without curation or niceties. For instance, there are points at which we no longer feel safe reading a horror story or watching a horror film, that moment when we want to look over our shoulder or check under the bed. All stories ask that we suspend our disbelief. Horror exploits that basic instinct to give ourselves over to stories. Horror is a genre that bites back.
“There are points at which we no longer feel safe reading a horror story or watching a horror film, that moment when we want to look over our shoulder or check under the bed.”
What draws people to horror stories?
The first theory that often comes up is catharsis. Horror fiction offers a safe way to experience things that we fear in life. I’d add that horror doesn’t just confront what we already fear. It’s a genre that goes digging; it looks for what’s buried, and in doing so, it tends to find that which is repressed, to speak to the otherwise unspeakable, or bring what has been overlooked or marginalized back into focus. Horror gets at truths that we might not be able to access in other ways. It gives us a language to speak to what troubles us. In that way, dark things can be quite illuminating.
And yet, horror is considered a lowly genre, both in literature and film. Why?
There are theories. American film scholar Linda Williams once proposed certain genres are considered “lowly” because they’re associated with bodily effects. Horror tries to get us to scream, melodrama to cry, and pornography, well … you know. All these genres are trying to assault your body, to provoke a physical reaction. This places them in a hierarchy opposite qualities associated with higher art: stimulating the mind or the intellect rather than the body. That’s a theory that I’m willing to buy. I’d also say it’s possible horror — genre fiction, in general — exists within existing power hierarchies. Popular fiction can be accessible fiction, becoming a home for marginalized voices with little access to institutional power. This is precisely one of the things that makes horror so exciting to me, personally, but it’s also what sets it apart.
What’s the difference between good and bad horror?
In any form of storytelling or craft there are “bad” versions, but these things are subjective. There is of course horror that just wants to shock or push you to the limits. I tend to find horror more satisfying when it’s tackling difficult or illuminating questions.
Folks use the term “elevated” horror to describe this, perhaps to distinguish certain texts and authors from horror’s reputation as a “lowly” genre, which is itself telling. But if we’re talking personal favorites, I don’t know how much such distinctions really matter. In film, I love “The Descent,” which is something of a cult hit, as well as “The Others,” more of a gothic. “Alien,” of course. As for prose, I always recommend Scott Smith’s “The Ruins.” I thought it was going to be a simple thriller, but it turned out to be a novel I return to year after year.
In general, I think the fun of horror is that it’s always surprising. Something doesn’t have to have a big budget or big names to strike a chord; sometimes what resonates can be quite personal — even idiosyncratic. For instance, I personally tend to avoid cannibalism plots, but I’ll run to haunted houses and feminine gothics or anything involving deep-sea horror. If there’s an underwater laboratory and things start to go wrong, I’m there. Not surprising, as one of my biggest fears is being stuck underwater.
In terms of works we read in this course, I do have a soft spot for Bram Stoker’s “The Judge’s House.” It’s a relatively simple ghost story, but it made me look over my shoulder when I first read it. And if horror isn’t making us question the world that we live in and our position in it, what’s the point?
How do classic and contemporary horror stories reflect the anxieties of their times?
In many ways we’re still very much living in the shadow of gothic literature. The gothic is a response to the Enlightenment era view of man’s supposed intellectual and moral prowess: that we can be in control or at least understand the world, that the known world is itself a stable — even conquerable — thing. Today, horror continues to do what the gothic has always done, reminding us that the world is far stranger than we presume to know and, ultimately, not ours to control. Horror will often take us to that more radical source of conflict where we realize that there is a limit to what we can control or even comprehend. Certainly, some stories exploit anxieties both past and present rooted in presumed oppositions: us vs. them, pure vs. impure, holy vs. profane, good vs. evil. But again, horror also confronts these binaries.
Our course tries to look to the past to see how much of its legacy remains present in today’s horror. We cover excerpts from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as well as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” But the focus is more on contemporary works. Of course, we must consider Stephen King as well as other prolific writers who are not necessarily household names: folks like Paul Tremblay or Tananarive Due or well-known experimentalists like Carmen Maria Machado. We also look beyond the format of prose in works from Emily Carroll and even a children’s picture book. I genuinely think Stan and Jan Berenstain’s “The Spooky Old Tree” is a masterpiece of horror storytelling, it’s just one that happens to be for early readers.
How do horror writers succeed in raising the hairs on our neck?
There are many ways horror gets under our skin. One strategy is docufiction. In different ways, both “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” are presented as first-hand accounts, making us wonder whether we understand our own world as well as its sometimes-naive protagonists do.
Related is the motif of infection. I don’t just mean as a plot point, say, the mass infection of a zombie apocalypse. If the characters in a film have just watched a video that will kill them in seven days, what does that mean for those of us in the audience who just watched the same video? What really gets under our skin — and what really makes a film like George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead” so affecting — isn’t the idea that the scary thing in the story could happen to any of the characters, but that it could also happen to us. By the end of “Night of the Living Dead,” you know that there is something worse than being bitten by a mindless zombie, and it’s something possibly even more insidious. Zombies, after all, are just reminders that to live with a human body offers no guarantee that one will be seen as human.
It’s important to not forget that horror isn’t just about being scary. I tell my students that horror, like any fiction, should try to tap into something that resonates. Something that affects people on a deeper level. Not just the element of surprise or a jump scare, but something that lasts.
‘Vote!’ exhibition honors those who fought for civil rights
While researching voter suppression and the Civil Rights Movement, artist Lisa Jones Gentry came across a story published by the Southern Poverty Law Institute. The news post highlighted 40 people who were murdered between 1954 and 1968, among them activists, victims of vigilantes, and ordinary citizens. The names inspired Gentry to create a piece of mixed media artwork to honor those lives.
“They Died for You: Vote 2024” features the faces of these men, women, and children concealed among brightly colored geometric shapes. The piece, and another Gentry created in 2020, sit in a new exhibition titled “Vote!” highlighting African American voting history at the Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
“They were really just ordinary people whose lives had been cut short because they were trying to make sure that this country was free for everyone,” said Gentry, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
“Vote!” showcases key figures who historically defined civic participation as their community struggled for equal voting rights. Works by Gentry, Haili Francis, A.L.M. ’18, Titus Kaphar, and others are on display along with selections from the Hutchins Center’s permanent collection, including Jules R. Arthur, Ray A. Frieden ’65, Charles W. White, and Rico Gatson.
A detail of “Kathleen Cleaver,” 1969, by David Mosley
A detail of “Shirley Chisholm: Unbought,” 2024, by Haili Francis, A.L.M. ’18.
Bust of Frederick Douglass, 1919, by Isaac S. Hathaway (left) and “Drawing the Blinds, Thaddeus Stevens,” 2014, by Titus Kaphar.
A detail of “Raffle,” 1970, from the “Wanted” series by Charles W. White.
A detail of “Rosa Parks,” 2011, by James “Jamie” Roux.
Curator Dell Marie Hamilton, acting director of the Cooper Gallery for African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, said she is intrigued by undecided voters and said she hopes the exhibition can show them the long road Black Americans have traveled to gain and protect their right to vote.
“This is a very long trajectory that doesn’t just happen. We, as civic participants, are part of this history as well,” she said. “For those folks who are perhaps still struggling with whether or not this is even a system worth saving, I would hope that an exhibition like this gives them some of the fuel they need to understand that this is the history that we’re wrestling with. This is the aftermath of why we are where we are. I feel like you can’t know the present or the future without really understanding the history.”
From the beginning, visitors are confronted with the U.S.’ violent and shameful past with enslavement. Kaphar’s “Drawing the Blinds, Thaddeus Stevens” is an oil on canvas featuring the abolitionist and American lawyer and a seated Black woman — a hint at Stevens’ relationship with Lydia Hamilton Smith, a mixed-race, born-free housekeeper, businesswoman, and abolitionist. The piece is displayed next to “Raffle,” a piece developed by Charles W. White in 1970 that was inspired by advertisements promoting slave auctions. “Raffle” is an oil wash on illustration board in shades of brown, featuring an enslaved Black woman who appears to be pregnant.
Curator Dell Hamilton in the Rudenstine Gallery at the Hutchins Center.
Two works by Francis, an alumna of the Harvard Extension School who helped plan a Harvard Black Alumni Society’s Global Change Makers Conference, which inspired the exhibition, are also displayed.
“As an artist, my role is to simply bring attention to something that can spark a larger conversation,” said Francis, an artist and scholar working at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “I believe that when we use art [we can] catalyze these conversations that can be difficult to have in other areas.”
One of Francis’ pieces, “Sidney Revels Redmond,” showcases the legacy of Redmond, a fellow alum (1923, HLS 1925), the grandson of the first Black senator, and a civil rights attorney in his own right. Francis’ second piece, “Shirley Chisholm: Unbought,” pays homage to the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman to run for president.
“My hope is that people understand that voting is powerful,” she said. “They do have a voice, even though sometimes they can get discouraged when the outcome doesn’t necessarily look like it’s going in a direction that feels fair or right.”
“Vote!” runs until Dec. 7, and is co-sponsored by the Harvard Black Alumni Society, the Harvard Alumni Association, and Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
Mara Bolis (center) dances at a June event celebrating the mothers of La Mé, Côte d’Ivoire with Mayor Florence Achi (left) and HKS student Kotomi Odate (far right).
Credit: Adzopé City Mayor’s Office, Côte d’Ivoire
Jessica McCann
Harvard Correspondent
9 min read
Or how a gender-equality seminar sparked change for women in Côte d’Ivoire
Mara Bolis arrived at the airport in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire last June — delayed, tired, and disheveled following a 20-plus hour journey from Boston. A security guard signaled for her to follow him through passport control and led her to a waiting SUV, assuring her that her luggage would follow. She sank into the back seat, eyes closed, looking forward to her hotel bed.
But when the car rolled to a stop, it was outside the gate of an elegant home. Glancing down at her jeans, sneakers, and cargo shirt, Bolis felt a wave of panic. It occurred to her that she was at the home of Patrick Achi, the former prime minister of the west African nation — and a former observer of her course.
Bolis’ road to Côte d’Ivoire began last spring semester. A fellow at the Harvard Center for International Development (CID), she led a seminar titled “Bringing a Gender Lens to Development Policy and Practice.”
While there are many drivers of inequality in the developing world, marginalization based on gender is a persistent cause. Part of the reason is because women continue to have less formal political authority — they make up only about 27 percent of parliamentarians around the world, so their unique needs and perspectives often go overlooked. Bolis’ course aimed to help leaders build the practical skills necessary to bridge that gap.
Achi arrived for a research fellowship at CID that semester. After stepping down from government in October 2023 to focus on his longtime role as president of the Regional Council of the La Mé region, he had come to Cambridge to research the factors slowing Africa’s development progress.
The former prime minister was planning for his own spring seminar, “Unlocking Africa’s Potential through Development,” which would provide insights into these challenges and explore strategies for overcoming them, and he decided to sit in on Bolis’ class as an observer.
After the first class, Achi approached Bolis and told her he’d enjoyed the class but felt uncomfortable as the only man in the room. (He would later reflect that this was the first time this had ever happened to him in a professional setting.) Achi didn’t want the other participants to feel they could not speak freely with a man in the room. He asked whether he should continue to attend.
“You should absolutely come back,” Bolis replied with a smile. “And now you know how most women in the professional world feel.”
Achi would not only return, he would soon become an integral voice in class and an advocate of gender equality.
“It was revelatory for him,” said Bolis. “In learning about examples of inequality in public life around the world, and how inequality on the basis of gender had personally affected many of the other students in the class, he grew increasingly energized by the prospect of what he could do to support women back home in La Mé.”
Achi reflected on his experience in Bolis’ course in an article for CID, noting that it was “instrumental in deepening my understanding of gender issues and made me realize that while many of us believe we are implementing effective gender policies, the actual awareness and prioritization of these is often significantly lacking.”
Achi and Bolis began collaborating on the development of a comprehensive gender strategy for the La Mé region. The work had three components: research to identify women’s needs as distinct from those of men (the first time the region had gathered sex-disaggregated statistics to inform their strategy development); a roundtable discussion, hosted by the La Mé Regional Council, of the key issues facing women in the region; and a training, run by Bolis, for elected and administrative officials to bring a gender lens to their policy and programs.
In June, Achi and Bolis initiated a research project alongside two HKS students, Femi Olonilua and Kotomi Odate, with the support of gender leaders and members of Achi’s La Mé team. The team went on to talk to hundreds of residents about what activities they felt would help women reach their goals. The HKS students facilitated focus groups and administered questionnaires, then worked to identify the key challenges facing women and develop policy recommendations to address them.
In July, Bolis arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, expecting to participate in a small, closed-door session with the Ministry of Women in the Economy to discuss opportunities and living standards for women and provide training on bringing a gender lens to policy and program development for La Mé regional officials.
This is how Bolis found herself at Achi’s home, surrounded by elegantly dressed people who, she was realizing, had waited until she’d arrived at 10 p.m. to begin their dinner. What Bolis assumed would be a private session turned out to be a much longer major event.
“When we arrived in La Mé the next day, I found a public ceremony with over 100 participants, including members of the press, elected and administrative officials from all levels of government, international donors, representatives from the World Bank and French Development Bank, and members of civil society and women’s rights organizations from across Côte d’Ivoire,” said Bolis.
She was brought onstage to give remarks. She noted, laughing, that working with Achi means always being on your toes.
Later, in a smaller, closed-door session, Olonilua and Odate presented their survey findings to the multi-stakeholder group. The two students talked about women’s aspirations in agriculture and commerce, their interest in learning about women’s rights, and the barriers they face.
Following the presentations, the group talked about their “vision for women’s empowerment in La Mé and took a hard look at exactly what was standing in our way,” Bolis said. “Like elsewhere in the developing world, the unpaid care work done by women in the region keeps them from engaging in economic activity and gaining financial independence. They lack safe and reliable transportation options. Many women were unable to secure permission to leave their homes alone. In parts of La Mé, women have an 80 percent illiteracy rate. We talked through these problems and their root causes. The conversation had an incredible energy.”
One problem the group identified is that many women in La Mé lack formal identification, which can lead to their being overlooked in economic or social programs. “Right then and there, we decided to have an ID drive. It’s rare that you can have a conversation with so many different players where everyone is ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work,” said Bolis.
Over the course of the rest of the week, Bolis led a gender-sensitization workshop for 50 elected and administrative regional government officials in La Mé, which was met with requests for more such opportunities by male and female participants alike.
Then Achi’s wife, Florence Achi, one of the few female mayors in Côte d’Ivoire, invited the HKS team to an event celebrating the region’s mothers where the mayor was the guest of honor.
Before they went, Mayor Achi’s team helped the HKS team obtain dresses in Ivorian fashion to befit the occasion. The event featured a parade of women’s associations, music, and dancing with hundreds of celebrants resplendent in a rainbow of colors and designs.
In closing, Mayor Achi gave a rousing speech, assuring the crowd that women could do anything they set their minds to — even become mayor — to an eruption of roaring cheers.
“Nothing could have prepared us for the moment the mayor pulled us in to join her in a traditional dance in front of all of the spectators,” Bolis said. “The audience was generous with their applause, considering our clear lack of experience with Ivorian dance.”
Since the July event, Achi’s gender-equity work in La Mé has picked up speed. This fall, La Mé’s Regional Council approved the country’s first-ever gender-responsive budget, which allots funding for gender initiatives across the region in 2025. Areas of focus include women’s rights awareness-raising, training on active citizenship, adult literacy classes, and enhanced support for agricultural production.
Women in the area have also expressed a strong interest in financial-inclusion initiatives. In response, the government has budgeted for increased investment in support of women’s savings groups, which are called AVEC (French for “with”), in Côte d’Ivoire, as well as training to help women use their phones for saving, lending, and transactional purposes.
The new budget “brought tears to my eyes,” said Bolis, who has wrapped up her time in CID but continues her work in gender-justice initiatives as a fellow with Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.
“These initiatives will contribute to the financial resilience, well-being, and happiness of women — and men — across La Mé. They are the outcome of countless hours of work by our students to carefully untangle these complex issues, and by former Prime Minister Achi’s efforts to champion gender issues in a new and important way. They demonstrate the types of cross-border collaboration and joint learning that is made possible through an environment like Harvard. The joy of developing partnerships to create more equitable futures is why I do what I do.”
Grappling with how clearings may support rainforest animal life
Aerial view of a bai in Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Republic of the Congo.
Photos by Evan Hockridge
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
New research offers detailed overview of layout, makeup of canopy gaps in Congo
“Tropical rainforest” conjures images of close-packed trees, dense humidity, a home for plenteous and diverse animal life.
But rainforests in the Congo Basin of west-central Africa also host lesser-known clearings called bais. Some stretch the length of 40 football fields; others only a few hundred feet. Though not widespread, they appear to play a big role in making the rainforest a highly complex, biodiverse habitat, and new research may boost understanding of how and why.
A new study in the journal Ecology provides an unprecedented, detailed overview of bais’ layout, makeup, and abundance across more than 5,000 square miles of conserved forest in Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Republic of the Congo. Culminating more than two years of field study, the work was led by Evan Hockridge, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the lab of Andrew Davies, assistant professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
“This was a huge data collection effort, involving everything from drones to soil measurements to camera trapping to identification of plant species,” Hockridge said.
Hockridge originally set out to study how large African animals engineer their own ecosystems, but quickly realized megafauna cannot be understood outside the bais they inhabit.
“Animals are extremely attracted to these giant clearings in the middle of the forest, including many endangered animals like the Western lowland gorilla and the African forest elephant,” Hockridge said. “These keystone conservation priority species will spend enormous portions of their lives basically just moving between bais.”
Drones helped the team remotely sense bai vegetation and aided bai classification from satellite data.
A pair of forest buffalo in Mbouebe Bai, one of the data collection sites.
African forest elephants move between bais throughout their lifetimes
Evan Hockridge (right foreground) with collaborators including paper co-authors Sylvain Ngouma, Elijah McGill, Ella Bradford, and Beatrice Youd.
Coming upon a bai after hiking through thick canopies of trees is “stunning,” according to Hockridge, who spent several months of 2021 in Congo collecting data and leading teams.
Without warning, the trees stop, opening into a clearing where forest buffalo often lounge among short grasses and sedges. A stream cuts through the expanse. Flocks of a thousand African green pigeons land nearby to gather salt and other soil nutrients. “It’s like something out of a picture book, but the picture book doesn’t exist,” Hockridge said.
For their study, the scientists developed a technically sophisticated remote-sensing protocol using drone-based Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) and satellites, producing models and maps of bais across the vast landscape of the Congo basin. They found many more bais than anyone had expected — more than 2,000 distinct ones in the national park, as opposed to the informally counted 250 or so.
Yet the total habitat that bais encompass is quite small — less than 0.2 percent of the entire national park, according to the research. Varying in size, they also tend to be clustered together, which could ease conservation efforts, Hockridge said.
The analysis also unveiled a tantalizing new insight into the biological makeup of bais: stark differences in plant compositions between those frequented by gorillas, versus those frequented by elephants. They’re not sure why.
“There’s a great need to understand what’s happening with these bais because they’re so important to organisms we’re trying to conserve,” Hockridge said. “Our goal is to understand how animals are interacting with these clearings. Are they making them? How dependent are they on them? Are these clearings stable over time?” Their next study may delve deeper into these questions, Hockridge said.
Paper authors include collaborators Gwili Gibbon, head of research and monitoring at Odzala-Kokoua National Park, and Sylvain Ngouma and Roger Ognangue, research “ecomonitors” at the park who served as the Harvard team’s local experts in the area’s biology and botany.
“This work would have been impossible without them,” Hockridge said. “They’re the most quintessential partners in the work we do.”
The Congo Basin’s rainforests offer so much more than just the carbon they store, noted Davies, “and we are still just barely scratching the surface of what we know about them.”
“This study helps us understand a little bit more about their functioning, and the treasure trove of biodiversity they hold, which only inspires and excites us to keep exploring and discovering more of their secrets,” Davies said.
Stroboscopic technique uses darkness to shine light on the science of movement
Exceptional student athletes, artists, and performers aren’t hard to come by under the bright lights of Harvard’s sports arenas and performance spaces. These images, however, were taken in the dark — a necessary technical requirement to make images using stroboscopic flash.
Photographic motion studies were first pioneered in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge, who used multiple cameras and trip wires to photograph horses galloping. The process later evolved to use individual cameras and strobes in the work of the more contemporary Harold E. Edgerton and Gjon Mili.
How we did it
During photoshoots the students and I choreograph a short movement, usually one to three seconds in length. Setting my shutter speed to match this, I place my camera on a tripod facing the student and point my flash unit toward the student’s path of motion. I then turn off the lights and make adjustments to ensure proper exposure of the photos.
As students perform, the flash unit fires repeatedly, each flash creating another likeness of the person. We continue to take photos and adjust variables until we get an image that pleases us both. As a result, the photos in this project are all created in-camera and are not the result of using Photoshop to put multiple images together. Completing these shoots — all in a completely dark room — provided a collaborative and technically challenging project that yields delightfully unique results.
A behind-the-scenes look at photographing Alan Huang ’27 and Jasmine Zhang ’25 using stroboscopic flash.Huang, vice president of the Harvard WuShu Club, uses a spear.Zhang, president of the Harvard WuShu Club, uses a broadsword.Ballet dancer Sophia Barakett ’25 dances in the Harvard Dance Center.Barakett in motion.Lucas Amory ’25, former music director and conductor of the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra, conducts.
Gymnast and aerialist Brice Laurent ’25 does a handstand.
Circus trapeze artist and ringmaster Izzy Patrowicz, a 2024 Extension School graduate, performs.
Scarier than ghosts: A nurse superfan and a spouse with secret rooms
Steven Pinker, Maria Tatar, other scholars recommend books for Halloween season
6 min read
‘Adela’s House,’ a short story in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’
Recommended by Laura van den Berg, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program; author of “The Third Hotel”
In “Adela’s House,” a brother and sister enter a derelict house, along with their neighbor, Adela. The house quickly proves to be nightmarish, possessed with its own terrible life force; once inside Adela is never seen again. While the plot summary of “Adela’s House” might sound like a conventional haunted house tale, Mariana Enríquez is after something far more charged. In her translator’s note, Megan McDowell writes that “what there is of gothic horror in the stories in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism … most of Mariana’s characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and a vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.” In Enríquez’s hands, the house at the center of “Adela’s House” is a conduit for exploring both individual and collective trauma, for showing us just how close at hand the ghosts of the past are.
Bluebeard
Recommended byMaria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology
A man, a woman, and a house with a chamber, its floor awash in blood, with corpses hanging from hooks in the walls. These are the main features of “Bluebeard,” a horror story in which the title figure tests the obedience of his wife by handing her a key and telling her that she may open any door but the one that key fits. Curiosity gets the better of her, and, once she sees the victims of her husband’s rage, she flees, dropping the key in the pool of blood. Just as Bluebeard is about to execute his wife (he sees the telltale blood on the key), the wife’s brothers come to her rescue.
For many years, the husband’s homicidal history in this folktale took a back seat to the wife’s curiosity, which was inflected morally as sexual infidelity. Today, “Bluebeard” has almost fallen into a cultural black hole, but the story still flashes out at us in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” and Margaret Atwood’s “Robber Bride.” The Hollywood Dream Factory, which gave us Bluebeard films like “Rebecca” and “Secret Beyond the Door,” has now recycled the old horror story (with a perverse twist) in “Get Out” and “Ex Machina.” Presto! Bluebeard has become a new kind of monster, a seductive femme fatale who has become as dangerous as her folkloric forebear and who reveals to us a host of new cultural anxieties about female intelligence and ingenuity.
Dark Harvest
Recommended bySteven Schlozman, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard
This book is among the best American horror novels ever written. It mixes Americana with a sense of resigned but terrifying fatalism, adding just a tincture of the occult.
Picture a small New England town, normal in all ways except one day a year when everyone knows that the harvest yields something foul. It combines normalcy and gore, letter jackets and morality, and most importantly, the illusion that you can escape when you never really can.
Dracula
Recommended by David Scadden, Gerald and Darlene Jordan Professor of Medicine
I study the blood so it has to be Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
It may not be high art, but it captures the tensions of science and myth, morality and bestiality, the familiar and the foreign with page-turning suspense. Blood embodying both regenerative life and corrupting disease is not just a literary conceit in either the book or, as far as I can tell, in life; it rings true — chillingly true — and is worth thinking about.
Misery
Recommended by Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
My reactions to horror fiction spring from my world view as a scientific skeptic who is convinced that mental life depends entirely on an intact brain. That means I’m incapable of experiencing frisson at the antics of ghouls, zombies, demons, curses, dybbuks, and other paranormal mischief-makers — they come across as kitschy, not horrific. At the same time my awareness of human depravity is all too acute, and I can be suitably chilled by the prospect of a character’s ingenuity mobilized in the service of malevolent passions like revenge, manipulation, or sexual jealousy. “Cape Fear” and “Fatal Attraction” are deliciously terrifying, but as a writer I’d have to single out “Misery,” which brings to life the mixed blessing of having devoted fans.
Strange Practice
Recommended by Samantha DeWitt, Resource Sharing Specialist, Widener Library
This series follows Greta Helsing, an English doctor who treats supernatural beings — “vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights and entropy in mummies.” What could be better? My favorite was a sweet baby ghoul with a fever, who “wouldn’t even touch her nice rat.” (It was an ear infection, of course, an illness ubiquitous to all children.) Vivian Shaw’s storytelling could be gimmicky, but it isn’t. These well-written books are an absorbing and fun escape into a world where the supernatural is routine.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
Recommended byHannah Hack, University Archives Administrative Coordinator
This book is a whimsical, heartfelt, and at times laugh-out-loud tale of a young, lonely witch trying to find her place. It has an assortment of odd yet lovable characters (including a grumpy librarian and possibly murderous children), lots of magic, and a touch of romance.
Wuthering Heights
Recommended by Min Jin Lee, 2018-2019 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute; author of “Pachinko”
I’m a coward and can get spooked by my shadow, so I avoid stories and any visual media gory or frightening. Not a big fan of Halloween. Life and Washington, D.C., are plenty scary enough. That said, I am very interested in any narrative about a haunting love. I can think of few stories with the kind of obsessive romance that rival “Wuthering Heights” — which has a ghost, forbidden desire, pathological love triangles, class and ethnic prejudices, intrigue, rivalries, and some good old-fashioned anguish. Catherine is kinda bonkers, but Heathcliff has the hots for her, and by gosh, he suffers for it.
Amid Hurricane Milton’s devastation, a sliver of good news
Cellphone data suggest evacuation mandates, warning systems worked
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Earlier this month Hurricane Milton caused an estimated $50 billion in damage and claimed the lives of at least 14 people, yet didn’t deliver the scale of destruction some had feared.
Preparedness seems to have played a role in Milton’s relatively low death toll, according to a panel recently hosted by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. This is “good news” according to Satchit Balsari, co-director of the research platform CrisisReady, which uses cellphone data to study the travel patterns of people in disaster zones.
“Warning systems and evacuations and people getting used to those risks and hardening their homes actually make a difference,” said Balsari, associate professor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Evacuation hit 80 percent to 90 percent in some of the key areas.”
Those key areas, concentrated mostly along Florida’s coast, are “mandatory evacuation” zones. Further inland, he said, evacuation rates dropped to around 45 to 50 percent. “So yes, while we’re celebrating that mandates work, about half the population had not evacuated.”
He added that people with pets, elderly residents, or residents living in fortified buildings were likelier to stay put. Another factor in evacuation rate, according to Balsari: whether a population has experienced a disaster in living memory. As recently as 2022, Florida was struck by the deadly Category 4 storm Hurricane Ian.
“The storm dropped only 10 inches of rain in western North Carolina, but there are over 250 people dead. They weren’t expecting flooding there.”
Daniel Schrag
Balsari also pointed to the Bangladesh cyclones of 1990 and 1994.
“What’s interesting is they were almost the same storm. They had almost the same track, same intensity, made landfall in the same place. In 1990 the cyclone hit in Bangladesh, and 138,000 people died. Three years later, the same storm hits, 350 people died.”
The difference he said, was that by 1994 the government had invested in an early warning system and constructed concrete bunkers across the country where people could ride out the storm.
“Something like 450,000 people sheltered in those bunkers,” Balsari said. “And 350 people died.”
Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm which hit the South just weeks before Milton, is tied to more than 200 deaths, with economic losses estimated at $250 billion.
“The storm dropped only 10 inches of rain in western North Carolina, but there are over 250 people dead, still, I think, about 100 missing, and hundreds and hundreds of homes destroyed,” said Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering. “They weren’t expecting flooding there. In North Carolina, they weren’t expecting the kind of impacts from the storm.”
Referring to Milton, Balsari added: “A lot of people who died in this hurricane died not because of the hurricane, but because of tornadoes that were spawned by the hurricane.
“So that’s an interesting phenomenon. And it suggests it’s the surprise element [that’s deadly].”
However, no matter how prepared a locale is, there are some things you cannot anticipate. Balsari pointed to an epinephrine shortage in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
“The storm just unleashed tons of bees, and they have such a huge spike in bee stings that a lot of the relief organizations are actually trying to get more epinephrine to North Carolina as soon as possible.”
Balsari cautioned that we’re only starting to understand the full toll of Hurricanes Milton and Helene.
“You lose cellphone coverage, power is lost at home, your nebulizer is not going to work, you cannot refrigerate your insulin, and access to dialysis centers are sometimes interrupted. In the couple of months after a hurricane, people continue to die at a higher rate than expected.”
New Herbaria director studies plants via satellite and microscope for insights on changing planet
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Jeannine Cavender-Bares.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
The 5 million specimens of pressed and dried plants, algae, and fungi in the Harvard University Herbaria’s collection — among the world’s largest — must be celebrated and protected for their own sake, and for their role in deepening our understanding of a changing planet, says newly appointed Director Jeannine Cavender-Bares.
“Biodiversity collections house the knowledge we have about organisms, their taxonomies, their names, and the whole histories of their discovery,” said Cavender-Bares, a plant ecologist and professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
The new director has spent her career studying plant biology from the smallest physiological features to sweeping habitats made visible by advances in satellite-based remote sensing. Solving the related crises of climate change and biodiversity loss requires discovery at many different scales, she said.
Cavender-Bares points to a research project she led that mapped swaths of diseased oak trees so they could be culled to prevent spread. On the cellular level, her teams examined tissue of trees stricken with oak wilt disease to understand immune response. Using aircraft, they measured electromagnetic information from affected forests, detecting sick and healthy canopies.
“This is an example of how we’re moving from cells and details of the anatomy of a plant to large, regional remote sensing for management,” she explained.
This and other projects fall under a National Science Foundation-funded Biology Integration Institute based at the University of Minnesota that Cavender-Bares leads, called ASCEND, aimed, in part, at training the next generation of leaders in spectral biology and its many applications.
As a leading expert in spectral biology, Cavender-Bares uses the interaction between light and plant matter to reveal unique, fingerprint-like information about plants’ chemistry, structure, and cellular function. Such information can be gathered from handheld spectroradiometers measuring how leaves reflect light; also from aircraft and satellite sensors, like those planned for NASA’s Surface Biology and Geology mission and the European Space Agency’s CHIME mission, which will capture sweeping hyperspectral information over landscapes for monitoring agriculture practices and soil health.
Cavender-Bares is initiating an effort toward spectral digitization of herbarium specimens, not only at Harvard but among a network of academic and institutional herbaria worldwide.
“We’re working with other herbaria to get all the protocols worked out and figure out the right way to do this, so that we don’t have 10 different herbaria doing this 10 different ways,” she said.
The Herbaria will soon mark the 100-year anniversary of one of its largest and most important collections, the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogramic Botany, which contains 1.4 million specimens of lichenized and non-lichenized fungi, bryophytes, and algae. Luminaries in mycological sciences and botany will gather at Harvard to reflect on the collection’s history, and share knowledge about everything from the foundational importance of fungi in ecosystems to the latest science of rusts, which are pathogens that cause plant fungal diseases.
Cavender-Bares hopes events like the Farlow celebration will give the Herbaria a forward-facing outlook and underscore for the public its significance as a hub of scientific knowledge. Biodiversity collections show us where we’ve been and what we could lose, she noted.
“We’re facing choices about converting our forests into solar panels,” she said. “But if we’re not simultaneously thinking about all these other organisms for the functions they provide, for the water they clean, for erosion control, for carbon sequestration — we’re going to lose them, and the potential they harbor for regenerating healthy ecosystems in the face of global change.”
This quilt, created by Sherry Rencenberger Boram, second cousin of Robert James, depicts members of the James family in and around their home in Ord, Nebraska. The words in the sky list qualities attributed to Robert and his eight siblings.
Ardis and Robert James Collection, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1997.007.0123
Robert and Ardis James created a culture of philanthropy within the James family that has spanned generations
The late Ardis Butler James — an avid quilter and collector of quilts since childhood — and her husband, the late Robert “Bob” James, M.B.A. ’48, Ph.D. ’53, amassed an assortment of quilts that eventually became the largest public collection in the world. In an early example of generosity that would characterize their philanthropy and inspire so many others, Ardis and Bob, both native Nebraskans, donated nearly 1,000 quilts to establish the International Quilt Study Center (now known as the International Quilt Museum) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in 1997. The couple was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 2011.
The Jameses’ love of quilts — made by piecing together different fabrics to create something beautiful and unified — is a fitting metaphor for their approach to philanthropy. Through their generosity and service to Harvard, the James family has had a profound impact on the entire University community, sewing together the rich variety of Harvard’s constituent Schools and programs to create a unified whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Robert and Ardis James.
Photo courtesy of University of Nebraska Foundation; Photographer Geoff Johnson, Malone & Co.
Inspired by the quality of his Harvard education, the couple wanted to give back to the institution that had given Bob so much, making their first donation to the Harvard Business School fund. Shortly after, they made a significant contribution to the School to establish the Robert and Ardis James Fellowship, which offered scholarships for Eastern European students in need. These gifts were driven by their unwavering belief in supporting future generations and initiated a lifetime of transformative support.
Recognizing that leaders and change-makers emerge from every corner of the University, Bob and Ardis expanded their philanthropy beyond HBS and the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the two Schools that Bob had attended. The James family’s generosity began creating a quilt of a different sort, intentionally integrating various aspects of the University and their own passions to strengthen the institution as a whole, embodying the spirit of “One Harvard” long before President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust championed this idea during her presidency.
A family tradition
Bob and Ardis instilled their values into their children, Ralph James, M.B.A. ’82, and Cathy James Paglia, M.B.A. ’76, from an early age. Together, two generations of the James family have spread their generosity across the University, including gifts to HBS, Harvard Griffin GSAS, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Their contributions were pivotal in the recent restoration of HDS’s Swartz Hall, reflecting their belief in the importance of understanding religion to comprehend human motivations and foster a peaceful, just world. Named in the family’s honor, the James Room at Swartz Hall is a new, state-of-the-art space for teaching, learning, and gathering that expands the School’s convening power.
“Whether or not my father knew it or articulated it in this way, he was one of the earliest proponents of One Harvard. My sister and I have embraced it ever since.”
Ralph James, M.B.A. ’82
Having grown up when opportunities for women were scarcer, Ardis was deeply inspired by HRI’s mission, particularly the Schlesinger Library, which illuminates the lives of American women past and present. She believed that to impact the future, one must first understand the past.
Outside of their own philanthropic interests, the James family has enduring faith in Harvard’s leadership to address the biggest challenges in the world today.
“My family’s commitment to philanthropy reflects many things,” Ralph says. “The quality and values of leadership really do matter. Execution matters. You can have a fabulous strategy, but it isn’t going to have the impact you want unless it’s executed properly. Across the board, Harvard exhibits these qualities. They check all the boxes.”
Ralph and Cathy have lent their time and talents in support of the University in numerous other ways. Ralph previously served as HBS executive director for external relations, as HBS executive director of executive education, as co-chair of HGSE’s most recent fundraising campaign, and as a member of the HDS Dean’s Council and the HRI Dean’s Advisory Council. Cathy has co-chaired her HBS class reunion efforts every year since her graduation.
Today, Ralph and Cathy honor their late parents by carrying on their legacy, seeking new ways to support Harvard and adding new patches to the family’s meticulously crafted quilt of philanthropy.
“Everything always evolves. Philanthropy continues to change. My parents had a particular way of viewing their philanthropy, and Cathy and I are continuing that tradition,” Ralph said. “They supported what was important to them, and as we grow older, we bring our own perspectives into family philanthropy with the hope that the next generation will do the same. The beauty of Harvard is that whatever you may be interested in or want to accomplish, Harvard is doing it somewhere on campus.”
Comedy writer Simon Rich talks about turning life into funny fiction, offers tips for young writers
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Simon Rich.
Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP/file
Simon Rich had a two-book contract from Random House by the time he graduated from Harvard in 2007. Since then, he has written for “Saturday Night Live,” been a showrunner for the cable TV comedy “Man Seeking Woman” (based on his collection “The Last Girlfriend on Earth”), wrote the screenplay for the Seth Rogen film “An American Pickle,” and published numerous pieces in publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and McSweeney’s.
His latest collection of short stories (his seventh), “Glory Days,” follows a hilarious cast of characters, including an old man who tells his great-grandson about romance in the age before post-climate change dystopia, a nostalgic participation trophy buried in a landfill under “four hundred tons of Wow potato chips,” and David and Goliath (who, as it turns out, threw the fight).
Rich spoke to the Gazette about his latest work and offered some insight into his creative process — with some tips for young writers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What approach did you take to “Glory Days” and did you feel like it was similar or different than some of your past work?
I would say it’s embarrassingly identical to my last four books, which were all collections of short stories. But thematically, it’s a little bit new for me. The characters are a little older and grappling with higher-stakes dilemmas than some of the protagonists of my previous collections.
When you say, “embarrassingly identical,” what do you mean?
When I was starting out as a writer, I was a lot more experimental in my approach to books. I was still trying to figure out my style and my own sensibility and taste. Around my late 20s, I hit upon a style that I liked, and I think I haven’t creatively grown or changed. It’s safe to say, whatever people thought of the last four books, I imagine they’ll feel very similarly about this one.
“Around my late 20s, I hit upon a style that I liked, and I think I haven’t creatively grown or changed. It’s safe to say, whatever people thought of the last four books, I imagine they’ll feel very similarly about this one.”
You mentioned your protagonists face higher stakes in this collection. A lot of the themes touch on family, parenting, or the pains of getting older. Did you lean into your own experiences to reflect the type of angst your characters encounter?
I think all of my books are really autobiographical, which you wouldn’t necessarily know by reading them. The premises are so surreal; the characters are ridiculous; and their life experiences don’t actually match my own. But on an emotional level, I’m always trying to write stories that that are authentic to what I’m actually experiencing on earth.
My last collection, “New Teeth,” was very much stories about becoming a parent and having children. And this collection is about turning 40 and entering midlife. There are a lot of characters in the book who are grappling with a sense of obsolescence and trying to adapt to a world in which they’re no longer the youngest generation. There are stories about characters who are used to winning, have to come to grips with their own frailty, and hopefully gained a bit of humility.
Let’s talk a little about process. You approach your stories from surprising angles. For example, you’ll take a well-known plot or character and add an unexpected twist, like Mario (from Super Mario Brothers) going through a midlife crisis or the Tooth Fairy being hounded by what sounds like an illegal tooth smuggling ring. When or how do these ideas occur to you?
Since College, I’ve had a family encyclopedia that I’ll flip through for ideas. The one I use now, the Oxford Family Encyclopedia, I’ve owned literally since school, and I would go to Lamont Library and flip through their encyclopedias, magazine collections, and search for evergreen topics that might yield comedic premises.
I avoided newspapers because I didn’t want to do anything too topical; topics were often fraught and had too many satirical associations. I looked at magazines, but eventually landed on children’s encyclopedias because every page is filled with common reference points. So many of my stories have come from just flipping through the pages and being struck by a topic or reference that could be humorously inverted.
Where did you come across this strategy?
It was early freshman year when I was trying out for the Lampoon. I had read an article about The Onion and knew that the way they generated material was by reading the news and taking that day’s headlines and attempting to subvert them. But I knew I didn’t want to do satire. I wanted to pursue more absurdist humor, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be too untethered or unhinged. I was looking for that sweet spot where I could meet the reader in an accessible place but then take them on an interesting journey.
When do you know you’ve landed on something?
The first step is me thinking the concept is funny, but then the second bar it has to clear is: Do I have a funny idea for how to execute it? There are hundreds of premises on my computer that I that I think are intriguing, funny, or interesting, but I don’t actually know how to write them. I don’t know what perspective they should be written from. I don’t have a story. I don’t know who the protagonist ought to be. A lot of times an idea will sit on my computer for many years before I come up with the right narrator, the right point of view, or the right plot.
Was your time at Harvard and writing for the Lampoon a formative time for your development as a writer?
Totally. I wrote my first book in College, and my process was exactly what I just described. I would take my encyclopedia and go to Peet’s Coffee every night and sit at the glass-walled ledge. In longhand, I would write down any premises that occurred to me and then in the mornings go to the Lampoon and write up the ones that felt the most promising.
I basically wrote that first book at the Lampoon and in the computer room in Adams House. I never took any creative writing classes, but there were writers at the Lampoon that I really looked up to.
My favorite was the recently graduated Danny Chun, who would come back and visit. I read everything he wrote for the Lampoon, including stuff that didn’t get into the magazine. He was probably my biggest comedic influence at the time.
Colin Jost was also really encouraging and supportive of younger writers and would always take the time to read what I was working on and give me feedback.
And to be totally honest, I took a lot of classes for materials, specifically subjects that I thought might yield premises. I was so single-minded in my pursuit of original comedic premises that I would take courses purely for that reason. I remember thinking, “If I get a piece out of this, it’s worth it.’
“Even if I put terrible stuff into the world, it would be forgotten. That was a real comfort to me as an undergraduate. I took a lot of risks with my writing.”
Do you have any advice for other young writers?
I remember when I was at Harvard, I fell in love with the writer William Somerset Maugham. I just absolutely flipped for “Of Human Bondage” and “The Razor’s Edge,” which I found at The Coop.
So I went to Lamont and realized he’d written about 100 books. I picked a couple off the shelf at random and found they weren’t as strong as the ones that had been consistently in print for 100 years or so.
I had this epiphany: Nobody remembers your bad stuff. Even if it’s egregiously bad, it just kind of evaporates, like it never existed. People only remember your absolute best stuff.
Realizing that set me free to take a lot of risks and try a lot of different genres and mediums because I knew that nobody was really watching. Even if I put terrible stuff into the world, it would be forgotten. That was a real comfort to me as an undergraduate. I took a lot of risks with my writing. In those early days, I wrote in a lot of genres that I had no business writing in and learned a lot from doing it.
What’s next for you?
I’m doing a show on Broadway in December called “All In: Comedy About Love” directed by Alex Timbers and featuring a rotating cast of actors and comedians — like John Mulaney, Andrew Rannells, Richard Kind, and Chloe Fineman — reading my work. It’s a lot of really funny, talented people and the score is by the Magnetic Fields, who were a big influence on my writing. I’m really excited about it.
Key to negotiated peace in Ukraine? Having the West keep Russia honest.
Former defense minister says U.S., allies need to continue financial, arms aid, remove curbs on missiles to bring Putin to table
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Oleksii Reznikov.
Credit: Ukrainian Research Institute
There is a path forward to peace in Ukraine, according to the country’s former minister of defense. But it will require concrete, mutually agreed-upon terms with Russia, backed up by support from the U.S. and allies to ensure Moscow doesn’t renege.
Oleksii Reznikov, who served as Ukraine’s minister of defense from 2021 to 2023, paid a visit to the Ukrainian Research Institute on Oct. 16 to discuss the possibility of negotiated peace in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.
The discussion was moderated by Mariana Budjeryn, a senior research associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. It touched on Ukraine’s requests for more weapons from the U.S. and its allies, the possibility of full NATO membership, and the need for shows of iron-clad Western support as a prod to bring Russia to the table for talks to end to the almost three-year war.
“Crushing Putin’s regime on the battlefield is the best way to launch the transformation of Russia, and that is possible. Ukraine has proven as much.”
Oleksii Reznikov
“Crushing Putin’s regime on the battlefield is the best way to launch the transformation of Russia, and that is possible. Ukraine has proven as much,” Reznikov said. “All we need is the sufficient and timely support without six-month pauses — I mean decision in Congress — and without limitation on how weapons are used.”
The U.S. has thus far restricted the use of long-range missiles it has supplied to Ukraine, which wants to strike targets deep in Russian territory. Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that he would consider any such attack to be an act of war by the allies.
The U.S. has continued to provide financial and weapons aid to Ukraine throughout the conflict, most recently in the form of a $425 million security package. However, Reznikov said, Russia continues to dominate Ukraine with the number and sophistication of their weapons, along with disinformation campaigns.
“We need a lot of weapons and trained personnel if you don’t want your people to lose lives,” he said. “This is one of the last, if not the last, war where you will see large manpower in direct conduct. War is increasingly turning into a competition between robotic systems as well as automated control systems.”
Reznikov also mentioned Russia’s use of deep fakes, AI, and cyberattacks to spread propaganda and disinformation.
“We have the experience of defending a democratic country against a strong and highly technological army of an autocratic regime,” he said. “The main challenge is the timely recognition of threats when the enemy is actively employing hybrid sub-threshold acts of aggression and is weaponizing everything from freedom of speech to migration streams, food logistic chains, freedom of navigation in a Black Sea, Caspian Sea, etc.”
And if the two countries get to the negotiating table, Reznikov said there must be two basic components if the talks are to be a success: trust and guarantees, backed by threat of enforcement.
Ukraine has had bad experiences when it comes to trust, he said. For example, the 1994 Budapest memorandum with Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. required Ukraine to give up its then-sizable nuclear arsenal (left behind during the breakup of the Soviet Union) in exchange for security guarantees from the three nations.
“We have given up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, our strategic aviation, and the missiles [once part of Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, now converted to conventional arms] that Russia is now using to kill our children and women in the cities, far from the front,” Reznikov said. “One of the guarantors of our security, Russia, openly attacked us in 2014 and others stood by and did nothing.”
But “there are also success stories,” he said, of long-running hostilities ended through negotiation.
Reznikov points to the Good Friday agreement between the U.K. and Ireland as an example. The accord ended more than 30 years of conflict between the states and helped develop the current system of government operating in Northern Ireland today.
“It was not easy, and it didn’t solve every problem, but it allowed the parties to proceed past a stalemate and to overcome some obstacles,” Reznikov said. “There was a trust. There were guarantees, and there was a model of coexistence.”
In the case of Russia and Ukraine, Reznikov believes the two countries will need allies on either side of the table to ensure guarantees. One option would be membership in NATO for Ukraine, assuring protection by Western allies against future aggression.
“Another option is a bi- or multilateral deal, detailing direct obligations to support Ukraine, should Russia violate its side of the deal,” he said. “Not promises to hold consultations, but concrete steps, weapons, financial support, closing the sky with the air defenses, crushing sanctions against Russia, etc.”
Without the backing of other countries, Russia will continue to be a source of instability within the region, Reznikov said.
He also noted that concerns by the West over Putin’s thinly veiled threats of nuclear attacks over Ukraine areoverblown.
“Russia is developing policies to increase policies and increase the work force. It is not planning to die in nuclear ashes,” he said. “The moment they encounter resistance, they stop and back down. Therefore, the free world needs to set its anxieties aside.”
Mars may have been habitable much more recently than thought
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Study bolsters theory that protective magnetic field supporting life-enabling atmosphere remained in place longer than estimates
Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the Red Planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable and, if so, when.
The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years — so hundreds of millions of years more recently.
The study was led by Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Sarah Steele, who has used simulation and computer modeling to estimate the age of the Martian “dynamo,” or global magnetic field produced by convection in the planet’s iron core, like on Earth. Together with senior author Roger Fu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, the team has doubled down on a theory they first argued last year that the Martian dynamo, capable of deflecting harmful cosmic rays, was around longer than prevailing estimates claim.
The researchers simulated the cooling and magnetization of large impact basins on Mars to defend a later dynamo shutdown.
Credit: Sarah Steele
Their thinking evolved from experiments simulating cooling and magnetization cycles of huge craters on the Red Planet’s surface. Known to be only weakly magnetic, these well-studied impact basins have led researchers to assume they formed after the dynamo shut down.
This timeline was hypothesized using basic principles of paleomagnetics, or the study of a planet’s prehistoric magnetic field. Scientists know ferromagnetic minerals in rock align themselves with surrounding magnetic fields when the rock is hot, but these small fields become “locked in” once the rock has cooled. This effectively turns the minerals into fossilized magnetic fields, which can be studied billions of years later.
Looking at basins on Mars with weak magnetic fields, scientists surmised they initially formed amid hot rock during a period in which there were no other strong magnetic fields present — in other words, after the planet’s dynamo had gone away.
But the Harvard team says this early shutdown isn’t necessary to explain those largely de-magnetized craters, according to Steele. Rather, they argue that the craters were formed while the dynamo of Mars was experiencing a polarity reversal — north and south poles switching places — which, through computer simulation, can explain why these large impact basins only have weak magnetic signals today. Magnetic pole flips also happen on Earth every few hundred thousand years.
“We are basically showing that there may not have ever been a good reason to assume Mars’ dynamo shut down early,” Steele said.
Their results build on previous work that first upended existing Martian habitability timelines. They used a famed Martian meteorite, Allan Hills 84001, and a powerful quantum diamond microscope in Fu’s lab, to infer a longer-persisting magnetic field until 3.9 billion years ago by studying different magnetic populations in thin slices of the rock.
Steele says poking holes in a long-held theory is a little nerve-wracking, but that they’ve been “spoiled rotten” by a community of planetary researchers who are open to new interpretations and possibilities.
“We are trying to answer primary, important questions about how everything got to be like it is, even why the entire solar system is the way that it is,” Steele said. “Planetary magnetic fields are our best probe to answer a lot of those questions, and one of the only ways we have to learn about the deep interiors and early histories of planets.”
Outdoor physical activity may be a better target for preventive intervention, says researcher
Jacqueline Mitchell
BIDMC Communications
3 min read
A growing body of evidence shows that taking vitamin D supplements does not reduce the risk of cardiac arrest in older adults, according to a new study out of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard affiliate.
Cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death among adults over age 65 years.
“While multiple observational studies have demonstrated a relationship between low vitamin D and high risk for cardiovascular disease, few randomized controlled trials to date have evaluated the role of vitamin D supplementation on cardiovascular disease,” said lead author Katharine W. Rainer, a resident physician at BIDMC. “Our study decisively showed that vitamin D had no effect on the markers of cardiovascular disease over the 2-year follow-up period, regardless of dose. These results reinforce evidence that vitamin D supplementation is not an effective intervention for cardiovascular disease prevention.”
“Our study decisively showed that vitamin D had no effect on the markers of cardiovascular disease over the 2-year follow-up period, regardless of dose.”
Katharine W. Rainer
To evaluate the effect of vitamin D supplementation on the heart, researchers at BIDMC assessed whether higher doses of the vitamin reduced the presence of two specific proteins in the blood known to indicate cardiac injury and strain. The team’s analysis of data from a double-blind, randomized trial — the gold standard of scientific testing that provides the most persuasive results — do not support the use of higher-dose vitamin D supplementation to reduce cardiovascular risk in adults with low blood levels of vitamin D. The study is published in the American Journal of Preventative Cardiology.
Rainer and colleagues analyzed data from a National Institute of Aging-sponsored trial conducted between July 2015 and March 2019. Participants were randomized into one of four groups, receiving either 200, 1,000, 2,000, or 4,000 international units (IUs) per day of vitamin D3 supplementation. Blood levels of the markers of cardiovascular disease were measured at baseline and at three-, 12- and 24-month follow-up visits.
The investigators found that lower vitamin D levels were associated with a baseline elevation in one marker of cardiovascular disease, but failed to reduce either marker of cardiovascular disease over the two-year study period, regardless of dose. The findings were largely consistent regardless of participants’ age, sex, race, or history of cardiovascular disease, including high blood pressure and/or diabetes.
“While much work is needed to understand why vitamin D deficiency is associated with CVD, our study adds to the growing body of evidence that daily or monthly supplementation with vitamin D does not prevent CVD events or reduce markers of subclinical cardiac injury or strain,” said corresponding and senior author Stephen P. Juraschek, research director of the Hypertension Center at BIDMC. “Instead, there may be other factors upstream to vitamin D and CVD (such as outdoor physical activity, for example) that may be a better target for preventive interventions.”
Co-authors included William Earle of BIDMC.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (grants NIH/ NHLBI 7K23HL135273 and 3K23HL135273S1); the National Institute on Aging (grants U01AG047837 and K01 AG076967); the Office of Dietary Supplements; the Mid-Atlantic Nutrition Obesity Research Center (grant P30DK072488); and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translation Research (grant UL1TR003098). STURDY is registered on clinicaltrials.gov under identifier NCT02166333
Weight-loss surgery down 25 percent as anti-obesity drug use soars
Study authors call for more research examining how trend affects long-term patient outcomes
BWH Communications
4 min read
A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6 percent decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity.
The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open.
“Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs,” said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6 percent from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients). Meanwhile, there was a 25.6 percent decrease in use of bariatric metabolic surgery during the same period (from 0.22 to 0.16 patients per 1,000 patients).
Among the sample of patients with obesity, 94.7 percent received neither form of treatment during the study period (while 5 percent received GLP-1 RAs and 0.3 percent received surgery). Compared to patients who were prescribed GLP-1 RAs, patients who underwent surgery tended to be more medically complex.
“For now, metabolic bariatric surgery remains the most effective and durable treatment for obesity. National efforts should focus on improving access to obesity treatment — whether pharmacologic or surgical — to ensure patients can receive optimal care,” said Tsai, who is also an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and an assistant professor in health policy and management at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health.
Tsai notes that while GLP-1 RAs can effectively treat obesity and related conditions (such as diabetes), these medications have been limited by high costs, limited supply, and gastrointestinal side effects that may prompt treatment cessation and subsequent weight regain.
“As patients with obesity increasingly rely on GLP-1s instead of surgical intervention, further research is needed to assess the impact of this shift from surgical to pharmacologic treatment of obesity on long-term patient outcomes,” Tsai said. “With the national decline in utilization of metabolic bariatric surgery and potential closure of bariatric surgery programs, there is a concern that access to comprehensive multidisciplinary treatment of obesity involving pharmacologic, endoscopic, or surgical interventions may become more limited.”
“These results also highlight an opportunity to further expand uptake of surgical and pharmacologic treatments for obesity and related comorbidities,” said co-author Ateev Mehrotra, chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Metabolic bariatric surgery and GLP-1 RAs are both effective interventions for patients with obesity, yet less than 6 percent of patients in our study received either form of treatment.”
Considering these results, the authors encourage clinicians and policymakers to continue to monitor access to effective obesity treatment amid a rapidly evolving landscape of treatment options. In addition, further research is needed to understand the tradeoffs between use of surgical intervention and increasingly popular GLP-1 RAs to treat obesity.
Funding/disclosures: Tsai reported receiving grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health to Harvard Catalyst, the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, and financial contributions from Harvard University and its affiliated academic health care centers.
World appears on track for even more dangerous Cold War 2.0
Pulitzer winner warns China, which is building nuclear arsenal, would be third major player besides U.S., Russia — and six other nations now have bombs, too
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
China has significantly picked up the pace of expanding its nuclear arsenal in recent years, a development that increases the likelihood a new arms race will begin revving up, one that could be more dangerous than the Cold War contest between Russia and the U.S., according to two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Hoffman.
In a talk on Tuesday, sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Hoffman raised the alarm about a “new nuclear age,” with three countries leading the pack and a handful of other countries already developing their own nuclear weapons.
“It’s time for us to wake up,” said Hoffman. “It’s time for us to get over the vacation that we’ve had since the end of the Cold War.”
“Nuclear weapons are political weapons. They’re instruments of threat and of coercion, and they require political will to restrain. ”
David Hoffman
The period of geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, began in 1946 and ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. That year, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which called for both nations to reduce their nuclear arsenals. The initiative to control nuclear weapons was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The START treaty will expire in February 2026.
A new arms race poses all the risks for nuclear Armageddon as before and then some, said Hoffman. It will multiply the possibilities for mistakes and misperceptions, and it will take effort to find out whether the other two competitors are U.S. adversaries, he said.
“A three-way race will be infinitely more difficult to negotiate than was the Cold War between two sides,” said Hoffman. “A three-way race with all the different kinds of forces, threats, and possibilities is a bit like a diplomatic Rubik’s cube. It’s not going to be easy to use diplomacy to solve it.”
Hoffman, who won his first Pulitzer for his 2009 book, “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy,” said he worries about the lack of political will among world leaders to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
“Nuclear weapons are political weapons,” Hoffman said. “They’re instruments of threat and of coercion, and they require political will to restrain. Reagan and Gorbachev for their own reasons summoned up the political will to get rid of these weapons … Now we’re at a time of growing danger, a time when political will is absent, and that’s why I’m alarmed.”
A contributing editor to The Washington Post, Hoffman won his most recent Pulitzer this year for a series of editorials on technologies and tactics used by authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent. He noted that China has 500 nuclear warheads and may reach 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon.
“China seems to be planning to try to match the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals to get to about 1,500 warheads,” said Hoffman. “China is accelerating the arms race, and I think it’s very worrisome that China refuses to enter into negotiations. The Chinese basically say, ‘Wait till we get to be peers with Russia and the United States, and then we’ll talk about that.’’’
The fear of a nuclear war is not unfounded, said Hoffman, not only because there are more nuclear-armed countries — a group that includes France, the U.K., Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Israel — than ever before, but also because of the potential impact of artificial intelligence on early warning systems.
The possibility of a false alarm that could lead to a nuclear attack is real, said Hoffman, who wrote about a series of failures in the U.S. early warning system for ballistic missile defense in his book about the Cold War.
Between 1960 and 1976, there were seven false alarms, and between 1979 and 1980, there were five. In 1983, the Soviet early warning system also registered a false alarm. And more recently, in 2022, India accidentally fired a missile into Pakistan. India later said it was due to a “technical malfunction” during routine maintenance.
“We cannot grow complacent about the possibility of mistake, a misperception or a misunderstanding leading to a nuclear explosion,” said Hoffman. “If artificial intelligence says, ‘We’re under attack,’ would you believe it? Would you not believe it? Would you put the fate of the Earth in the hands of ChatGPT?”
This week’s event was part of the series “Russia: In Search of a New Paradigm — Conversations with Yevgenia Albats,” a prominent Russian investigative journalist and political scientist who received her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 2004 and is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center.
Although the scenario seems bleak, Hoffman said the U.S. could take actions to prevent a nuclear apocalypse, including strengthening ties with U.S. allies, and working on nuclear weapons risk-reduction measures and robust arms control treaties with both China and Russia.
“American people just have to hear that this looming arms race is coming in,” said Hoffman. “Ultimately, though, it comes back to political will … Because that’s ultimately the way to restrain political weapons … I’d love to see us get back to that Reagan-Gorbachev magic moment.”
Outside of the U.S., how do leaders view Harris and Trump?
Weatherhead panelists offer insights on geopolitical stakes of presidential election
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
The Weatherhead Center’s online session with Rana Mitter (clockwise from top left), Melanie Cammett, Timothy Colton, Diana Durán Nuñez, and Ziad Daoud.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Next month’s U.S. presidential election is being closely watched across the world. But do foreign governments have a clear preference for either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump?
According to the Oct. 9 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs forum on the election’s geopolitical stakes, many international observers remain ambivalent on the race. The panel featured four experts weighing in on the global hotspots of China, Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is probably inclined toward Trump, according to Timothy J. Colton, the Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies Chair of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. “But the Russians will point out that Trump, in the end, did Russia no favors in his first term,” Colton said. “At least at the leadership level, they’re by and large convinced nothing good is going to come in the election from Russia’s point of view.”
At the moment, Moscow appears less invested in the U.S. election than in the last two cycles, Colton observed. “The Russians have turned away almost every shred of cooperation with the United States of America, and at least verbally and rhetorically they are fashioning a pretty radical new image of where they belong in the world.” As examples, he cited top thinkers in Russia who speak of becoming an Asian country and Putin himself describing it as a civilization state, or a unique culture descended from an empire much like China.
What’s more, Colton added, the Russian establishment sees far more opportunity in countries like Germany, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for undermining support for Ukraine. “It is reasonable to expect the war in Ukraine will come to an end, or at least to a point of suspension, in the next U.S. presidential term,” he added. “But my own sense is the geopolitical outcome will depend more on what happens on the battlefield than on anything that happens in Washington.”
Most pressing in the Middle East is the escalating conflict involving Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Ziad Daoud, a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, described a prevailing sense of fury amid another crisis in the Arab world. “This dissatisfaction could multiply if we get a condition in which you have loss of territory in Gaza or in the West Bank or in Lebanon, or you have displacement of people from Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon,” he said.
For Daoud, the central question is: Which U.S. presidential administration could help secure a favorable resolution for all parties? As a model, he pointed to the “five no’s” offered last year by National Security Council member Brett McGurk: “No forced displacement, no reoccupation, no reduction in territory, no threats to Israel, no besiegement.”
“There are people who say President Trump is averse to war and therefore he’s more likely to end the war,” offered Daoud, who is also the chief emerging markets economist at Bloomberg. “But there are others who say that President Trump may not be as committed to the ‘five no’s’ outlined by the U.S. administration last year. Yes, the ceasefire might be reached but the conditions may not be great, and that might lead to further disruption down the road.”
For countries south of the U.S., the issues of drug trafficking and illegal corridors are far more central than immigration, according the Columbian journalist Diana Durán Nuñez, currently a fellow with Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. “If the U.S. really wants to see a different outcome on immigration, they need to raise concern and interest among their partners in Latin America,” she said.
The former TV news reporter also noted the growing influence of China, highlighting Nicaragua and Venezuela as two of the Asian country’s key allies. But the region’s ever-shifting political allegiances could hold new possibility for U.S. interests. “Latin America is a complex compound of left-wing, right-wing, and authoritarian governments,” Durán Nuñez said, pointing to the U.S. military’s new naval base partnership with Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei. “China was supposed to be the ally for that project — there had already been conversations, and they were quite advanced — but Milei stopped it.”
As for China itself, an obvious concern is U.S. trade policy, given Trump’s proposal of a 60 percent tariff on imports from the country. Rana Mitter, the Kennedy School’s S.T. Lee Chair of U.S.-Asia Relations, emphasized that neither U.S. presidential candidate stands for 1990s-style free trade with China. For example, a Harris administration is expected to pursue more restrictions than the Biden administration on tech investments and intellectual property transfers involving China. “But that lies in contrast with what we are promised by people involved with a Trump II administration,” he said.
Mitter, who recently visited the Chinese capital, noted how closely elites there are following the U.S. presidential race. “The only place where I’ve seen as much interest as there is on, say, CNN, is in some of the think tanks of Beijing,” he said. “Many people, very well informed about U.S. politics, wanted to talk about the subject and gave highly granular accounts of voting patterns in various Pennsylvania and Wisconsin counties.”
But these sophisticated observers favor neither candidate. “The majority view,” Mitter said, “was that it might not make that much difference on the grounds that relations between the U.S. and China will be turbulent for quite some time.”
Your side might lose. But you don’t have to lose your mind.
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Political engagement is healthy. Doomscrolling? Not so much.
Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, are locked in an extremely close race. With Election Day less than two weeks away, many Americans are feeling anxious and overwhelmed.
At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Tuesday, journalist Eugene Scott, currently a Fall 2024 Fellow at the Institute of Politics, asked analysts how people who care about politics and the election outcome can remain engaged without harming their mental health.
John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP, which conducts the biannual Harvard Youth Poll, noted stress among 18– to 29-year-olds about the state of the world, along with persistent doubt that current political and economic systems will help them.
“Young people today feel this insecurity and instability about the future,” he said. “They feel like all of the problems that older generations have are trickling down to them.”
Across the political spectrum, voters have expressed frustration and exhaustion, said pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights.
“It just feels like the stakes are very high,” she said. “And at the same time, people feel powerless. They feel like those who wish to do them harm have been increasing in their power and ability to harm them, and that’s led some people, particularly those who are consuming the most information about politics, to feel the most anxious” about the consequences the election outcome might mean on their everyday lives.
Whether reality-based or manufactured, fear has long been understood to be an effective turnout tool.
“I think in this election, there’s just a lot of selling fear, and that even people who will say, ‘The other side is out there fearmongering,’ then turn around and do it themselves,” Soltis Anderson said. “They catastrophize what the other side taking power would mean.”
Political anxiety, which psychologists now recognize as a discrete condition, has a significant effect on mental health, which in turn deeply impacts physical health, so, “Yes, this a public health crisis,” said Chris Chanyasulkit, former president of the American Public Health Association.
One simple way to reduce election anxiety is to stop “doomscrolling,” said Chanyasulkit.
“Do not go to bed at night with your phone and reading — it’s terrible. Do not wake up first thing in the morning and reach for your phone to see what’s going on.”
Chris Chanyasulkit
“Do not go to bed at night with your phone and reading — it’s terrible. Do not wake up first thing in the morning and reach for your phone to see what’s going on. None of that is good because you’re getting inundated” with outrage tailored to keep users on these platforms. “That’s so not healthy.”
Political engagement doesn’t inevitably lead to anxiety; it can have positive and empowering impacts on people. Research has linked voting to better mental health and better health outcomes overall, said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.
And political engagement can include other activities beyond voting, like protesting or running for office, Allen said. Where those pursuits can have detrimental effects on mental health is when people don’t feel tightly connected to others while participating, she said.
“There is this kind of tension between conflict and connection, and that really, I think, is at the core of the question of how we process political anxiety,” Allen said. “Are we processing it in mainly a conflict mode or are we taking the opportunity of engagement to connect with others and do positive work for our communities?”
Generation Z, a key voting cohort in 2024, faces mental health stressors shaped by damaging events during their lifetimes, like the recession of 2008-2009, school shootings, and COVID-driven social isolation, Della Volpe said.
Because they don’t get news from traditional sources, Gen Zers often don’t hear about the good things government has been able to accomplish, which fuels a cycle of negativity, anxiety, and hopelessness.
“That’s why I think it’s so important … for all of us … to remind younger people that things do get better,” he said. “Things have gotten better because of younger people.”
Alysia Abbott, a writing instructor, tries on a suit.
Photos by Grace DuVal
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
A.R.T. sells off costumes dating to 1980s, attracting thrifters and theater-lovers alike
Need a last-minute Halloween costume? Or know any local theater-lovers who might want to own a piece of history? The American Repertory Theater is holding its first-ever public costume sale — selling off pieces from its inventory dating back to the 1980s. The sale, which started last week, runs through Saturday. Prices range from $1 to $50.
“I think people who like to vintage shop will find a treasure trove of things here,” said Alycia Marucci, the A.R.T.’s wardrobe manager. “But I also think that a theater-lover might want to look through the labels, because you can see the history of a garment.”
Many of the clothes for sale contain custom labels noting the show a costume was used for, and sometimes the name of the actor who wore it. Also for sale: a plethora of items that did not make the cut for a production. Some pieces, sourced by wardrobe designers from contemporary stores, still have the tags on them.
“We have all kinds of different makers, local and not local. And then we do productions like ‘Life of Pi,’ where a lot of things were sourced internationally,” Marucci said. “So we have every sort of option depending on the show that’s coming through.”
An impending renovation to the A.R.T.’s storage space at Fawcett Street sparked the sale, Marucci said.
“We realized how much stuff we really have, and we realized we really don’t have the labor or the resources to go through every garment and clean it and make sure it’s ready and size it and do all those things,” she said. “So the first thing we wanted to do was offer it up to people who might enjoy it or who might use it before we would.”
Alissa Cardone, an associate professor of dance at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, was one of those people.
“I’m always looking for things,” she said. “And I need old underwear and pointy boots for a piece I’m working on.”
Costumes for sale are from productions dating back to the 1980s and range in price from $1 to $50.
Artist Tzviyah Rosenstock checks out the wide selection of hats.
Shoppers dig through coats, dresses, and more.
Heather Brine Martin tries on an opera coat and hat.
Some of the costumes contain labels documenting the show it is from and the actor who wore it.
Holding two long coats in her arms, she said she also found some pieces for herself. She said she heard about the sale from a friend who told her not to miss it.
“A lot of people appreciate old versus new.”
Amanda Marcus, a Cambridge resident on the A.R.T. mailing list, was drawn to the many hats on sale.
“Some of the shows I recognize — ‘Gatsby’ was the most recent one,” she said. “And I saw a couple of ‘Gatsby’ hats in there already.”
Marcus was accompanied by Alasdair Post-Quinn, who added that the pair is always in the market for unique costume items.
“We are Burning Man people,” he said, referring to the annual music festival. “We both modify our own clothes by sewing and adding things on, adding lights.”
The shop will reopen from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the A.R.T. Scene Shop at 155 Fawcett St. in Cambridge.
Video by Getty Images; illustrations by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Hope flags when medications fail, isolating and endangering patients. Backed by a major grant, 2 Harvard scientists are focused on reducing the distance between diagnosis and recovery.
For millions of people every year, depression is not just an illness but a grueling pattern — anguish, meds, failure, repeat.
Supported by a major grant, two Harvard scientists want to break that pattern, each by his own path.
David Walt is operating at a microscopic level, observing cell abnormalities that may contribute to depression. Diego Pizzagalli is taking a bigger-picture approach, using MRIs and other methods to identify potential treatments by tracking activity in key brain regions. Their common aim, backed by the nonprofit Wellcome Leap, is to speed the path from diagnosis to an effective medication for the individual patient.
“We’re concerned that when people go through this trial-and-error approach, they lose hope,” Pizzagalli said. “We’re really interested in evaluating whether by using tools of neuroscience, we can get to the correct treatment faster.”
More than 22 million U.S. adults suffer at least one major depressive episode every year. The experience is lonely, debilitating, and dangerous. As anxiety, insomnia, and other symptoms take hold, patients lose touch with family and friends. Feelings of isolation interrupt one of the greatest sources of happiness and well-being — relationships — and heighten their risk of suicide. The damage also creeps into broader society, including U.S. workplaces, imposing an economic burden of more than $330 billion annually.
The first attempt at antidepressant therapy takes 12-14 weeks to be effective, and works for only about a third of patients.
Research shows varying success with subsequent treatments, with as little as 40 percent of patients able to find a drug that works for them by the fourth try.
Talk therapy can help, and emerging technologies, including neurostimulation, have shown promise. But one of the most common treatments for depression — antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, which are often prescribed by a primary care physician — has yielded mixed results, in part because of a grindingly inexact matching process.
“You end up with lots of people who, frankly, need a personalized individualized analysis to figure out the underlying basis of their disease that can be addressed by a particular drug,” Walt said. “It’s just sort of guesswork right now and there is no strong scientific basis for what’s right for each person. It’s, ‘Let’s try this drug and see if it works.’”
The goal of both researchers is to help shape an approach that is more effective for being more precise. “We’ve wanted to convince ourselves — and the field, hopefully — that personalized treatment is possible in depression,” Pizzagalli said. “Persistent symptoms can be very impairing and failed antidepressant treatments are associated with costs to individuals and society, with loss of productivity.”
Written in the blood
David Walt in his lab at the Wyss Institute.
Photo by Niles Singer
Walt, a professor of pathology and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, wants to know whether certain proteins at work in the brain can shed light on how depression develops, allowing scientists to identify potential treatments. He and his team are studying four major cell types, each serving a different function with unique protein molecules.
“The expectation is that the proteins that we capture and measure from these four different cells will be different in individuals who suffer from major depression compared to those from healthy individuals,” Walt said.
One target is neurons, which transmit messages among brain regions. Changes in neurotransmitters such as serotonin can contribute to depression. (SSRIs function by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.) The other areas of focus are oligodendrocytes, microglia, and astrocytes, which influence cell structure, immune response, and metabolic function, respectively.
Any abnormality in these cells can weaken the connections in the brain and leave a person more vulnerable to mood disorders. Past research has suggested that antidepressants can help our brains repair and form new connections among damaged cells.
If investigators can determine which cell types are being affected in patients with depression, then eventually they should be able to target the underlying mechanism responsible for those changes, Walt said. If it’s a neurotransmission problem, then specialists can focus on finding drugs, including SSRIs, that best target neuron growth and regulation. If the issue is related to immune cells, researchers can try to identify drugs that affect the immune system.
Walt has zeroed in on extracellular vesicles — pieces of cells that travel out of the brain and into our blood.
“Parts of the cell membrane that encapsulate the cell break off from the cell into these really tiny nanoparticles,” he said. “These nanoparticles contain all the contents of the cell from which they have broken off. And these nanoparticles can get through the blood-brain barrier into the bloodstream to some extent.”
By comparing blood — which contains less than 1 percent material from the brain — with spinal fluid, he and his team have been able to identify specific markers in these different cell types that allow them to isolate extracellular vesicles in the blood.
The goal he has in mind would be life-changing.
“If you could identify the right markers in blood, then you could give a drug to somebody, and then have them come back the next week, take their blood, and measure biomarkers to determine if the drug is working,” he said.
“You may say, ‘This isn’t working, because your markers are exactly where they were last week before you started taking the drug. We need to switch you to a new drug immediately.’ Our goal is to avoid having patients wait six months to see if a drug works. If we can, it means we’re making progress toward helping these patients find the right treatment, compress the timeframe, and reduce the risk of suicide.”
Watching for a breakthrough
Diego Pizzagalli prepares a research participant for an EEG at McLean Hospital.
Photo by Niles Singer
Pizzagalli, a psychiatry professor at the Medical School and director of the Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research at McLean Hospital, has spent his career examining psychological, environmental, and neurobiological factors associated with mood disorders, including major depression.
For the Wellcome Leap project, his lab is probing behavior and brain function for markers that could be used to assess the severity of a patient’s depression and guide treatment choices.
The work builds on a previous study that deployed neurocognitive tests, EEG, and functional MRI to pinpoint biomarkers that could predict a positive response to widely prescribed drugs: the atypical antidepressant bupropion, whose brand name is Wellbutrin, or the SSRI sertaline, whose brand name is Zoloft. That research led the team to imaging methods that in both cases reliably predicted a favorable response. The working premise now is that an MRI might be able to determine whether an SSRI or other medication is the best avenue of treatment.
“Our hope is that individuals with the bupropion markers will do very well when receiving bupropion, and vice versa for the patients with the sertraline markers,” said Pizzagalli, whose team will also weigh personal attributes (age, race, sex, etc.), personality traits, and performance in neuropsychological tests.
The functional MRI is recorded with patients in a resting state. Researchers track activated brain regions.
“Brain regions become activated with anything that we do: Thoughts, emotions, motivation, and so on,” said Pizzagalli, adding: “It’s not the case that every single brain region is activating in isolation and not communicating with the other brain regions. Information is basically passed from region to region.”
The use of fMRIs has shown that the anterior cingulate cortex (above) and the nucleus accumbens (below) signal to each other in a network associated with reward-sensitivity and learning.
The two regions his team is most interested in are part of the so-called brain reward system. The nucleus accumbens is very deep in the brain and known for its role in pleasure and motivation; the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is located in the frontal lobe and a key intersection of cognition and emotion.
Pizzagalli is exploring the strength of the link between the two regions, which could help a prescriber decide between an SSRI and a non-SSRI.
“What we’re doing is moving from looking at the level of brain activity in a single region to activity across a network,” he said.
Both Walt and Pizzagalli pointed out that personalized treatment of depression and other brain disorders has been a challenge for reasons that go far beyond the capabilities of any one lab. Cost is a major obstacle, as is the deep individual complexity of the illness. But clarifying that such personalized treatment is possible and worth pursuing would be a major turning point, both for clinicians and their patients.
“The task is on researchers just to show whether these types of approaches can actually dramatically improve the response rate,” Pizzagalli said.
The journey to an answer is in its very early stages, both he and Walt were quick to note. Pizzagalli’s lab expects to finish work on their project in mid-to-late 2025. The first phase of Walt’s initiative is set to wrap this month, but the larger plan will unfold over years.
In the end, the researchers hope to have made major progress toward reclaiming time for patients and families suffering under the sometimes crushing weight of depression.
“It might be a blood test, it might be a blood test combined with imaging, it could be a blood test combined with imaging combined with certain behavioral features,” Walt said. “It could be that all of these tools, or a combination, will be necessary to really do precision diagnostics and be able to identify the right drug for the right person at the right time.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with a mental health issue, the National Institute of Mental Health has resources that can help. In a crisis, use the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. On campus, help is available through Counseling and Mental Health Services. There is also a 24/7 support line: 617-495-2042.
Kennedy School panel says it’s a combination of knowledge — and skills
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Illustration by Roy Scott/Ikon Images
Surveys have shown that Americans’ faith in the nation’s political system and its institutions has declined, as partisan polarization and civic disengagement has risen. In response, there is a growing consensus that students — and American democracy itself — would greatly benefit from more robust civic education.
Higher education, in particular, has long had an essential role in helping foster a healthy democracy, but are colleges and universities doing enough to meet the moment?
A panel of specialists on public policy and civic engagement considered the many options during a talk last week hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
During the current period of “incredible turmoil and debate” on college campuses across the country, the question over how higher ed should fulfill that role has become especially salient and important, said Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, during the Friday event.
Allen is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, which focuses on the challenge of how to tune up democratic institutions to ensure they continue operating as intended and to fix components when they falter.
“Cultivating the spirit not only of individual economic success, but of collective work mutually tied to one another, is the secret sauce our nation needs right now more than ever.”
John Bridgeland ’82
Experts say if we truly want to prepare college students to be fully engaged in civic life after graduation, schools need to insist that appropriate training be part of an undergraduate education. That would include necessary academic work as well as the development of the intellectual and social tools necessary to engage in the kind of vigorous, fact-based debate that living in a healthy democracy requires.
It’s “absolutely essential” that every college student take courses in American government, politics, history, and economics regardless of their concentration or career goals, said John Bridgeland ’82, who chairs Civic Enterprises, a social enterprise firm, and worked on domestic policy initiatives during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Schools must also expand how students understand democracy — that it’s a cooperative activity all citizens are part of and responsible for maintaining, Bridgeland argued. And they could do more to encourage and facilitate stints in public service, perhaps by linking it to tuition defrayment.
“I think cultivating the spirit not only of individual economic success, but of collective work mutually tied to one another, is the secret sauce our nation needs right now more than ever,” he said.
Allen noted that one of the biggest obstacles schools must overcome to provide “a democracy education” is “ideological self-segregation and an absence of civil discourse across political divides.”
Panelists said there are some strategies that can help.
Schools not only ought to be deliberate in teaching the history and requisite skills of democracy, but also model the behaviors of a democratic society, such as supporting arguments with facts, listening to and considering evidence from other viewpoints, and having sometimes-uncomfortable conversations, said Cecilia Muñoz, a senior White House staffer on domestic policy during the Obama administration.
Beyond dialogue, schools can also bring students from different viewpoints to work together on local, real-world problems so they learn a cornerstone of democracy — how to move beyond ideological differences in order to get things done, said Bridgeland.
Changing attitudes, curricula, and behavior certainly won’t be easy. Still, lots of college and university officials remain eager to see their institutions play a more intentional role “renovating” American democracy and educating its citizenry, said Rajiv Vinnakota, president of Institute for Citizens and Scholars, an organization assisting more than 100 college presidents pushing for better civic preparedness.
Contrary to news reports about ideological clashes on college campuses over the Middle East or presidential politics that might suggest students today are less open to engaging with those from different perspectives, survey data show “that actually isn’t the case,” Vinnakota said.
One major structural challenge that school administrators will need to overcome, however, is that students are often afraid to speak their minds freely because of a fear over “being canceled” by peers and on social media. It’s a “critical” societal problem with no clear solution, he warned.
‘Harvard Thinking’: Plastics are everywhere, even in our bodies
We ingest equivalent of credit card per week — how worried should we be? In podcast, experts discuss how to minimize exposure, possible solutions.
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
The world has a plastic problem. Not only are nonbiodegradable plastics clogging oceans and landfills, but they’re also invading our bodies.
“Ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card,” said Philip Demokritou, the founding director of the Environmental Health Nanoscience Laboratory and the Center for Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology at the School of Public Health.
We’re “drowning” in plastic exposure, according to Don Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor both in the Medical School and School of Engineering. From the synthetic clothes we wear to wildfire smoke, it’s nearly impossible to escape. And our bodies can’t fully break plastics down. This is especially alarming as research has found plastic in nearly every bodily organ.
“These particles … are what we call sustained release vehicles, meaning they’re just sitting there, and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs,” Ingber said. “That makes [them] even more dangerous.”
Mary Johnson, a research scientist in the Environmental Health Department of the School of Public Health, said more research is needed to figure out who is at the highest risk of exposure. But all consumers should be trying to minimize their use of plastics — from what they wear to how they furnish their homes to how they prepare food — until better, biodegradable alternatives can be found.
“As a consumer I feel like I can’t wait; I want to minimize my own exposure,” Johnson said.
In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas speaks with Demokritou, Ingber, and Johnson about the prevalence of plastic — and what to do about it.
Transcript
Philip Demokritou: Ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card.
Samantha Laine Perfas: Our planet is filled with plastic. On average, we produce 430 million tons every year, most of which is used only for a short period of time and then discarded. But plastic isn’t just in the environment: it’s now in our bodies. Microplastics have been found in our bloodstreams, lungs, and other organs, and we’re only recently beginning to understand how this affects our health.
How destructive is our relationship to plastic?
Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by:
Demokritou: Philip Demokritou. I’m the founding director of the Harvard Nanotechnology and Nanotoxicology Center at the School of Public Health.
Laine Perfas: His current research focuses on how nanomaterials and particles affect our health and safety. Then:
Don Ingber: Don Ingber. I’m the founding director of the Wyss Institute and a professor both in the Medical School and School of Engineering, as well as Boston Children’s Hospital.
Laine Perfas: He’s also a cell biologist and a pioneer in the field of bionics. And finally:
Mary Johnson: Mary Johnson. I am a research scientist in the Environmental Health Department of the School of Public Health.
Laine Perfas: Her work focuses on immune health and investigates how the effects of air pollution, wildfires, and other environmental exposures affect our bodies.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll take a close look at the plastic problem.
I want to start off by asking why are we so obsessed with plastic?
Demokritou: I think plastics have become an integral part of modern life because of their low cost, amazing properties, and they definitely made our life easier. We found one of the very first ads that the industry put together and it starts with, “Plastic is fantastic.” So, I guess we live in the age of disposable living. We are all addicted to plastics.
Ingber: It’s basically our culture’s heroin. It does everything you’d want it to do at incredibly low cost with high fidelity, reproducibility, manufacturability. It’s useful in every way, as Philip was saying. It’s a fantastic product, it’s just getting rid of it is the problem. It’s killing us over time; I mean the whole planet, not just humans. I mean, marine life, animals. In the last 15, 20 years, it’s really reached the point where it’s obvious when you see large expanses of ocean filled with plastic trash, that doesn’t degrade in landfills and so forth, but it was always there. We just weren’t aware.
Demokritou: When we don’t manage plastics in a sustainable way, then it becomes a problem. And that’s the case for every chemical we’re using, every material we’re using. And unfortunately, the modus operandi of our society when it comes to chemicals is, let’s put them out there and we’ll worry and clean the mess 20, 30 years later when scientists like myself, Don, and Mary discover that they are causing harm to the environment and human beings.
Laine Perfas: So I want to talk a little bit about microplastics and nanoplastics specifically. What are they and why are they so concerning to our health?
Johnson: So the plastics are wonderful when they’re being used, but then they decompose. And as they decompose, the microplastics are small plastics, less than 5 millimeters, and they can further degrade into nanoplastics, which are even smaller. And the concern, obviously, is not only is it destroying our environment, a few years ago we found out it’s in our blood, and now we’re finding out it’s in a lot of our organs and tissues and really it’s everywhere. I think that has heightened our concern and our awareness that we really have to figure out a way to prevent this degradation and exposing ourselves to the microplastics.
Laine Perfas: How is it getting into our bodies?
Ingber: I was in meetings 15, 20 years ago when the field of nanotoxicology sort of initiated when people realized that these particles are getting — this was all types of nanoparticles, not just plastics — getting into every organ in the body, and it was hard to understand how this could be happening because we have barriers in our tissues. Maybe 14 years ago we developed devices called organs-on-chips that have human cells oriented in little engineered devices that have hollow channels that could have flow of fluids to mimic blood and air. And we lined it by the lung cells that line our air sac. And we put particles that were some of the more plastic particles in the lung. And what we found is that actually breathing motions increase their absorption enormously, and it’s analogous, I think, to like viruses going across, which are similar size, going across the barrier of these tissues. They’re being picked up the way we pick up other things that are small and transport them. It wasn’t like tearing apart the tissue at all. It really made me think, whoa, I mean, the idea that this can cross all the tissue barriers got really worrisome to me.
Laine Perfas: I mentioned at the top of the episode too that we’re also literally eating them; and I guess that was surprising to me, that from consuming them it was also entering our bodies because like you said, Don, I would have thought that our bodies were able to just digest it. And there it goes. And it’s no longer in us. But that’s not the case. So I’d love to hear more about that as well.
Demokritou: That’s what I call the two I’s in terms of the exposure: inhalation, of course, but also ingestion. Actually, if you look at the human population data, you will see that ingestion is the primary route of exposure, and we are consuming about 5 grams of micronanoplastics per week; that’s the equivalent of a credit card. So ingestion is a major route. And we have a grant from USDA, and we’re looking also at how these micronanoplastics from soil make it to edible plants. And also through the trophic transfer, they can make it through the food chain. Now, I think Don put it nicely, anything in the nanoscale, it’s very clear that they can bypass biological barriers. When it comes to micronanoplastics, especially nanoplastics, they are everywhere. It’s the byproduct of degradation over 50, 60 years that we throw them out there. We have many evidence that these nanoplastics in particular, because of their hydrophobic nature, they can really become systemic. We found them everywhere. Every organ, every week, it’s a study that we found them. In this organ, in that organ. Of course, for those of us that were doing toxicology, we know that the dose makes the poison. So it’s not just the identification in organs, it’s also in certain quantities that they can really cause harm. And that’s the question we’re trying to address right now.
Johnson: I’d like to also bring up microplastics in the air, I think [that] is underappreciated, and we don’t have a standardized method for measuring it, especially on a populational level. And we do research looking at how wildfires, how the smoke impacts your immune system. We know that there’s also microplastics being inhaled with the smoke. But the standardization of measurements isn’t there yet to be able to accurately quantify how much we are inhaling, especially in those special circumstances with increased air pollution or wildfire smoke.
Ingber: I learned that one of the biggest sources of microplastics is tires; as tires run on the road and you’ll see those little black marks, it’s leaching into the air. And then also textiles. We’re just surrounded, we’re bathed in them. The other point I think that’s important, it may not be obvious, is that, when we ingest foods, we digest them, right? We break them down to small molecules that could be absorbed, and those that are not digested usually go out in feces or urine. But plastics are not broken down to their individual links, if you like, we call them monomers. Yes, their small bits are released through breakdown, but that’s more physical breakdown over time and not chemical breakdown. And that’s what makes them really so dangerous.
Laine Perfas: It seems like a study every day is coming out, oh, we found microplastics here in the body, or in this organ, or here. So we know that it’s very commonly present in our bodies. What do we know so far about the health risks, about how that actually is affecting our bodies, and some of the dangers that it can cause?
Demokritou: In public health, usually we use epidemiology to come up with the associations of exposures to whatever disease. And that’s an area that when it comes to micronanoplastics, we don’t have many studies out there. So we need to do more of these kind of studies to link the associations between exposures and diseases. Now, in terms of the toxicology of micronanoplastics, that’s a little bit more mature field. I’ve been studying nanoscale materials and plastics for probably 10 years, especially nanoplastics through the NIH-funded center we had at Harvard. The evidence that nanoscale plastics in particular, that they can bypass biological barriers, I think, that’s very strong. You put them in the lungs, they will translocate, become systemic, they will go to different organs. Also, at the cellular molecular level, we see red flags. We can see them becoming internalized in the gut, for instance, we even found them in the nuclei. We publish a ton of papers on DNA damage, the potential to generate reactive exospecies and interfere with cellular functions. Actually, I’m using one of the organ-on-a-chip platforms that Don developed to understand how they behave in the gut. We have a ton of evidence, but we need to understand mechanistically what’s happening. Not all micronanoplastics are created equal. They have unique properties, different polymers, different sizes, morphologies. So we have a ton of work to do to study potential health effects. We are not there yet.
Ingber: I’m excited to hear you working with intestine-on-a-chip because that would be a great model for this. We’ve also integrated microbiome into these intestine chips. And the microbiome can also modify the plastics, or they can be modified by the plastic. And these plastics can bring toxins along with them, like heavy metals. And that’s a whole area I think that people have explored more in the marine-life area, but it’s probably affecting us as well. In our first paper that I mentioned, where we looked at nanoparticle transport in the lung chip, we could absolutely show activation of inflammation. And inflammation is, you know, at the heart of almost every disease and also even cancer progression. It was the nanoparticles being taken up that drove that.
Johnson: There was a recent study that did come out that I thought was pretty exciting, where they looked at patients who are undergoing carotid endarterectomies, so they were scraping the plaque out of the arteries, and then they analyzed the plaque for microplastics. And they found that those who had microplastics in the plaque, I believe it was at least 50 percent, I think it was more than 50 percent, they were able to associate the microplastic levels with morbidity and mortality three years later. And to my knowledge, it’s one of the first studies that were able to show basically a clinical outcome associated with the presence of the microplastics.
Demokritou: One additional point, Sam. All the plastics that we’re currently using, they are loaded with additives. And those additives have plenty of literature, historical, epidemiological, and toxicological data that they can cause harm. We know the phthalates, that they’re there to make the plastic soft, they’re endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And these micronanoplastics now, when they’re taken up by our cells and the body, they are the carriers of these additives so they can more efficiently deliver chemicals into our body. So, it’s kind of a Trojan horse of delivering chemicals from the plastics themselves. We have a paper now in review that as these micronanoplastics wandering in the environment, they carry other environmental pollutants on their surface because of their hydrophobic nature. And also they can really deliver these environmental pollutants more effectively in our bodies.
Ingber: It’s like the cumulative exposure to chemicals of any type that matters, not just whether you saw it for a short time. And these particles, when they’re ingested, are what we call sustained-release vehicles, meaning they’re just sitting there and every day they’re releasing a little bit for the rest of the lifetime of those cells in your gut or other organs, and so that makes it even more dangerous.
Laine Perfas: That actually gets to a clarifying question I wanted to ask, which is: Is it the plastic itself that’s dangerous, or is it all the additives and chemicals that are in the plastic?
Demokritou: I think it’s a combination of the two. I mean, you cannot rule one or the other. And that is one of the major knowledge gaps that we have in toxicological studies of micronanoplastics. Actually, in my labs right now, we have developed platforms that enable us to simulate what happens to a plastic material across its life cycle as it goes through these stressors, which can be mechanical, it can be weathering, UV photo oxidation, thermal stressors. We can shorten what happens to plastic material over 50 years and we make what we call reference micronanoplastic materials that are environmentally relevant. And those are the ones we use in our toxicological studies.
Laine Perfas: Mary, I actually wanted to ask you, with microplastics, I saw some of your work was actually looking at different communities who are at higher risk of being affected than others. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Johnson: A lot of our research has looked at communities that are disadvantaged and are typically exposed to high levels of chronic air pollution and/or wildfire smoke. We don’t have hard data yet, but within that context, it is thought that those groups would also be more exposed to microplastics. A similar concept would be those who are living next to industries, and those also tend to be the disadvantaged populations, and so those types of vulnerable populations are probably going to fall fairly similar to what we see for those exposed to chronic air pollution and exposure to wildfire smoke. There have been a limited amount of studies, not our own, that have found that, at least in the indoor environment, infants are more at risk for exposure, and the second category would be preschoolers, and as you go up, you become less and less exposed to the microplastics. As we’re able to monitor indoor or outdoor air for actual microplastic numbers, we’ll have a better idea of the different age ranges and vulnerabilities.
Ingber: Do they think that infants and small children have greater exposure because everything that you give to a kid is plastic because it tends to be cheap and safer and they put everything in their mouths? Is that why or something about absorb from air?
Johnson: I do believe that the younger populations are exposed to a lot more plastics, but I believe that particular study was focusing on indoor dust, which is where the microplastics were primarily found.
Laine Perfas: I guess I’m surprised. I would have thought that people who are older, who’ve been on earth longer, would be more at risk.
Johnson: Yeah, I believe it was, they were referring to the inhalation basically of the dust in the indoor home, which makes sense, and the younger they are and they’re on the floors and not washing their hands and crawling and closer to the dust itself in the home. But it’s a very limited amount of research that’s come out so far, looking at those associations. So I do think much more needs to be done looking at which populations are truly vulnerable and we should be targeting to try to prevent exposure as much as possible.
Demokritou: I think it might be worth [discussing] a little bit more what happens on the global scale. There is a very recent paper, came out in Nature, which is the first effort to quantify and come up with an inventory of emissions of plastics around the world. And in high-income countries, generally speaking, we did well, not amazingly well, but we did well in containing and controlling the plastic pollution. That’s not the case in low-income countries. About 50, 60 million tons of plastic waste out of these 250 million metric tons that we’re generating globally, it’s uncontained. And in these countries, you will see open fires and burning plastic. You will see debris everywhere and the populations in those countries are getting exposed at higher levels compared to all of us in the United States, for instance. So we really need to do a little bit more at a global scale because environmental pollutants, they transcend boundaries. So if you put micronanoplastics in the air, they will travel, especially the nanoscale particles. They can go thousands of miles, and they can be everywhere. We need to keep that in mind as we address this global issue.
Johnson: I’d like to also bring up, there was a study that sampled tap water globally and 80 percent of the samples had microplastics in them. It’s certainly another issue that maybe isn’t talked about as much, although there was a study looking at bottled water and levels of microplastics, and it was pretty shocking how high of a concentration that were in the bottles. So many areas, I think that, need to be addressed.
Ingber: It obviously depends on whether you have copper pipes, or nowadays PVC is used all over and actually plastic tubing is used now quite a bit. It probably varies enormously, but it’s hard to escape.
Sam, I think it’s important to note that plastics is a general term that are, you know, materials that can be easily formed and take shapes that you desire and that’s where its initial term came from. In medicine, there are plastics that are biodegradable. That’s very different. Those can be broken down to the individual monomers or links. And so we’re talking about ones that can’t be broken down here, often petroleum industry-based and so forth. There’s a lot of work going on at my institute and other places in terms of both bioplastics, things that are easily even compostable, you can put it in the compost to break it down, or ways to remediate and break down plastics that are all over the place. I think that is really where hope lies.
Laine Perfas: I actually wanted to ask a question about that. How are we doing when it comes to discovering plastic alternatives?
Demokritou: We really need to substitute the non-biodegradable plastics, especially the ones that are single-use. Myself and Kit Parker from Wyss Institute, we have this project trying to extract biopolymers from food waste and then turn them into potential nanofibers to replace food packaging, which is a major source of plastic. And actually most of the food packaging we’re using, it’s single-use. So it will end up in landfills. We developed and we published a paper in Nature, I think a year or two ago, that we developed the first water-soluble, washable plastic material that can be used as an alternative for food packaging.
Ingber: Maybe 10 years ago, we developed a material that was inspired by insect cuticle, right? Think of a lobster, you know, or a beetle, very hard shell, but they’re also flexible. And it turns out that it’s all the same material that’s almost like plywood made up of layers; it’s called chitin in insects. And so we made something we called shrilk, which was the chitin, or breakdown products called chitosan, from shrimp shells, and silk fibroin, from silk. Chitosan is used in medical products for wound healing and silk is in surgical sutures, so it’s safe. And when we recreated the layer-by-layer structure, we actually had material that was optically clear but had the strength of aluminum foil and it could be molded. And so we were really excited about that. The challenges in that world, and I think for even Philip’s technology, is scaling up manufacturing so that you can do this at a cost-effective way.
The other side of this that we’ve had some really exciting recent breakthroughs is breaking down of plastics. And there have been some groups recently published that they can find microbes, bacteria that can degrade one type of plastic. And that’s gotten a huge excitement. We have bacteria that we isolated from the microbiome of a worm that degrades plastic on its own. And it degrades at least four different types of the major classes of plastic, and that’s led to a startup company; that was between my lab and George Church’s at the Wyss Institute. The reason we’re excited about this new startup is that it can work in a complex mixture. It doesn’t need to go through the current recycling pipeline of isolating each bit and then trying to degrade one at a time. And I think that’s the kind of thing that we need.
Laine Perfas: Given what we know and don’t know, are there things that we can do as consumers to reduce our exposure now, while we wait for some of these other changes to happen?
Demokritou: I think we should start from the societal level. We really need to actually come up with a strategy, and this is what we call the “three R waste hierarchy.” So we need to reduce use of plastics. We need to reuse plastics as much as we can. Of course, recycling has to increase, where 9 percent in the United States, it’s very low, and the single-use plastics that will end up in the environment, we need to substitute them, if possible with biodegradable, nontoxic plastics. Of course, we need to get all stakeholders on board. We need to redesign products, which may add to the cost, and it’s also the question of who is paying this add-on cost? Is it the consumer? Those are fundamental questions that we really need to start discussing. And the most effective approach is to do a source reduction. If we reduce the use, if all of us reduce the use of plastics, myself included, I think that can be a really good start.
Ingber: Think about how quickly solar and wind have changed in terms of energy. It required huge political shifts and financial incentives. And I think it’s got to be at that level. I mean, sure, every individual could stop buying plastic water bottles and using plastic bags and use wood cutting boards, but it’s got to be top-down at the same time.
Demokritou: There is this effort by United Nations to put in place a legally binding global plastics treaty, similar to the climate treaty, which is gaining track actually the last couple years; there are already I think 150 countries, signed this treaty. And again, this is at the global level because we need to see the plastic crisis across the board, not only at the local level, and not only at the high-income countries.
Johnson: I guess I would say, obviously, yeah, everything has to be dealt with at a global level, but even so, as a consumer I feel like I can’t wait, I want to minimize my own exposure. And I think having the mindset of when you purchase something, actually knowing what you’re buying helps. Simple examples would be clothing, synthetic clothing versus buying an all-cotton product or an area rug. Synthetic rugs are really cheap and soft. And wool rugs cost more, but you would be reducing the potential amount of microplastics that you’re being exposed to. You mentioned the kitchen. I do try to have nothing plastic used in the kitchen, if possible, it’s not always possible, and avoid, if there is plastic, it being exposed to heat, which can make the chemicals leach out faster. And I think it would be helpful to consumers to have some type of labeling on products, especially until we get these biodegradable plastics, so people are more educated and can make better choices in trying to minimize their exposure to the plastics.
Laine Perfas: So all of these are good suggestions for minimizing future exposure on a global and personal scale. Is there anything that we know of that we can do to remove the plastic that’s already in our bodies?
Ingber: Yeah. I think that’s something we need to figure out.
Demokritou: Another important element, Sam, is, we need better monitoring. Plastics, micronutrient plastics are not in the list of the chemicals that we’re monitoring in terms of biomonitoring. I know some states like California, they’re trying to include micronanoplastics in their plans. And also the reporting is very important. But we need to develop the methods to be able to do it efficiently, the identification and quantification, because it’s not just the identification. It’s not that I found one microplastic in my bottle of water. So it’s the dose makes the poison. We need to quantify our exposures at the human population level.
Laine Perfas: So if I could give each of you a magic wand that you could wave to either speed up the research on something that’s already happening, or to just solve an aspect of this problem, what do you think are the things that would make the biggest difference on this issue right now?
Ingber: You heard Philip say that we want to reduce, replace, reuse. What I’m seeing out there, and I get to see technologies that are really out there coming down the pipeline at the Institute, I really do think this idea of harnessing the way some organisms can break down plastics. And so it is possible. And so what we have to do is not only find ones that break it down, but link it into a cycle so that you have a full remediation, reuse, replacement cycle. And do it in a cost-effective way. It has to be cost-effective, or it will never get anywhere.
Johnson: I guess for my wish, I think having a scalable method to accurately measure the microplastics, whether it’s air or water or in tissue, would be really advantageous, so we can begin to better understand the exposures obviously, but the health impacts.
Demokritou: I think, definitely we need technologies to clean the mess we created, but we really need to start thinking of how we can reduce the use of plastics, because we can’t just throw toxic compounds out there and then develop the technologies to clean the mess.
Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this conversation. I learned a lot and I really appreciate it.
Ingber: Thank you.
Demokritou: Thank you.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening; to find links to all of our episodes and a transcript of this one, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima with additional production and editing support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. This podcast was produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.
English professor, journalist says first step to better prose is being aware that no one has to read you
Universities are repositories of fascinating ideas. So why is academic writing so boring? Leonard Cassuto thinks it’s all a matter of keeping in mind that good writing is about keeping the reader interested. (Hint: Be a better storyteller.)
Cassuto, A.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’89, a Fordham English professor and journalist, recently published a new book, “Academic Writing as if Readers Matter.” He said he got the idea for the project while teaching expository writing as a graduate student, helping writers with different backgrounds and interests hone their communication skills, particularly in academic writing.
Cassuto’s desire to help make academic writing more accessible and compelling has dovetailed in recent decades with his participation in ongoing discussions to rethink graduate education. The goal there is to focus more tightly on work that advances society, not just some arcane academic interest — along with being able to better explain that work to diverse audiences.
Cassuto recently spoke to the Gazette about his work. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You start your book by pointing out that all academic writers begin their careers writing for one person: their teacher. Why does that create problems?
This is the primal scene of academic writing: some student writing some paper for some teacher someplace. It happens again and again and is the process by which we are socialized into the community of academic writers.
The distinguishing feature of that primal scene is one that I think gets very little attention, namely that the reader (in this case the teacher) is being paid. You grow up as a writer where your audience is one who can never be bored or discouraged because they’re being paid to read to the end of it. You’re learning in some sense that the reader doesn’t matter that much and that they’re going to be with you no matter what.
This is inevitably the root of many potential bad habits, which can burst into flower as writers become more and more advanced. One of the core motivations of this book is to encourage writers to recognize this relationship and to try to eclipse it — to write as though the reader is not being paid. The results are going to be much better in every respect.
Academic writing has a bad reputation, particularly among readers who value good prose. Would you say that criticism is deserved?
Increasingly so, and this book serves as both a handbook and an advice book. That’s the book’s beating heart.
But another central objective is to understand academic writers as a community. When we are writing, we’re not just writing for ourselves. If we alienate our audience, individually and collectively, it’s part of a larger problem that we’re all creating.
Academia and higher education have to be a public good. In order for that to happen, we need to be able to communicate in a way that people are going to hear what we’re saying and receive the message. Whether these are scientists writing about how to make semiconductors or whether it’s a professor of politics who’s writing about how we should understand the geopolitical context of an event that’s happening someplace in the world, if academia is going to do its job and take care of the public, then the communication has to be intact. Otherwise it creates disdain for that project and skepticism about what emerges from the academy. It’s the business of the community, collectively.
The tips and the advice about how to become a better writer have to be a collective objective. We have to get better; we have to repair the relation between town and gown so that we can continue to take care of each other productively.
“Too many people in academia think it’s more important to show that you’re smart than it is to communicate with somebody.”
What are some of the most common pitfalls for academic writers?
Here are a few of the greatest hits: One is that too many academic writers don’t understand the importance of story. Stories are how human beings have been communicating with each other since before we could write. Human beings are storytelling animals. We are people who live by story, and every argument is a story, and every story is an argument. If academic writers are most accustomed to thinking of themselves as making arguments, then it needs to unfold in a narrative way. If it doesn’t, it’s not going to be as successful.
Then, academic writing is riddled with jargon. Jargon doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it can be an efficiency, where people are talking to other people who understand the same language. But jargon creates an in-group and an out-group, those who understand and those who do not. If your reader is not necessarily a member of that in-group, then you’re being — simply put — unfriendly. You’re saying, “I don’t really care about you.” That sort of relationship is not productive of collaboration, either in the present or in the future.
And third, too many academic writers don’t understand the necessary relationship between the abstract and the concrete. Without the concrete, the abstract is a bunch of airy-fairy ideas that are floating off in the distance. Every time the reader thinks they’ve got a grasp on them, it turns out they are wisps that drift away. But without the abstract, the concrete is just a pile of bricks, a bunch of facts that aren’t being tied together by anything. We need the abstract and the concrete to coexist. If a writer neglects this necessary connection, the chances are they’re not going to be able to be as persuasive.
You make the case that academic writing can actually be fun. How would making academic writing more fun prove a benefit to a scholar or a student?
I think that if writers remember they are people who are talking to other people, that’s the first step. There is a difference between good and bad scientific writing, and it isn’t just about questions of clarity; good science writing is also animated by sensibility. Sensibility can take many forms.
In this book I use a lot of lively metaphors. They’re designed not only to teach but to also to make the reader smile. There are different ways to communicate a sense of self or a sense of voice. The conventions of a particular discipline might dictate guidelines around that, but you can still have a voice.
Creative writing and academic writing are often seen as being at odds with one another. Can academic writing be creative?
“Creative writing” is a term of art that we use to talk about fiction, poetry, and drama, but if we think about what the words in the phrase actually mean, something that’s creative is original; it has vitality.
You can find a lot of fiction, poetry, and drama that isn’t creative by that definition, because it’s cliched, hackneyed, dead on the page. And inversely, you can find writing that is not fiction — such as academic writing — that exhibits all of these qualities that we attribute to the creative. There’s originality; there’s the vital spark, a sense of life on the page.
All writers should think of themselves as creative writers, that you’re going to do your best work if you try to create something where there wasn’t something before.
Some of these bad writing habits stem from academic anxiety or the fear the writer might be seen as “clodpoll,” as you so eloquently put it. How can writers work through that fear?
Academia as a culture promotes some bad habits of thought and being. Too many people in academia think it’s more important to show that you’re smart than it is to communicate with somebody. In fact, a writer, fearing being called “not smart,” is going to construct all kinds of defenses that inhibit understanding and communication. It tells their reader, “If you work like a sled dog, you might be able to understand it; unless you can’t, in which case, well, that’s your problem.”
I think too many academic readers have had the experience of pushing through academic writing that behaves that way. We’re not taught often enough that writing clearly and crisply is more apt to be seen as smart, more apt to gain respect — and also more likely to communicate learning.
But culture is very persistent. I understand how hard it can be to change culture, and this book is a gesture and a call for us to examine the culture in which a lot of academic writing is produced.
It’s worth noting that public awareness of A.I. — specifically, ChatGBT, which can be used for writing — burst on the scene as you were working on this book. How do you see A.I. helping or hurting academic writing?
A.I. is a tool. We have absorbed the impact of new technology before, and I think we’re going to do it again. A.I. raises legitimate concerns in many areas of our practice, but I think ultimately it will take its place in our tool kit, and we will do what we need to do in order to use it thoughtfully and productively.
I think the great fear that A.I. is going to replace us is overwrought because of the importance of sensibility. We’re still at the very beginning of learning how to use it, but I hope writers will ultimately benefit from having another tool in their kit, particularly if it can help them do their work faster.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading your book?
Writers need to communicate with a reader who is an actualperson. If we understand and appreciate that those people are out there wanting to learn from us as writers, then we can understand and anticipate their needs. We’ll produce better work. That work has a chance to be part of something bigger than us.
Academic writing is an enterprise, and each individual writer should be the best writer that they’re capable of being. We’re in this together, and we have to be able to understand that this community needs good writing in order for us to exist sustainably and productively with the larger society.
What happened when a meteorite the size of four Mount Everests hit Earth?
Barberton Greenstone belt of South Africa.
Photo courtesy of Nadja Drabon
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Giant impact had silver lining for life, according to new study
Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it’s revealing secrets about Earth’s past.
Nadja Drabon, an early Earth geologist and assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has questions about what our planet was like during ancient eons rife with meteoritic bombardment, when only single-celled bacteria and archaea reigned — and when it all started to change. When did the first oceans appear? Continents? Plate tectonics? How did all of those violent impacts affect the evolution of life?
Her new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to answer some of these questions, in relation to the inauspiciously named “S2” meteoritic impact of more than 3 billion years ago, for which geological evidence is found in the Barberton Greenstone belt of South Africa. Through the painstaking work of collecting and examining rock samples centimeters apart and analyzing the sedimentology, geochemistry, and carbon isotope compositions they leave behind, Drabon’s team paints the most compelling picture to date of what happened the day a meteorite the size of four Mount Everests paid Earth a visit.
“Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water. It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents. Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami sweeping by and ripping up the sea floor,” said Drabon.
Graphical depiction of the S2 impact and its immediate aftereffects.
The S2 meteorite, estimated to have been up to 200 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs, triggered a tsunami that mixed up the ocean and flushed debris from the land into coastal areas. Heat from the impact caused the topmost layer of the ocean to boil off, while also heating the atmosphere. A thick cloud of dust blanketed everything, shutting down any photosynthetic activity.
But bacteria are hardy, and following impact, according to the team’s analysis, bacterial life bounced back quickly. With this came sharp spikes in populations of unicellular organisms that feed off the elements phosphorus and iron. Iron was likely stirred up from the deep ocean into shallow waters by the aforementioned tsunami, and phosphorus was delivered to Earth by the meteorite itself and from an increase of weathering and erosion on land.
Drabon’s analysis shows that iron-metabolizing bacteria would thus have flourished in the immediate aftermath of the impact. This shift toward iron-favoring bacteria, however short-lived, is a key puzzle piece depicting early life on Earth. According to Drabon’s study, meteorite impact events — while reputed to kill everything in their wake (including, 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs) — carried a silver lining for life.
“But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.”
Nadja Drabon
“We think of impact events as being disastrous for life,” Drabon said. “But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.”
These results are drawn from the backbreaking work of geologists like Drabon and her students, hiking into mountain passes that contain the sedimentary evidence of early sprays of rock that embedded themselves into the ground and became preserved over time in the Earth’s crust. Chemical signatures hidden in thin layers of rock help Drabon and her students piece together evidence of tsunamis and other cataclysmic events.
Nadja Drabon.
Photo by Bryant Troung
Drabon with students David Madrigal Trejo and Öykü Mete during fieldwork in South Africa.
Photo courtesy of Nadja Drabon
The Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa, where Drabon concentrates most of her current work, contains evidence of at least eight impact events including the S2. She and her team plan to study the area further to probe even deeper into Earth and its meteorite-enabled history.
FAS creates new professorships in civil discourse and AI
5 min read
Gift from business leader Alfred Lin ’94 and artist Rebecca Lin ’94, part of record 30th reunion giving, builds on critical new efforts on dialogue and generative AI
Harvard University announced today two new professorships in civil discourse and one in artificial intelligence made possible by a gift from alums Alfred Lin ’94 and Rebecca Lin ’94. These professorships are part of a wider donation that will also support these critical areas of work within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The gift comes as the University recently announced a newreport on open inquiry, with recommendations for faculty and students on how to debate and disagree in classrooms and within the larger campus community. Edgerley Family Dean Hopi Hoekstra last year launched a Civil Discourse Initiative at FAS, and undergraduates engaged with the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, both of which promote constructive conversations within Harvard College.
“Alfred and Rebecca’s support will help foster the practice and study of civil discourse in our classrooms and on our campus, as well as advance innovation and discovery in AI,” said Hoekstra. “Their formative experience as students and enduring commitment to Harvard is evident in this inspiring gift.”
The gift marks the Lins’ continued commitment to the University over three decades, and comes in celebration of their 30th Harvard College reunion. The new donation is part of a larger contribution from the Class of 1994, which this year set the record for highest grossing 30th reunion campaign in Harvard College history. A total of 599 members of the class donated more than $200 million.
Rebecca and Alfred Lin.
The Lin gift will endow two Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professorships in civil discourse, and the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor in artificial intelligence in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Lins’ gift will also launch the Edgerley Family Dean’s Innovation Fund for generative AI.
“As I like to say, Harvard students often strive to do ‘both/and’ rather than settling for ‘either/or.’ Alfred and Rebecca have demonstrated that spirit of possibility beautifully with their latest act of generosity,” said President Alan Garber. “By dedicating their support to civil discourse and artificial intelligence, they are both strengthening the foundation of our campus culture and pushing the boundaries of our teaching practices. Progress in these two areas is fundamental to our future as a University. I am deeply grateful for the support of the Lins and their vote of confidence in Harvard.”
“We came to Harvard with strong values. Some of those values were challenged; some of them were reaffirmed; and we believe that it continues to be a special place where dialogue moves important ideas forward,” Alfred Lin said.
“Alfred and I have tried to support Harvard when we could or consistently, but we also believe in supporting Harvard when times are challenging, and we want to help during those times,” Rebecca Lin said.
The Lins hope their gift will help support an environment where people can “disagree and not be disagreeable.” Alfred recalled auditing “Justice,” a government course previously taught by Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, and Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus (and recently renewed by Sandel). He remembers the two professors taking opposing political views on controversial topics in an effort to find truth.
Alfred and Rebecca Lin at Harvard in 1994.
“They would argue the extreme sides. They were never disagreeable, and they would always make you think,” Alfred said. “We modeled what we learned about social discourse in ‘Justice’ or other classes when we were just talking around the table at Quincy Grille.”
The Lins’ endowment of two professorships on civil discourse builds on these memories. The Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Civil Discourse will recognize, for a five-year term, faculty who have made significant contributions, whether through teaching, advising, or mentoring, to fostering students’ ability to engage in meaningful dialogue. The second Lin professorship will support a faculty member whose research and teaching focuses on civil discourse and dialogue, ethics, academic freedom, and freedom of speech.
Alfred studied applied mathematics while Rebecca concentrated in physics at the College. The couple’s earlier gifts gravitated toward supporting financial aid for undergraduates pursuing applied sciences and engineering. Their interest in advancing computer science and artificial intelligence is reflected in their new gifts of the SEAS professorship and to the FAS Dean’s Innovation Fund, which is meant to foreground the importance of integrating generative AI tools into teaching and learning.
Alfred is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he invests in early stage companies in financial tech, robotics, and healthcare, among others. He sits on several boards, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and Zipline. Rebecca is an artist with storyboard credits on various Walt Disney Animation Studios television series and on the feature film “Recess, School’s Out.” She serves on the board of trustees at the California Academy of Sciences and the UCSF Foundation. The couple previously worked at Zappos, where Alfred served as Chairman and COO and Rebecca managed real estate.
Significant decline in sexual misconduct at Harvard, survey finds
Most students are aware of reporting mechanisms and support services, but many do not use resources
6 min read
In April, the University invited all degree-seeking students to participate in the Higher Education Sexual Misconduct and Awareness (HESMA) survey. In a message to Harvard affiliates on Monday, President Alan Garber announced the release of the results.
The HESMA survey, which was conducted by a consortium of 10 universities, was the third in a series Harvard has used to understand and address issues related to sexual assault, misconduct, and harassment on campus. The first two were held in 2015 and 2019.
The new data shows a statistically significant decline in sexual misconduct at the University since the 2019 survey and indicates that a majority of bystanders who witnessed misconduct intervened. The results also show a high level of awareness of the reporting mechanisms and support services offered to those who have experienced sexual assault or harassment. Still, a significant number of students reported that they did not utilize resources following incidents.
These and other survey results will inform sexual assault and misconduct prevention practices and resource allocation.
The Gazette sat down with Peggy Newell, vice president and deputy to the president, and Kathleen McGinn, principal investigator for Harvard’s HESMA survey and Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, to discuss the findings.
Why is it important for the University to continue to gather data in this area?
Newell: We know from the research that we cannot rely on individual disclosures of reports of sexual harassment and assault to determine the prevalence of harm that is occurring within our community. Climate surveys, such as the Association of American Universities (AAU) surveys conducted in 2015 and 2019 and the HESMA survey conducted this year, offer important and reliable information that we can then use to develop strategies and resources for responding to this public health issue.
“The survey is long, and the questions touch on very sensitive subject matter, yet our students clearly were seeking to have their voices heard.”
Peggy Newell
Peggy Newell.
Harvard file photo
What are the most important findings from this year’s HESMA survey?
Newell: As a starting point, we are grateful to our students for taking the time to participate in this critically important research. The survey is long, and the questions touch on very sensitive subject matter, yet our students clearly were seeking to have their voices heard, with over 35 percent of Harvard students participating in the 2024 survey. The overall data show that the prevalence of all forms of non-consensual sexual contact, harassing behavior, and sexual harassment are lower in in 2024 than in prior rounds of the survey.
McGinn: The prevalence of sexual misconduct experienced by Harvard students was lower in spring 2024 than in spring 2019, but our students continue to experience sexual harassment and sexual assault. Even one incident of sexual assault on our campus is too many. In the large majority of incidents, students reported other students as the people responsible for the sexual misconduct. While our students are knowledgeable about support resources available on campus, these data show that very few students who experience sexual harassment or assault seek support from Harvard resources or programs. On a more positive note, students who observe behavior they believe could lead to sexual harassment or assault are very likely to intervene.
Newell: Having this information creates an opportunity for us to better understand the prevalence of sexual violence at Harvard currently and to use the data to inform our efforts to prevent harm. It is invaluable to be able to compare changes over the past four years to understand where and how our efforts have or have not made an impact. Additionally, it can help us work on lowering the barriers to seeking support when someone has experienced sexual violence. This is an area that the University is committed to exploring further so that we may better understand what resources and support are needed.
Since the original AAU survey in 2015, there have been many changes to resources at the University, including the formation of the Office for Gender Equity. For example, the SHARE [Sexual Harassment/Assault Resources and Education] Team is made up of trained counselors to offer trauma-informed counseling, groups, and advocacy for students, staff, faculty, and post-doctoral fellows, and has hired a restorative practitioner. We have also maintained a network of local Title IX Resource Coordinators across the Schools and central administration to provide individual supports to community members impacted by sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct to enable them to access their work or studies.
What trends do you see around the circumstances of assault and harassment cases?
McGinn: As in years past, the majority of undergraduate students who experienced sexual assault while at Harvard report that incidents of sexual assault begin either in on-campus housing or at on-campus social events and involve alcohol; the majority of assaults take place in on-campus housing. For graduate students, incidents of sexual assault are more likely to begin in off-campus social settings. We hope raising awareness of the circumstances around sexual assault will increase bystander awareness and reduce the likelihood of sexual assault in these settings.
“We hope sharing and talking about the survey results communicates that every single incident of sexual assault experienced by students at Harvard is serious and unacceptable.”
Kathleen McGinn
Kathleen McGinn.
Courtesy photo
How would you want the results from this survey to help the Harvard community?
McGinn: The first priority is to stop sexual assault and harassment. As a community, we need to speak more frequently and openly about sexual assault and harassment to change long-standing cultural factors that normalize unacceptable, damaging behavior.
Newell: A critical part of this communication involves engagement with our faculty and staff. To encourage this dialogue, in the coming weeks we are launching an updated version of the required eLearning course addressing sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct. This course will serve as a supplement to expanded in-person training that we are offering across the community. This is an important conversation for every member of our community.
McGinn: In addition, Harvard needs to do a better job supporting students who experience sexual harassment or assault. One of the top reasons students provide for not accessing support after being sexually assaulted is that they believe what happened to them is “not serious enough.” We hope sharing and talking about the survey results communicates that every single incident of sexual assault experienced by students at Harvard is serious and unacceptable.
No one at Harvard University should ever have to experience sexual violence, intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, or stalking. If any Harvard community member needs support, there are options. If you would like to reach the confidential SHARE Team, please email oge_SHARE@harvard.edu or call 617.496.5636. If you would like to reach Title IX, please email oge_TitleIX@harvard.edu. For more information, please visit oge.harvard.edu/options.
First lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska (center) takes in the Widener Memorial Room with curator Peter X. Accardo and University Librarian Martha Whitehead.
Olena Zelenska presents Harvard Library with books, shows appreciation for its contribution to Ukrainian studies
When Olha Aleksic came to Harvard as a graduate student from Ukraine, it was to study the history of Christianity at the Divinity School. During an internship in Widener Library’s Slavic division, she discovered her passion for libraries, which then led to a career in collection development and a reference librarianship working with Ukrainian materials.
Nearly 20 years later, it was Aleksic, now Harvard Library’s Ukrainian bibliographer, who greeted the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, at the Widener. It was a key stop in Zelenska’s visit to the University, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
During the Sept. 24 visit, Aleksic introduced Zelenska to Harvard Library’s Ukrainian collections, one of the largest and most comprehensive outside of Europe. Among the valuable Ukrainian items in Harvard’s collections are Ivan Fedorov’s “Apostol” and “Primer” (1574), the first books printed in Ukraine.
“The first lady specifically chose to visit Harvard Library because libraries are places where history can be preserved,” noted Aleksic.
Zelenska was officially welcomed in the Widener Rotunda by Martha Whitehead, vice president for the Harvard Library and University librarian.
“We see our collections as a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs and as a treasure trove for the distinguished visiting scholars who come to work and study at the Ukrainian Research Institute,” said Whitehead. “Our Ukrainian collections will tell the story of Ukraine and its people far into the future.”
Zelenska noted her deep appreciation for Harvard Library’s contribution to Ukrainian Studies, presenting Whitehead with “Ukraine and Ukrainians,” an art book by Ivan Honchar, to add to Harvard’s collection.
To add to Harvard Library’s collection, Zelenska presents Martha Whitehead with “Ukraine and Ukrainians,” which depicts the country’s story.Zelenska gave Harvard Library three damaged books rescued from a ruined printing warehouse in Kharkiv. They will be carefully conserved by the library’s Preservation Services.
“This is a very important volume that provides in-depth information about Ukraine and Ukrainians. We’re so pleased to gift it to Harvard Library,” Zelenska said.
Accepting the books on behalf of the library, Whitehead emphasized its longstanding commitment to its global collections and expanding world knowledge.
“We collect and preserve global voices for present and future generations of scholars,” she said. “Our collections are a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs, and we want the full range of Ukrainian thought and experience to be represented here.”
Zelenska also gave Harvard Library three war-damaged books: a children’s book by Oleksandr (Sashko) Dermanskyi; a novel translated from English to Ukrainian by Heather Gudenkauf; and an autobiography by Pavlo Belianskyi. The books were rescued from a ruined warehouse of the Faktor Druk printing house in Kharkiv, which was struck by a missile in May 2024.
Conservators at Harvard Library’s Preservation Services are currently creating custom enclosures for the books to preserve and protect them against further damage. Part of Harvard Library’s mission is to preserve knowledge for the future. It has long rescued and preserved books and cultural materials from places where they are endangered.
“One of our key strategic priorities is preserving knowledge for the future,” said Whitehead. “We have a fabulous team in our Collections Care Lab who will ensure the best care of these books, and our creative librarians will find opportunities to have our users experience their impact.”
Among her other stops, Zelenska also spoke at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute. To view the video, visit its website.
Ethics Center Director Eric Beerbohm (from left) with moderator Christopher Robichaud and panelists Shruti Rajagopalan, Tom Malleson, Jessica Flanigan, and Nien-hê Hsieh.
Are rich different from you and me? Would we be better off without them?
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Safra Center for Ethics debate weighs extreme wealth, philanthropy, income inequality, and redistribution
Billionaires devote vast sums of money to anti-poverty initiatives and green energy reforms. But the world’s wealthiest also cause disproportionate harm to the environment.
A rousing debate, hosted last week by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, wrestled with the issues of extreme wealth and growing income inequality. Panelists representing fields including philosophy, political economy, and business administration staked contrasting and occasionally unexpected positions on whether the super-rich are a net positive for society.
“The top 1 percent emit the same amount of carbon as 5 billion human beings,” said Tom Malleson, associate professor of social justice and peace studies at King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “The best thing you can do is to get rid of those billionaires by redistributing the wealth, particularly if you redistribute it to green technology.”
“The best thing you can do is to get rid of those billionaires by redistributing the wealth, particularly if you redistribute it to green technology.”
Tom Malleson
But billionaires like Bill Gates have invested in poor countries ravaged by climate disaster, argued Jessica Flanigan, Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond. Market forces further incentivize the world’s wealthiest to provide jobs and pursue improvements to clean energy infrastructure, she added.
“Those are all presumptive reasons to think that billionaires are helpful toward the global poor and more reliably beneficial to those people than public officials, who are beholden to people in their own political community” who usually are not badly off.
Moderator Christopher Robichaud, a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, kicked off the conversation by citing recent reports that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is poised to become history’s first trillionaire. “What should we think about a world, maybe right around the corner, that has trillionaires?” he asked.
“Could you imagine a society or a set of institutions in which it would be perfectly just for there to be trillionaires?” asked Nien-hê Hsieh, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “It probably has features to ensure people’s basic needs are met. It probably has features to ensure that great inequality doesn’t lead to the corruption of public officials, or the breaking of the democratic fabric … Whatever that system is, it is not the system we have today.”
Shruti Rajagopalan, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, noted how few of today’s billionaires inherited their money. Most of the modern era’s richest people earned their fortunes, she emphasized, largely through the stock market.
“If Elon Musk is getting wealthy, it’s also every single schoolteacher out there whose retirement is invested in one of these funds.”
Shruti Rajagopalan
“There’s a big difference between Genghis Khan and Elon Musk,” she quipped. “And if Elon Musk is getting wealthy, it’s also every single schoolteacher out there whose retirement is invested in one of these funds.”
At one point, Malleson highlighted the role of luck in wealth creation.
“If you have a more productive body — if you have Michael Phelps’ wingspan or Taylor Swift’s voice — good for you,” they said, citing the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls’ writings on the arbitrary nature of these traits. “We should think of meritocracy as part of a doctrine of ableism. It’s a prejudice doctrine that says people should be rewarded for factors that are outside their control and others should be punished — particularly disabled people — for their lack of productivity.”
The conversation expanded to cover big business and low-wage workers, with Walmart proving a favorite lightning rod.
“The poorest families in the United States want to shop at Walmart because the prices are going to be the best,” Rajagopalan noted. “Your stereotypical single mother — trying to feed her children, trying to keep very difficult hours at her job — can walk into a Walmart and get all the basics cheaper than pretty much anywhere else.”
But the company “exploits its employees, crushes unions, and takes out dead peasant insurance policies on workers who are going to die,” Malleson countered. “Its products are cheap because they’re made in sweatshops with abysmal conditions.”
The solution is not so easy as taxing Walmart for redistribution to low-income employees and consumers, Rajagopalan said. “Then we’re assuming there’s a bureaucrat or central allocation plan that can provide those same loaves of bread and cans of milk. … That has been done before and hasn’t worked pretty much anywhere in the world.”
“The kind of society that produces billionaires is the very same society that’s going to improve conditions for the worst off.”
Jessica Flanigan
Nobody is talking about communist-style central planning, Malleson said. Alternatives include some form of democratic socialism.
“It would mean Walmart has unions,” they said. “It would mean Walmart has co-determination, where workers are allowed to elect half the board like in Germany. It would mean there are basic labor conditions; there are basic rights and regulations that are very common in many parts of the world, particularly the Nordic countries.”
Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the U.S., Flanigan pointed out, because it still has a market economy that generates sufficient wealth for financing its public institutions.
“How do we materially improve the conditions of the worst off? The best thing we have is a market-based society that encourages investment and innovation; that’s it!” she said. “And the kind of society that produces billionaires is the very same society that’s going to improve conditions for the worst off.”
Hsieh chimed in with yet another option for curbing inequality.
“As somebody here at Harvard who is a good Rawlsian, I want to put forward the idea of property-owning democracy,” he said. “There’s an idea where you do allow for market exchange. You do allow for the private accumulation of wealth. You do allow for private capital … but with a much more egalitarian distribution of property.”
In the discussion’s final minutes, Robichaud picked up on one of their questions about what constitutes a minimum standard of living. He asked panelists how each would propose meeting such a standard for all.
“To lift the poor, we shouldn’t just look at taxation,” Rajagopalan said. The world’s poorest 2 billion people are “living in conditions that are entirely unjust. … There won’t be many takers for this politically, but the single best way to improve their lives is to allow immigration to rich countries.”
Jill Lepore, Maya Jasanoff, Kirsten Weld launch course that views present as wholly connected to the past
The media keep calling the 2024 election “unprecedented,” said political historian Jill Lepore. They said the same thing about contests for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020.
“Since, I would say, the [2000] Bush v. Gore election, our political discourse is about falling off a cliff,” Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, told her students recently. “It has a weird torquing effect on how people experience daily life.”
Lepore is one of three well-known scholars teaching the brand-new “HIST 10: A History of the Present” this semester. Co-created with professors Maya Jasanoff and Kirsten Weld, the introductory course uncovers historic concepts and clichés that anchor perceptions of today.
“We’re going to approach the present in this classroom as historians — as people concerned with how individuals and collectives situate themselves in historical time and, most importantly, how they make meaning of it,” promised Weld, a Canadian-born historian of modern Latin America.
Jasanoff, the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History, kicked off the first lecture with some history on the course itself. HIST 10 was once offered as a yearlong survey for actual and prospective concentrators focused on the Western world, especially Europe, she explained. But that framing slowly fell out of favor with students and faculty alike until the course was finally canceled in 2006.
“But we felt, and continue to feel, that history is something we all need to be educated in and conscious of,” said Jasanoff, a historian of the British Empire. “And so the three of us started talking about re-presenting a gateway course to revivify the sense that history is integrated into our consciousness, our lives, our society, our government, and much more.”
They designed a lecture course broken into three modules, each informed by individual interests and expertise. First Jasanoff is interrogating evolving definitions of ancestry. Lepore, who is also a Harvard Law School professor and New Yorker staff writer, will then lead a section on rights. And Weld will wrap things up with a unit on memory.
“What really drew me to the class were these conceptual frameworks,” said Victoria Rengel ’28, a Newark, N.J., native considering a joint concentration in government and history. “As the professors laid out in the first class, most human conflict can be broken down and understood through one of the three.”
Enrolled in the course are about 60 undergraduates, plus a sizeable contingent of auditors. “It’s packed,” observed A.J. Moyeda ’27, a history concentrator with a secondary in philosophy from South Texas. “I never imagined a history course with this many students.”
Mondays begin with scholarly takes on the students’ anonymously submitted questions. Wednesdays feature all three professors engaged with (and often debating) daily news. The first few conversations left Jacqueline Metzger ’27, a joint concentrator in history and in Theater, Dance & Media from the Washington, D.C., area, rethinking how election coverage is packaged.
“I really liked the conversation about things being unprecedented,” Metzger said. “It’s kind of an intimidating term, because it makes you feel we’re unequipped to handle what’s going on.”
Most of Day One was focused on the news cycle — a key tool for making sense of the present. Jasanoff invited everyone to pull out their laptops for some live polling on media habits and current events. Newspapers, social media, and word of mouth/group chats emerged as the go-to sources. Topping a ranking of 2024 issues were “the election,” “political polarization,” and “Palestine.”
Picking up on one of these topics, Weld demonstrated how students might think about the war in Gaza using her module. In the Middle East and elsewhere, perspectives on the conflict are “indelibly and inseparably framed,” she said, by historical memories of two traumatic world events: the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and the Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced to create the modern State of Israel.
“How one remembers those events — both within one’s own families as well as politically speaking — makes up a constitutive building block of your interpretations of the present,” Weld said.
The 75-minute session ended with Lepore lending rich historical insight to the 21st century’s confusing swirl of fact, fiction, and information technology. She started with the “long adversarial tradition” between America’s newspapers and its political leaders, beginning in the 1720s with the dogged New England Courant (published by Benjamin Franklin’s brother James).
This year’s candidates for U.S. president are hardly the first to try reaching voters without risking criticism by newspaper reporters. Lepore offered examples that bridge past and present including rallies, political postering, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s direct-to-listener radio broadcasts from the 1930s.
“It’s cool to see that much of what we’re dealing with has happened again and again,” Metzger said. “It’s such a grounded way to understand who we are and where we are in history.”
At one point, Lepore shared an advertising clip from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 re-election campaign. It opens with an animated figure anguished over the firehose of political information from TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.
“I’ve listened to everybody,” he cries. “Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?”
“Those are questions we still have,” Lepore emphasized. “They’re endemic to the age of mass communication we have been in for well more than a century. I hope that gives you some comfort.”
University cites careful planning, stewardship for solid financial position, endowment performance
Memorial Hall.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Staff Report
long read
Finance leaders note investments in key academic, community priorities
The University reported a budget surplus, along with robust endowment performance, and pointed to investments made throughout fiscal year 2024 in key mission-focused areas in its annual financial report released Thursday. Additionally, the report detailed philanthropic giving for the period, which continues to provide the resources to support increased financial aid and a range of academic and research priorities.
The Gazette spoke with Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick, chief financial officer and Vice President for Finance Ritu Kalra, and treasurer Timothy Barakett to learn more about how disciplined planning and sound financial management have positioned Harvard for progress in the years ahead. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
A year ago, the University had marked a full fiscal year return to post-pandemic normal operations, and we saw a corresponding operating margin that aligned with pre-pandemic performance. How would you describe the University’s financial position for fiscal year 2024, which ended with a surplus of $45.3 million?
WEENICK: Harvard continues to be in a solid financial position, grounded in thoughtful planning and careful stewardship across the University. This year’s surplus reflects the strategic decisions made by leadership across each of Harvard’s Schools. These surpluses are not merely financial metrics; they are vital sources of funds that allow us to strategically invest in educational and research initiatives aimed at tackling some of the most pressing global challenges.
Meredith Weenick.
Harvard file photo
“Our students, faculty, staff, and alumni leverage their knowledge and expertise to effect positive change through research, teaching, and community leadership at a global scale. The resources we steward support these efforts.”
Meredith Weenick
KALRA: Meredith makes an important point about the nature of Harvard’s operating result. It’s an aggregate reflection of the collective results across our Schools and units. These surpluses, plural — and in some cases deficits — are earned and managed locally. That local autonomy allows deans to direct resources to the areas they identify as their highest priorities.
This year, for the second year in a row, our operating expenses grew faster than our operating revenues — 9 percent versus 6 percent. That is not a long-run sustainable path. But the analysis begs an understanding of the nuance behind the numbers. Some of what looks like growing expenses are investments strategically intended to foster future growth. This year, those investments spanned several domains, including developing our technology infrastructure and AI capabilities and renewing our campus facilities to enable types of research that were unimaginable just a decade ago.
Of course, the pace of our recent spending underscores the need for prudence going forward. While it has been purposeful in the short term, it won’t be sustainable without a commensurate growth in revenue over the long term.
BARAKETT: This long-term perspective is essential. The University has investments it must make in the near future, including, for example, increased commitments to financial aid, which are vital to making Harvard and educational opportunities accessible. We must also continue to transform how we generate and distribute energy across the campus to meet our sustainability goals and commitments. At the same time, there are new opportunities we need to be poised to drive forward. For example, the transformative potentials of AI, quantum computing, and the life sciences will be made possible by the work of Harvard researchers across disciplines. In our planning for the years ahead, we must create the financial capacity to make room for these investments.
The academic year 2023-2024 was challenging for Harvard’s community, accompanied by frequent public criticism and scrutiny. Were there any financial impacts on the University?
KALRA: Throughout the year, our most immediate focus was to ensure our students had the resources needed to support their physical and emotional well-being. Senior leaders across the University and its Schools also invested enormous time and energy in cultivating a campus environment that fosters open inquiry and responsible civil discourse as a North Star for intellectual and personal growth. Each of those investments had a financial impact, though finances weren’t the drivers of those efforts.
The impact on philanthropy is less obvious. Across the higher education landscape, neither tuition revenues nor funding for research covers the full cost of an education. At Harvard, philanthropy, in the form of gifts for current use and the investment returns spawned by endowed gifts, is essential to make up the difference.
On both fronts, we are enormously grateful. In fiscal year 2024, current-use giving reached the second-highest level in Harvard’s history, and Harvard Management Company(HMC) generated a 9.6 percent return in the endowment portfolio. The future will be more complicated — both the level of giving and the level of returns may be difficult to sustain — but we remain grateful to our donors for their steadfast belief in Harvard’s academic mission. Their support is vital to everything we do.
WEENICK: I will also add that while we faced a challenging year on and off campus, Harvard never wavered from its commitment to excellence. The arenas in which we achieved that excellence span an astoundingly broad range. Dr. Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, and Dr. Gary Ruvkun just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Ten of our students were named Rhodes Scholars last year, a record for Harvard and more than double any other school. And let’s not forget that our community excels at the highest levels outside of academics as well. Our student-athletes and alumni took home a record 13 medals at the Paris Olympics.
Timothy Barakett.
“While HMC’s performance is best measured over the long term, the endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2024 is certainly encouraging. It shows we are on the right track.”
Timothy Barakett
How will the most recent endowment return of 9.6 percent impact distributions in a way that benefits both current and future generations of students and scholars?
KALRA: The fiscal year 2024 endowment return will provide a welcome boost to distribution growth in the short term. However, as we caution every year, it’s critical to remember that the endowment is not a $53 billion checking account.
The endowment, in reality, is 14,600 different endowments, many of which belong to a specific School or are designated for particular areas of scholarship or programs. The distribution that supports those programs is meant to grow each year to keep pace with inflation, while the endowment itself is meant to last forever. That requires us to spend responsibly from the endowment, as we have to be able to support future generations of students and scholars even if we face periods of lower growth.
Harvard targets an 8 percent return. That accounts for an approximately 5 percent distribution to the University’s annual operations and allows the value of that distribution to grow each year by 3 percent to account for inflation. Under Narv Narvekar’s leadership, HMC’s return has been 9.3 percent over the past seven years, well in excess of the target.
WEENICK: As Narv shared in his letter in the financial report, there are a variety of factors that played into this year’s return, as is the case every year. Since HMC was founded, the endowment’s 11 percent annualized return has allowed distributions to grow dramatically. These funds support critical initiatives, from financial aid and faculty support to professorships and research.
BARAKETT: Harvard derives nearly 40 percent of its annual operating revenue from the endowment, so finding the right balance between return, risk, and volatility is critical. HMC’s performance was suboptimal before Narv’s appointment, and he inherited a portfolio that was overweighted in natural resources and real estate and underweighted in private equity and hedge funds.
Over the past seven years since his arrival, HMC has been restructured, and the portfolio has been substantially repositioned. Given the scale of the endowment, this took some time, and we are now well-positioned. While HMC’s performance is best measured over the long term, the endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2024 is certainly encouraging. It shows we are on the right track.
Ritu Kalra.
Harvard file photo
“Our reserves have been built over years through disciplined planning and sound financial management. We need to continue to build the capacity to invest in new programs and pedagogies in order to foster the academic excellence that is both Harvard’s hallmark and its aim.”
Ritu Kalra
A challenge of recent years has been rapidly rising interest rates. Yet bonds and notes payable increased from $6.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $7.1 billion in fiscal year 2024. Why did the University decide to issue debt at this time?
KALRA: It’s true that interest rates are elevated relative to the decade or so following the global financial crisis. However, that is not an interest rate environment to which we are likely to return, barring an unforeseen crisis. Yet we still need to invest in our buildings and maintain our campus.
There was a window last spring when credit spreads reached historically low levels, offsetting some of the impact of the rise in rates. The rating agencies reaffirmed Harvard’s AAA credit ratings, which reflects confidence in Harvard’s stability, and we took advantage of that market opportunity to borrow at an attractive all-in cost, right around 4 percent.
A portion of our bond issuance will go toward planned future capital projects, and a portion went toward refinancing outstanding debt that carried higher interest rates. Harvard’s overall financial condition remains very strong. We have ample levels of liquidity and ready access to the capital markets for future borrowings as needed.
WEENICK: As you can see from the construction activity while walking around our campuses, whether in Cambridge, Allston, or Longwood, we have a number of long-term capital projects underway. We also have plans for facility renovations and new construction, which are essential for the University’s infrastructure and growth. For example, we are making progress in Allston with the construction of the new home for the American Repertory Theater at the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, along with the first University-wide conference center in the David Rubenstein Treehouse as part of the Enterprise Research Campus. This work also includes addressing other campus maintenance priorities and refreshed lab and classroom space to ensure the resilience and accessibility of our buildings.
One of the key themes found throughout this year’s financial report is advancing the public good. How is Harvard using its resources to support teaching, learning, and research priorities aimed at making a positive impact in the world?
WEENICK: Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence is the way we advance the public good. It’s at the core of everything we do. Our students, faculty, staff, and alumni leverage their knowledge and expertise to effect positive change through research, teaching, and community leadership at a global scale. The resources we steward support these efforts.
As a research university, Harvard is a powerful engine of innovation. In fiscal year 2024, our faculty were awarded $1 billion in external grants from government and private partners. On top of that, the University invests an additional $400 to $500 million a year to support research and early stage ideas. The discoveries made here have the potential to improve lives, transform industries, and create tremendous social and economic value. Harvard’s Office of Technology and Development plays a pivotal role in facilitating the translation of these discoveries into useful products and services that benefit society.
The University also serves as an epicenter of teaching, learning, and community service through initiatives like the Harvard Ed Portal, which connects the Boston and Cambridge communities to Harvard’s educational resources. Our partnership with our Harvard Medical School affiliates also provides access to some of the world’s best health and well-being resources.
Additionally, the learning that takes place on our campus also extends beyond the boundaries of the University. For example, in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, our students include mayors from around the country, who return to their communities equipped to tackle challenges that improve their residents’ quality of life.
The University brings together community members worldwide at the start of each academic year for Harvard’s Global Day of Service. These civic engagement opportunities motivate students during their time at Harvard and inspire lifelong commitments to public service.
What is the projected financial outlook for next year and beyond?
WEENICK: While our financial position remains strong, we, along with all of our colleagues in higher education, must be conscious of the challenges in our current climate. As we have cautioned before, traditional revenues in higher education are constrained, and we must be cognizant of the pressures on tuition affordability.
As we move forward, it’s clear we need to prioritize activities that most significantly contribute to our mission, and we need to work efficiently so that more resources can go directly toward teaching and research.
KALRA: Projections are dangerous in a world of persistent uncertainty. Safeguarding the University’s financial resilience is vital in such a rapidly evolving landscape. Our reserves have been built over years through disciplined planning and sound financial management. We need to continue to build the capacity to invest in new programs and pedagogies in order to foster the academic excellence that is both Harvard’s hallmark and its aim.
BARAKETT: We are grateful to our community — faculty and other academic personnel, students, staff, alumni, and donors — for their dedication to the University’s mission. Together, we have ensured that Harvard remains positioned for progress and continues to deliver on its world-changing mission.
Some give up without guilt while others insist going cover to cover. Harvard readers share their criteria.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
On the matter of whether it’s acceptable to stop reading a book before its end, there are two schools of thought: one that says we must finish what we started, and one that declares that life is too short for books we don’t enjoy.
The Gazette asked librarians, a classics professor, a literature scholar, and a lecturer in English for their views on a subject that triggers fiery debates among book lovers. Although all seven readers interviewed for this story fall on the “life is too short” side of the debate, they differ on when it’s OK to give up without guilt.
Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology, Emerita, said reading a book is a magical confluence of several factors that create a fulfilling experience, and when the delight is not there it can be shattering, if liberating.
“There’s a certain romance to reading, hence the inevitable heartache when you break up with a book,” wrote Tatar in an email. “I need both substance and sorcery, captivating content and magic on the page.”
When that magic is absent, said Tatar, readers should act accordingly, whether they’re 50 or 100 pages in. The reader’s clock is what matters, she said.
“Now, when I’m not under the spell of a book by page 50 or so, I put it aside,” Tatar said. “And sometimes, halfway through a volume, I realize that I get it and can stop reading. That happens frequently with biographies, for example.”
Reed Lowrie, head of research services at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Libraries, a fan of crime fiction, has no problem abandoning books when authors fall back on cliches or uninspired tropes.
“The danger of sticking with a book in that genre to the end is that you can be at the mercy of a horrible plot twist that makes reading the preceding hundreds of pages seem like a waste of time (‘Her missing husband was living in a cave near her house the whole time and she had several interactions with him without realizing he was her husband’),” said Lowrie. “You should keep reading a book if you’re enjoying and/or learning from it, but if neither of those things are true, put it down and find something else to read.”
Alessandra Seiter, community engagement librarian at Harvard Kennedy School, urges readers to follow their gut. “If you feel like you’re not being fulfilled or not being engaged, or it’s not how you want to spend your time, I give you full professional permission to put the book down.”
Whether the reader is put off by the author’s writing style, a weak plot, or the pace, it is OK to drop the book, said Maya Bergamasco, faculty research and scholarly support librarian at Harvard Law School Library.
“If the book is not working for me, I stop reading it,” said Bergamasco. “I’m kind of ruthless. There are so many books in the world and so little time to read them all. If it feels like a chore, why would you put yourself through that?”
“You should keep reading a book if you’re enjoying and/or learning from it, but if neither of those things are true, put it down and find something else to read.”
Reed Lowrie
Worry less about reading from cover to cover and focus instead on the experience, said Sophia J. Mao, lecturer on English at the Department of English.
“Reading, especially today, is never a solitary activity but comes alive in the classroom, on BookTok, at events in public libraries, bookstores, and community spaces,” said Mao. “As a literary scholar and a teacher, I may guide others toward what makes a specific book notable, but I also want to know what other works people are drawn to and why. I’ll never be tired of hearing from others what they find beautiful and moving. It’s what makes reading a pleasure and a challenge to my own perspective on whether a book is ‘worth’ it.”
When books are picked up on a whim, reading a few pages should suffice, said Mary Frances Angelini, research librarian for the Extension School. “When reading for pleasure, I tend to give the book about 10 percent of the pages to hook me. If it doesn’t work for me, then I move on to the next book.”
Richard Thomas, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics, tries to be efficient with his reading and reads reviews to choose nonfiction books, a genre he favors.
“It’s important to approach a book with some sort of knowledge about it,” said Thomas. “I tend to read a lot of reviews to make sure that the books are going to be worth my while. With recent books that have just come out, there’s obviously a lot of variation in quality, so you’re more likely to not finish your book, and that can be frustrating and alienating.”
Book lovers should not harbor guilt or agony over parting ways with a book although those reactions are plausible, said Thomas.
“Guilt and self-criticism are a natural response,” said Thomas. “I’ve never found guilt a very useful quality, so I don’t know if one should feel guilty for not finishing reading a book.”
Tatar shares that sentiment. Instead of remorse, she said, readers should focus on finding books they delight in and allow themselves to feel sad when a beloved book ends.
“Guilt?” said Tatar. “None at all, unless you are reading the book with your book club. Then you feel like a delinquent. Or, of course, if you’re reading it for a class. What’s harder for me, and what sometimes fills me with grief is finishing a book, exiting a world in which I was once immersed, living and breathing with the characters.”
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A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Leslie Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has spent decades studying human cognition. His books include “Circuits of the Mind” and, most recently, “The Importance of Being Educable.”
Notions like smartness and intelligence are almost like nonsense. We think we know what they mean but we can’t define them with precision. Even psychologists can’t agree on one definition. And intelligence tests don’t tell one very much — they are usually justified in terms of correlations with other things.
How do you recognize whether someone is intelligent? There is not one answer; there are many, and they can be inconsistent. Some, like Howard Gardner, have emphasized that there are many kinds of intelligence. I think we’ve reached the expiration date for the usefulness of the term “intelligence” both for humans and machines. We should be able to do better.
I’m a computer scientist and I take a computational approach to understanding what the mind does. In computer science, the main questions, theoretically speaking, have been: What is easy to compute? and What is hard to compute? Some decades ago, I decided that the secrets of human cognition must also be hidden in this problem — that some things are hard to compute for the brain and some things are easier. The main advantage that computer science offers is that one can express capabilities that are more complicated than ones reasonably implied by conventional phrases, and, at the same time, evaluate their feasibility for the brain.
I started working on a computational viewpoint on cognition 40 years ago. The fundamental challenge I set myself was to find a useful definition of learning. In “The Importance of Being Educable,” I define the concept of “educability.” My view is that it wasn’t “intelligence” that allowed humans to create civilizations, but educability, which involves three aspects.
The first is learning from experience. The second is being able to chain together the things you’ve learned; it’s a kind of low-level reasoning capability that even the simplest animals have because it’s so essential to life. The third is being able to incorporate knowledge acquired from instruction. This last one is very important for humans because this is how culture spreads and science progresses.
“Computers will not take over the world just because they want to. This will happen only if we allow it to happen.”
Educability incorporates both the ability to generate new knowledge by learning from experience and also the ability to transfer that knowledge directly to others. There isn’t the time or the need for everyone to gain the same experiences, such as repeating difficult scientific experiments.
I’d say that machines can be also made educable, and ultimately, we won’t be able to claim that we’re fundamentally different from machines. Current AI systems are not designed to be educable in the sense I define, but machines will likely become more and more capable in that direction. I don’t see AI as an existential threat; it’s just another powerful technology. Obviously, in bad hands, it can be misused, just like chemistry or nuclear physics. Computers will not take over the world just because they want to. This will happen only if we allow it to happen.
There is a downside of being educable. Educability gives us very powerful ways of acquiring new information — we can soak it all up. But we don’t have comparable abilities to check whether the information we get is true or not. We are not well-equipped for evaluating knowledge, theories, or facts. If someone tells us something, if we believe it, we will incorporate it into our knowledge. This can be dangerous. The only cure is to educate people about what propaganda has done over the centuries and make them aware of this human weakness. To inoculate ourselves against disinformation we need to acknowledge our basic weakness.
Novelist and boxer Laura van den Berg says the two practices have a lot in common
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Laura van den Berg circled her partner on the mat at a Central Square boxing gym on a recent Tuesday evening, hands raised protectively in front of her face, delivering quick, precise jabs into the training mitts. Others in the class paused for water between exercise intervals, but van den Berg remained in place, bouncing on her toes, keeping loose for the next round.
This past summer van den Berg, senior lecturer in English, embarked on two parallel journeys: publishing her sixth novel, “State of Paradise,” and training for a boxing match that will take place this weekend in Waltham. She believes the practices foster similar useful qualities.
“Writing a novel and training for a fight both require an immense trust in process,” van den Berg said. “There are going to be times when you are really tired, overwhelmed, or defeated, and you have to trust in your program. Whether your program for a writer is writing five pages a day, or your program as a fighter is showing up to your daily training session, you have to trust in the power of cumulative labor over time.”
Van den Berg started writing “State of Paradise,” which was published in July, during the pandemic when she and her husband, Paul Yoon, also a fiction writer and senior lecturer in English, were living in her native state of Florida. It began as a daily practice of writing meditations on aspects of her surroundings: weather, landscapes, or family life.
“I did this for about six months with no expectation that it would turn into a book. Then a strange thing happened,” van den Berg said. “I realized I was writing these meditations in a voice that was like mine but also not mine. And that was the voice of the protagonist stepping forward.”
The novel follows a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author, as her everyday life in humid small-town Florida is disrupted by strange events — extreme weather, sinkholes, missing people, a cult in her living room, and a disorienting virtual reality device — that challenge her perception of reality.
While in Florida writing the novel, van den Berg, who began boxing for fitness and mental health in 2018, started getting more involved in competitive boxing. After her first USA Boxing-sanctioned fight in 2021 (which she lost by decision), she knew she wanted to try again but wasn’t sure she could find the time.
This semester, Laura van den Berg is teaching a fiction workshop, “The Art of the Short Story.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“It can be easy to feel like, ‘Oh, I’ll do it next year when I’m not publishing a book, when I have more room in my schedule,’” van den Berg recalled. “I think I just realized at a certain point that that the ‘chill year’ that I’m waiting for is never going to arrive, and I just need to dive in.”
She began training hard with the help of a coach at Cherry Street Boxing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She focused on both technique and endurance to prepare for the amateur match, which includes three rounds, each a minute and a half to three minutes in length.
Even during her book tour in July and August, van den Berg kept up her routine, waking early to run up hills in San Francisco, for example, before catching a flight to her next tour stop.
“You know your future opponent is out there somewhere, and you should assume that she’s getting up in the morning, doing whatever she needs to do to be successful on fight night,” van den Berg said. “That motivates me.”
This semester, van den Berg is teaching a fiction workshop, “The Art of the Short Story,” and co-teaching “Reading for Fiction Writers” with Neel Mukherjee, associate senior lecturer in creative writing. She divides her time between Cambridge and her Hudson Valley home in New York state, where she spends weekends, school breaks, and summers. While Cherry Street is her primary gym, she can often be found training at Redline Fight Sports when she is in Cambridge.
She often travels to sparring events around the New England area, seeking out new female boxers to practice with, something that can help prepare her for facing an unknown opponent on fight night.
To document her parallel journeys, van den Berg started a newsletter called “Fight Week,” where she writes about the intersection of writing and fighting. The title refers to the days leading up to a match, following the last hard training session — a time she describes as standing on the edge of a precipice, “about to step off into the air.”
Van den Berg believes writing and boxing both require a certain level of comfort with risk — whether it’s risking failure with a new narrative structure or injury in the ring.
“‘State of Paradise’ is certainly the most personal book that I’ve ever written. There’s a lot of me in there, so it was emotionally risky in a way that my other books really haven’t been,” van den Berg said. “In boxing, the more punches you throw, the more vulnerable you are. There’s risk in going hard.”
As the weekend fight approaches, van den Berg feels confident, embracing the nerves that come with the territory and knowing she’s done everything she can to prepare.
“There’s no way to know for sure what the outcome will be,” van den Berg said. “If you’re 100 pages into a novel, you can’t say for sure what it will be like when you finish. You can’t know for sure what the outcome of a fight will be. You have to have a deep belief in the process and cultivate a tolerance for sitting in doubt and uncertainty and being able to move through those emotions.”
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Michael J. Sandel brings back wildly popular ‘Justice’ course amid time of strained discourse on college campuses
Which is better? The 1996 film adaptation of “Hamlet” starring Kenneth Branagh or a spoof on the Prince of Denmark’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy delivered by Homer Simpson?
The question was posed last month to more than 800 undergraduates during “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” The legendary Gen Ed offering has returned to Sanders Theatre this semester after more than a decade of availability only as a prerecorded offering online. Originally launched in 1980, the course became wildly popular for its format: guided student debate of the hottest issues of the day, informed by study of classictheories on moral decision-making.
“The first thing I want to know is which one you like most,” announced “Justice” creator Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. Most in the room, dismissing the third option of a WWE body-slam clip, lavished applause on “The Simpsons.”
But the conversation turned spiky on a second point: “Can we derive what’s higher, what’s worthier, what’s nobler, from what we like most?” Sandel asked. “Or is there a gap between the two?”
One student stuck with “The Simpsons,” arguing that it was the most pleasurable. Another noted the cartoon excerpt owed its existence to Shakespeare’s worthier source material. Still others characterized the TV show as fleeting pleasure versus the intellectual and even spiritual nourishment of high art.
From the stage, Sandel invited these divergent responses while pressing the room to consider new angles. “It’s an opportunity for students to dive into why they think the way they do,” observed Darlene Uzoigwe ’25, a government concentrator from Brooklyn.
Michael Sandel (foreground) takes a question from Yaroslav Davletshin ’28 in the balcony.
Generations of Harvard graduates, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara ’90, have cited the impact the course had on their careers and lives. In 2009, a recorded version went on to become the first Harvard course freely available online.
“It was an experiment in using new technology to open access to the Harvard classroom,” Sandel said in an interview last month. “We never dreamt that tens of millions of people around the world would want to watch lectures on philosophy.” More than 38 million have viewed the course on YouTube, and millions more on foreign language web platforms.
The in-person offering was paused when the political philosopher noticed first-years enrolling despite having watched “Justice” in high school. “I tried for a couple of years to change some of the examples, stories, even the jokes,” Sandel said. “But I found I liked the original version and didn’t want to change everything. So, I decided to let it live online and teach other subjects.”
Most of these courses, including those on technology and globalization, were capped at 200 students. Trevor DePodesta kept trying to get a spot.
“It took me until now to get into one of his classes,” said DePodesta ’25, an Ethical Human-AI Interaction concentrator from San Diego. “I felt like the Harvard experience wouldn’t be complete until I sat in a lecture hall with him.”
Trevor DePodesta ’25 (center) asks a question.
As any alum of the course will know, the Homer-Hamlet matchup is really about exploring ideas about high and low pleasures outlined by 19th-century Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.
“I didn’t think you could discuss ‘Simpsons’ vs. ‘Hamlet’ for so long,” said Saskia Hermann ’28, a first-year from Germany. “What I’ve learned so far is that you can always look at something twice — once from your initial point of view, and then you can apply a certain philosophical idea to look at it from that perspective.”
Also familiar to “Justice” veterans are course readings by Mill’s Utilitarian predecessor Jeremy Bentham as well as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. Bringing the class back to Sanders means Sandel has now updated the ethically charged issues that test the philosophers’ ideas.
The first weeks of the course, which carries, at times, the fizzy energy of a concert, covered readings and lectures on the philanthropic movement reportedly embraced by former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted this year on fraud charges.In one hypothetical, Sandel posed whether it was better to solve urgent medical needs in the developing world by becoming a physician or by making a lot of money in cryptocurrency and donating, say, $50 million to Doctors Without Borders.
“It’s a test of the Utilitarian philosophy underlying the Effective Altruism movement,” he explained.
Later, students will delve into climate change, artificial intelligence, and the polarizing consequences of social media. “From the time the course was first offered in the 1980s we’ve discussed affirmative action,” Sandel added. “Now we continue the discussion in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action in university admissions.”
The real motivation for relaunching the course, Sandel said, was student feedback about the strained state of dialogue on campus. “It’s definitely true that there isn’t a lot of civil discourse going on,” said Maia Hoffenberg ’26, a linguistics concentrator from the Washington, D.C., area. “People have become entrenched in their own ideas.”
Sandel has been a supporter of other campus initiatives designed to boost civil discourse and intellectual vitality. Last winter he hosted a one-day session for faculty on cultivating healthy debate and another inviting students to grapple with the tangled ethics of artificial intelligence. At orientation this fall, Sandel offered a primer on engaging with highly disputed but important issues.
Hermann enjoyed the latter conversation so much she dropped a course to pick up “Justice.” “I really liked the way he asked questions and made us get to the point, rather than just lecturing on what he believes,” she said.
“I really liked the way he asked questions and made us get to the point, rather than just lecturing on what he believes.”
Saskia Hermann
Others taking “Justice” have been reading Sandel since high school — and clearly consider themselves fans.
“Yeah, that’s my boy!” called out one student as Sandel appeared for a lecture last month.
After class, a handful of devotees line up near the podium clutching dog-eared copies of Sandel’s “Justice” (2009) or “The Tyranny of Merit” (2020). “I’ve been able to snag him after class a few times,” DePodesta shared. “He promised that if I come find him outside of class, he’ll sign my books.”
Offering such a large-scale course meant Sandel spent the summer recruiting, interviewing, and hiring an army of “Justice” teaching fellows. A staff of 32 graduate students this fall helms a total of 64 sections, with many scheduled in the early evening at first-year dorms and various Harvard Houses. The goal is to “carry the learning beyond Sanders Theatre,” said Sandel, who won’t teach the course next fall due to a planned sabbatical.
That encourages students to continue conversations about immigration, abortion, reparations, and extreme wealth — to name a few topics — over dinner. “My roommates and I have these intense debates after every single class,” shared Leverett House resident Hoffenberg. “We get mad at each other, but it’s all very lively and very academic. It’s honestly been one of the best things about taking the class.”
Bit of happenstance, second look at ancient fossils leads to new insights into evolution of tardigrade, one of most indestructible life forms on planet
They may be microscopic, but tardigrades are larger than life.
Called “water bears” because of their plump shape and lumbering movement, the ancient micro-animals are nearly indestructible, able to survive anything from deadly radiation and arctic temperatures to the vacuum of space.
They can still be found anywhere there’s water today, but the evolutionary history of these eight-legged micro-animals remains relatively mysterious because of their sparse fossil record.
Now, in a new study published in Communications Biology, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Javier Ortega-Hernández and Ph.D. candidate Marc Mapalo were able to confirm another entry in the fossil record, which now stands at just four specimens. The research represents a significant advancement in the field of paleontology because it offers new avenues for exploring the evolutionary history of one of the planet’s most resilient life forms.
In their study, the researchers examined a piece of amber found in Canada in the 1960s that contains the known fossil tardigrade Beorn leggi and another presumed tardigrade that couldn’t be substantively described at the time. Using confocal laser microscopy, a method usually employed for studying cell biology, the researchers were able to examine the tiny structures of the fossil tardigrades in detail.
Ortega-Hernández and Mapalo’s study provides not only a definitive classification of B. leggi in the tardigrade family tree, but the identification of a new species of tardigrade as well.
“Both of them are found in the same piece of amber that dates to the Cretaceous Period, which means that these water bears lived alongside dinosaurs,” Ortega-Hernández said. “The images of B. leggi show seven well-preserved claws, with the claws that curve toward the body being smaller than those curving away from it, a pattern found in modern-day tardigrades.”
Amber with Beorn and Aerobius. Artistic reconstruction of the two fossil specimens.
Photo by Marc Mapalo; Illustration by Anthony Franz.
The second, previously unidentified specimen, had claws of similar length on each of its first three pairs of legs, but longer outer claws on its fourth set of legs. The team named it Aerobius dactylus, from “aero” meaning relating to air — because the fossil appears to be floating on air in the amber — and “dactylo,” or finger, after its one long claw.
The impetus for applying this new technology to known fossils came when Mapalo, a self-described “paleo-tardigradologist,” came across the 2019 book “Water Bears: The Biology of Tardigrades.”
“In one of the chapters, they had a photo of the oldest fossil tardigrade that was visualized using both normal microscopy and confocal laser microscopy,” Mapalo said. “And that gave me the idea to use that with the fossil that I’m working with right now.”
That fossil, encased in a piece of amber from the Dominican Republic, turned out to be a new species of tardigrade. Mapalo, along with Ortega-Hernández and researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, published their findings in a 2021 paper.
Left: Ventral view of Beorn leggi photographed with transmitted light under compound microscope (A), with autofluorescence under confocal microscope (B), and schematic drawing; Right: Habitus of Aerobius dactylus ventral (A,D) and dorsal view (E,F) photographed using confocal microscope and compound microscope. Schematic drawing (C), specimen and claws viewed in inverted greyscale to highlight autofluorescence intensity (D,F).
Source: “Cretaceous amber inclusions illuminate the evolutionary origin of tardigrades”
In their latest study, both fossils serve as critical calibration points for what’s called molecular clock analysis, which help scientists estimate the timing of key evolutionary events. For example, the latest findings suggest that modern tardigrades likely diverged during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago.
The research also sheds light on the origin of cryptobiosis, the technical name for the remarkable ability of tardigrades to survive extreme conditions by entering a state of stasis.
“The study estimates that this survival mechanism likely evolved during the mid- to late Paleozoic, which may have played a crucial role in helping tardigrades endure the end-Permian mass extinction, one of the most severe extinction events in Earth’s history,” Ortega-Hernández said.
“Before I started my Ph.D., there were only three known fossil tardigrades, and now there’s four,” Mapalo said. “Most, if not all, of the fossil tardigrades were really discovered by chance. With the Dominican amber, researchers were looking for fossil ants, and they happened to see a fossil tardigrade there.
“That’s why, whenever I have a chance, I always tell researchers who are working with amber fossils to check if maybe there’s another tardigrade in there, waiting to be found.”
Studies connect genetics, physics in embryonic development
Genes are the control panel for an embryo morphing from a ball of cells into organs, muscles, and limbs, but there’s more involved than just genetics. There’s also physics — the shaping of tissues by flows and forces from cellular activity and growth.
Two recent studies in Developmental Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shed light on the gene-mediated geometries and forces within embryonic development that give rise to different sections and shapes of the gut, including the large and small intestines. The findings bridge a critical gap between genetic signals and the physical formation of the early gut.
The Developmental Cell paper, led by former Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Hasreet Gill, shows how a set of developmental instructions called Hox genes dictate gut formation. For the study, Gill and colleagues traced the gut development of a chicken embryo as a model organism; Hox genes are also found in humans and all other vertebrates.
“I wanted to understand why different regions in the intestine, from the anterior, meaning esophagus, to the posterior, meaning large intestine, end up with different shapes,” said Gill, who co-authored both papers with her Ph.D. adviser Clifford Tabin, the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Gill was a student in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology’s Molecules, Cells, and Organisms program.
“I wanted to understand why different regions in the intestine, from the anterior, meaning esophagus, to the posterior, meaning large intestine, end up with different shapes.”
Hasreet Gill
The study connected experiment to computational theory through a collaboration with Sifan Yin, a former postdoctoral fellow in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and L. Mahadevan, professor in applied mathematics, physics, and biology in SEAS and FAS.
Gill’s study built on previous work looking at how Hox genes are involved in organ differentiation. The set of genes, highly conserved throughout animal evolutionary history, was the subject of the 1995 Nobel Prize when they were recognized for their role in segmenting a fruit fly’s body.
Gill and colleagues discovered that measurable mechanical properties of the tissues that make up the large and small intestines of a chick embryo are directly involved in how they arrive at their final shapes. For example, the tissues that form the villi located in the small intestine, she found, have different stiffness parameters than those that shape the inside walls of the large intestine, which form larger, flatter, more superficial folds.
To test the consequences of all these mechanical differences, the lab turned to its longstanding collaboration with Mahadevan’s lab, whose members, including Yin, carried out theoretical and computational analysis to define the impact of physical forces generated via differential growth on organ shape.
It had long been known that Hox genes are the instructions that lay the groundwork for how different organs, including the gut, are sectioned off and shaped. But the detailed “how” of this process had been a mystery.
To solve it, Gill and colleagues revisited a 1990s-era experiment from the Tabin lab that had investigated this question. In that experiment, they expressed a particular Hox gene in a small intestine and found it took on the characteristics of a large intestine.
Gill’s team repeated the experiment while running physical tests on the mechanical characteristics of the different parts of the gut, considering things like wall stiffness, growth rate, and tissue thickness. They found that the HoxD13 gene in particular regulates the mechanical properties and growth rates of the tissues that eventually lead to the large intestine’s final shape. Other, related Hox genes may define those same properties for the small intestine.
Crucially, they also illuminated the role of a downstream signaling pathway called TGF Beta, which is controlled by Hox genes. By tuning the amount of TGF beta signaling in their embryos, they could switch the shapes of the different gut regions. Seeing the importance of this pathway, long known to be involved in fibrotic conditions, was an important basic-science step toward fully understanding gut development in a vertebrate system.
These insights could lead to new knowledge of conditions for colon cancer and other fibrotic diseases of the gut, Gill said.
“One possibility is that the disease is co-opting a developmental program that can cause an excessive deposition of extracellular matrix, and this ends up being harmful to the patient,” she said. “Having this developmental context, especially related to Hox gene expression, might prove useful at least for understanding the broader context of why these diseases are happening in people.”
The complementary PNAS paper, co-led by Gill and Yin, showed how geometry, elastic properties, and growth rates control various mechanical patterns in different parts of the gut.
“We focused on how mechanical and geometric properties directly affect morphologies, especially more complicated, secondary buckling patterns, like period-doubling and multiscale creasing-wrinkling patterns,” said Yin, an expert in theoretical modeling and numerical simulations of active and growing soft tissues.
Added Mahadevan: “These studies allow us to begin probing aspects of the developmental plasticity of gut development, especially in an evolutionary context. Could it be that natural variations in the genetic signals lead to the variety of functional gut morphologies that are seen across species? And might these signals be themselves a function of environmental variables, such as the diet of an organism?”
Yin said the two papers provide a new paradigm for studying how genes affect the development of shape, or morphogenesis.
“Morphogenesis is driven by forces arising from cellular events, tissue dynamics, and interactions with the environment,” Yin said. “Our studies bridge the gap between molecular biology and mechanical processes.”
Threat of mosquito-borne diseases rises in U.S. with global temperature
Experts fear more cases of West Nile virus, EEE (and possibly Zika, Dengue fever) as warm seasons get longer, wetter
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Crisper fall weather is descending, signaling the coming end of another mosquito season that this year saw modest outbreaks of West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis.
The good news has been that the disease-carrying mosquitoes would rather bite birds than humans, a factor in keeping the maladies relatively rare. The bad news is that a warming world is expected to add months to mosquito season and, worse, that species with a stronger taste for humans are headed north.
Recent studies have projected that by 2050 longer autumns and earlier springs will extend the U.S. mosquito season by as much as two months.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says this year there have been just 880 U.S. cases of West Nile, the most common mosquito-borne disease in the continental U.S. EEE is rarer still, with just 13 cases in seven states this year.
That rarity is a good thing because both can be deadly.
Though most cases are mild or asymptomatic, one in 150 cases of West Nile can be severe (as was the recent case of Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and one in 10 severe cases result in death, according to the CDC. The numbers are more sobering for EEE, with most of the cases reported each year being severe and 30 percent, on average, resulting in death. Seven of the known cases this year have been fatal.
The cooler temperatures that come with autumn are beginning to ease the EEE outbreak. In early October, Massachusetts public health officials lowered EEE risk warnings in the worst-hit parts of the state from critical to moderate. The risks for West Nile remained unchanged — high or moderate over large portions of the state — and experts warn that cooler weather alone doesn’t stop transmission. Mosquitoes remain active until killed by frost, which has been happening later in recent years.
In fact, recent studies have projected that by 2050 longer autumns and earlier springs will extend the U.S. mosquito season by as much as two months. Those months are expected to be warmer and wetter, providing more standing water where mosquitoes can breed. The extra time also means more gestational cycles so more biting by females, who must have a blood meal before laying eggs.
Professor Flaminia Catteruccia with mosquito cages at Harvard Chan School.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“You have more bites, more areas where they’re able to live, more months when they’re active, and more places for them to breed. That means larger populations,” said Matthew Phillips, a research fellow in infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “All of this is expected based just on changes in climate that affect mosquitoes.”
Evidence of the trends has already been seen, Phillips said. In 2021, during one of the hottest Decembers on record, the CDC recorded 30 cases of West Nile virus. Even at MGH in chilly Boston, the trend has been evident, albeit with diseases spread by hardier insect vectors.
“We were seeing cases of anaplasmosis and babesiosis, diseases that are spread by ticks and can be potentially pretty serious,” Phillips said. “Typically, you’d see them in summertime, but we were seeing those in the middle of winter.”
Experts are also keeping an eye on two invasive species that have already established themselves in the nation’s Southeast and are beginning to spread north. The mosquitoes, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, can carry several viral diseases, including West Nile and EEE. But unlike the mosquitoes currently spreading those diseases, both prefer humans. Estimates by Canadian researchers in 2020 showed the species spreading to the West Coast and the Canadian border by 2080.
Epidemiologists note the two species pose some additional threats. Besides West Nile and EEE, these mosquitoes can carry Zika, which caused 3,500 cases of microcephaly among infants during Brazil’s 2015-16 outbreak. They can also spread the tropical diseases Dengue fever — called “break-bone fever” because of the intensity of its pain — and Chikungunya, a tropical fever with no known treatment or cure. Public health officials in Florida and California reported cases of Dengue fever this year.
In 2021, during one of the hottest Decembers on record, the CDC recorded 30 cases of West Nile virus.
Aedes aegypti is more efficient at spreading diseases like Zika and Dengue, but when discussing near-term threats, both Phillips and Flaminia Catteruccia, a mosquito expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, point to albopictus as the most concerning. Not only is it hardier, it’s already starting to appear.
“It’s only recently been seen in Massachusetts and is very good at transmitting viruses,” said Catteruccia, professor of immunology and infectious diseases and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “That’s my bit of worry: If it becomes really prevalent, we might see more transmission. But it remains to be established whether the environmental conditions, especially the long winters here, will be hospitable enough for these mosquitoes to survive.”
Alongside the new threats is the possibility of an older one that may make a reappearance: malaria. In 2023, there were malaria outbreaks in Florida, Texas, and Maryland that could not be traced to someone arriving from a malaria-endemic country. The apparently local acquisition of the disease is concerning because malaria was responsible for more than 600,000 deaths in 85 countries in 2022. It’s also not a newcomer to the U.S. Malaria circulated widely here from Colonial times until it was eradicated in 1951.
Catteruccia said that malaria has an advantage in favor of its U.S. spread: the Anopheles mosquitoes that host the malaria parasite are already widespread here. Counterbalancing that is the fact that those mosquitoes prefer animals to humans. Cold winters also provide a shield.
“Malaria used to be here in the states, so the mosquitoes are around and are potential vectors of malaria,” Catteruccia said. “But malaria has a very complex lifecycle, so especially here in the north, I don’t see this becoming an issue for the time being.”
With shifting disease patterns already happening, Phillips said our understanding of the epidemiology of those diseaseshas to change as well. Physicians who diagnose patients during winter shouldn’t automatically rule out ailments traditionally seen in summer. And those diagnosing in summer shouldn’t rule out ailments from warmer regions.
“One thing that climate change does is it changes the traditional epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases,” Phillips said. “We’re used to these diseases in the summertime, and they’re showing up in winter. We’re used to them being in the tropics and they’re showing up in temperate climates. These traditional epidemiological associations are breaking down and, as they break down, we need better disease monitoring to know where they’re going and what they’re doing.”
How whales and dolphins adapted for life on the water
A common dolphin off the coast of Australia.
Credit: Amandine Gillet.
Wendy Heywood
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
Backbones of ocean-dwelling mammals evolved differently than those of species living closer to shore, study finds
If you’ve ever seen dolphins swim, you may have wondered why they undulate instead of moving side to side as fish do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans, which include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are mammals that descended from land-dwelling ancestors.
Cetaceans have undergone profound changes in their skeletal structures to thrive in aquatic environments, including the reduction of hindlimbs and the evolution of flippers and tail flukes, resulting in a streamlined body. Scientists still don’t understand how the transition from land to water, approximately 53 million years ago, impacted cetaceans’ backbone, a central element of their skeleton.
A new study in Nature Communications sheds light on how these marine mammals’ backbones were reorganized as their ancestors adapted to life in water. The international Harvard-led team found that, contrary to previous assumptions, the cetacean backbone is highly regionalized, despite being homogeneous in shape along its length. The way in the backbone is regionalized, however, is drastically different from terrestrial mammals.
The team also explored how regions in the backbone correlate to habitat and swimming speed. They discovered that species living farther from the coast have more vertebrae, more regions, and higher burst swimming speed. Species living in rivers and bays, so closer to shore, have fewer vertebrae and regions, but their regions differ more from one another, potentially affording them greater maneuverability.
“When their ancestor went back into the water, whales and dolphins lost their hind legs and developed a fish-like body,” said lead author Amandine Gillet, Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. “But that morphological change also means the vertebral column is now the main part of the skeleton driving locomotion in an aquatic environment.”
The vertebral column of terrestrial mammals moving on land must provide support to help the legs carry the body weight. When cetaceans transitioned from land to water, the forces of gravity shifted from air to buoyant water, releasing the pressure to carry body weight. The new body structure and movements needed to move through water meant the backbone of these animals would have to shift in some way to fit their new environments.
Previous studies have looked at the backbone from a vertebral morphological view. In a 2018 Science paper, co-authors Stephanie Pierce and Katrina Jones explored the complex evolutionary history of the mammalian backbone using a novel statistical method first developed to study the backbones of snakes. Pierce and Jones revised the model to fit their study, which allowed them to demonstrate that the vertebral column of terrestrial mammals is characterized by numerous, distinct regions in comparison to amphibians and reptiles.
Comparing backbones of species living in shallow waters (left) and the open ocean (right) shows differences in number of vertebrae, regions, and modules.
Credit: Amandine Gillet
“It’s a challenge to understand how the regions of a terrestrial mammal’s backbone can be found in whales and dolphins, and one reason is because their backbone looks very different in terms of morphology, even though they evolved from them,” said Pierce, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and senior author of the study. “They lost the sacrum, a fused string of vertebrae bracing the hind legs, and a critical landmark needed to distinguish the tail from the rest of the body.”
The vertebrae of cetaceans are further complicated in that they became more homogeneous in their anatomical features. So the transition from one vertebra to another is gradual compared to the extreme transitions found in terrestrial mammals, making it more difficult to identify regions.
“Not only do they have very similar vertebrae, but certain species, in particular porpoises and dolphins, have many more vertebrae than terrestrial mammals, with some species having close to 100 vertebrae,” said Jones. “This makes it really challenging to translate regions found in terrestrial mammals to the backbones in whales and dolphins.”
Traditional statistical methods used to identify regionalization patterns require the exact same number of elements across specimens. The statistical method Pierce and Jones implemented (called Regions) allowed them to overcome this issue by analyzing the backbone of each specimen individually. While the method worked well for the constrained backbone of terrestrial mammals, it proved computationally challenging for the high counts of vertebrae in cetaceans. Gillet collaborated with the Data Science Services team at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science to rewrite the code, allowing the program to obtain results within minutes. The researchers made the new program, called MorphoRegions, publicly available for the scientific community as a computational software R package.
“This is definitely one of the biggest advances of our study,” said Pierce. “Amandine spent months refining the program so that it could analyze a system of high repeating units without crashing the computer.”
Gillet applied the MorphoRegions method to the data she had previously collected during her Ph.D. work. She visited six museums in Europe, South Africa, and the U.S. gathering information on 139 specimens from 62 cetacean species, two-thirds of the almost 90 living species. In total, Gillet measured 7,500 vertebrae and ran them through the analytical pipeline.
Researchers propose a model where the backbone of cetaceans is divided into precaudal and caudal segments.
Credit: Amandine Gillet
“Our large data set allowed us to demonstrate that not only does the organization of the cetacean backbone differ from terrestrial mammals, but also that the patterns vary within cetaceans as we identified between six and nine regions depending on the species” said Gillet, “We then worked from there to find commonalities across regions and identified a pattern common to all cetaceans, which is summarized by our Nested Regions hypothesis.”
The hypothesis proposed by the team introduces a hierarchical organization of the backbone in which a precaudal and a caudal segment are first identified. The two segments are then each divided into several modules common to all cetaceans: cervical, anterior thoracic, thoraco-lumbar, posterior lumbar, caudal, peduncle, and fluke. Next, depending on the species, each module is further subdivided into one to four regions, with a minimum of six and a maximum of nine post-cervical regions along the backbone.
“Surprisingly, this showed us that, compared to terrestrial mammals, the precaudal segment has less regions, whereas the caudal area has more,” said Pierce. “Terrestrial mammals use their tails for a variety of different functions, but not usually for generating propulsive forces, like cetaceans do. Having more regions in the tail may allow for movement in very specific regions of the tail.”
With a better understanding of the organization of the cetacean backbone, the researchers plan to next tackle understanding how these morphological regions correlate with function using experimental data on the flexibility of the vertebral column collected in the lab. These data collected on modern taxa should allow the researchers to infer swimming abilities of fossil whales and help inform how the backbone shifted from a weight-bearing structure on land to a propulsion-generating organ in the water.
Foreign policy experts discuss likely fraught succession at kickoff of two months of events marking 75th anniversary of People’s Republic
Xi Jinping has managed to maintain his grip on power in the People’s Republic of China for longer than a decade. What will unfold when the 71-year-old president eventually steps down?
“I think it’s almost certain that he will choose a weak … successor,” said Yuhua Wang, a professor of government and one of three experts to participate in a symposium hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
“The People’s Republic of China at 75” kicked off two months of lectures, discussions, and film screenings organized by the center to mark the anniversary of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s proclamation of a new Communist state. Moderator and Fairbank Center Faculty Director Mark Wu, the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, got the event started by inviting panelists to offer reflections bridging past, present, and future. The theme of leadership transition rose to the fore as Xi struggles with a wobbly post-COVID economy.
Wang, author of “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China” (2022), rang a note of optimism by first underscoring the PRC’s resilience by historic standards. Over 2,000 years, the average Chinese dynasty lasted 70 years by his calculations. “If you think about comparative communist regimes, the Soviet Union lasted for 69 years,” Wang added.
But he quickly pivoted to commonalities between Imperial China and the PRC. The quality of governance during the Imperial period depended solely on leadership — never on the health of China’s institutions, Wang emphasized. And the PRC, despite its collectivist ideologies, has failed to break that cycle.
The comparative political scientist went on to cite “the crown prince problem,” a concept that explains why strong emperors usually select heirs who threaten neither power nor life. It played out again and again in Imperial China. And it also happened following Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Wang argued. “What I worry most in the next 25 years is exactly this succession,” he said.
Joseph Fewsmith (from left), Mark Wu, Anthony Saich, and Yuhua Wang.
Xi, who also serves as general secretary of the party and commander of the armed forces, ascended to the presidency in 2013. In 2018, just ahead of his second five-year term, he mobilized the National People’s Congress to abolish term limits enacted by former leader Deng Xiaoping amid an era of reform in the 1980s. In effect, Xi’s move returned China to the one-ruler cycle that prevailed under Mao and the centuries of emperors before him.
“Xi’s decision to extend his rule pushes succession into a very uncertain and unpredictable future,” Saich declared.
Boston University’s Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of international relations and political science, grappled in his remarks with the contested legacy of Mao himself. Fewsmith highlighted a resolution on China’s history, implemented by Deng in 1981, that was pretty tough on the PRC founder. “It made no doubt that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were very serious mistakes,” said Fewsmith, co-author with Nancy Hearst of the 10-volume “Mao’s Road to Power.”
More than 15 years later came proposed revisions that put a more positive spin on the Maoist period. Moves to formally adopt this version of events were blocked in the late ’90s. But Xi formally accepted them in 2013, Fewsmith noted. “We have been living with this interpretation of the Maoist period ever since,” he said.
How did things go in the intervening years, as Xi consolidated power and ensured his own longevity? Fewsmith pointed to slowing economic growth, the devastation of COVID-19, and a rising tide of nationalism over Maoist political thought.
Later in the conversation he challenged characterizations of Xi as a strong leader, citing as just one bit of evidence delays to the recent Third Plenum meeting of top party officials amid urgent economic concerns.
“I think we have a very rough future in China,” Fewsmith concluded. “And I would highlight succession as probably the most critical.”
Next up, on Oct. 25, JFK Jr. Forum – A Conversation with Ambassador Kevin Rudd. On Oct. 30, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong will discuss his new book, “At The Edge of Empire,” which blends family history and his own reporting on military efforts to maintain control over China’s border regions. For a complete lineup, visit fairbank.fas.harvard.edu.
Unearthed papyrus contains lost scenes from Euripides’ plays
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Alums help identify, decipher ‘one of the most significant new finds in Greek literature in this century’
For centuries, questions have loomed about two of Euripides’ lesser-known tragedies, “Ino” and “Polyidus,” with only a smattering of text fragments and plot summaries available to offer glimpses into their narratives.
Now, in a groundbreaking find, two Harvard alumni have identified and worked to decipher 97 lines from these plays on a papyrus from the third century A.D.
Yvona Trnka-Amrhein ’06, Ph.D. ’13, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was the first to identify part of the text as an excerpt from “Polyidus,” a scene in which King Minos of Crete confronts a seer, demanding he resurrect his son. Trnka-Amrhein and colleague John Gibert, Ph.D. ’91, identified the remaining text as lines from “Ino,” a scene that probably depicts the title character boasting victoriously after orchestrating the deaths of her stepchildren. Their research was published this month in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, or the Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy.
The papyrus as it was uncovered at the ancient necropolis.
Photo courtesy of Yvona Trnka-Amrhein
The papyrus was discovered in 2022 in a burial shaft at the ancient necropolis of Philadelphia, Egypt, by a team from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. In June, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies hosted a conference with Trnka-Amrhein, Gibert, excavation team leader Basem Gehad, and 12 other scholars from around the world to compare research, including Harvard Professor of the Classics Naomi Weiss. Classics Ph.D. candidate Sarah Gonzalez also participated.
“It’s arguably one of the most significant new finds in Greek literature in this century,” Weiss said. “I don’t expect there to be another find like this in my lifetime, in my particular field of expertise. For Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies to host the first public investigation into this material was really exciting.”
Weiss, whose research focuses on ancient Greek performance culture, especially classical Greek drama, discussed the significance of the finding. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your experience at the New Euripides Conference?
That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a scholar of Greek tragedy. To be one of 15 scholars worldwide who got to see this stuff for the first time was really incredible. There was a core group of people there who were literally going through the fragments word by word and discussing whether Yvona and John’s readings of each part of the papyrus were correct. Some of it is hard to read, so individual words are contested.
What are your early takeaways from the new fragment of “Polyidus”?
It quite clearly seems to be a dialogue between King Minos of Crete and Polyidus the seer, where Polyidus is saying, “It’s wrong to demand that I revive your son from the dead, that goes against all laws of nature,” and Minos is basically saying, “Well, I’m king and what a tyrant asks for has to happen.” The passage seems to be really concerned with questions of tyranny and the extent of human power and free will, and how those can jostle against each other. How far can human power go, how far can human knowledge and skill extend? Even to the point of reviving someone from the dead? The fact that Polyidus does end up reviving the dead son is an example of how Euripides liked to play with plot twists and “happily ever after” endings. At the same time, he was deeply engaged with contemporary intellectual questions.
“These fragments are unusual because they’re relatively long and give us a lot of information about plays that we previously knew less about. ”
Naomi Weiss
Naomi Weiss.
Photo by Jodi Hilton
And the new fragment of “Ino”?
If the editors’ reconstruction is correct, then “Ino” is the only surviving fragment that has a dialogue between the two wives: Ino, the king’s first wife who was long presumed missing and has returned in disguise; and Themisto, the second wife. Each wife has two children. Themisto tries to kill Ino’s, but Ino tricks her into killing her own instead. Themisto commits suicide and then the king mistakenly kills one of his sons by Ino, and she walks into the sea with the other. In this excerpt, the meeting of the two wives brings to the fore the doubleness and repetition running throughout the play and it in turn makes us better appreciate quite how excessive this tragedy was, with multiple wives, multiple children, multiple deaths, multiple suicides.
Does this change anything about our understanding of Euripides?
“Ino” is a really gruesome tragedy. The only person left at the end is the king, and he’s lost all his wives and all his children. This seems like tragedy on steroids. It’s the sort of experimentation with how far you can push a tragic plot that may remind us of later plays of Euripides. “Ino” may well be a significantly earlier play — there seems to be a reference to it in a comedy by Aristophanes that was produced in 425 B.C. If that is a reference to “Ino,” we know the tragedy was performed before this date. We tend to think of Euripides’ super experimental plays as being from the last decade of his career, where he’s just going all out and questioning the very form of tragedy. If we are right in dating this earlier, then that changes our understanding of how tragedy developed through the fifth century.
Who might have written the excerpts on this papyrus, and why?
We don’t know. It’s a really open question. At the conference, one of the questions that kept coming up was, is it significant that these two plays, which have something to do with the death of children, were found in a pit grave where there were buried — at different times — the body of an older woman and the body of a child? But it’s very hard to make any reliable conjectures about that connection. Some people at the conference thought that these extracts may be part of what’s called the “anthology tradition”: Maybe someone was teaching Euripides’ plays or hoping to draw from them in their own compositions and compiled a set of useful passages from each tragedy. Another scholar at the conference thought that maybe these were written out to be part of a performance, essentially like a script for actors. All of these questions remain and will be debated.
How much do we know about Euripides’ work as a whole?
When we think of Greek tragedy, we tend to think of the “big three”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who all wrote tragedies in the fifth century B.C. Of these three tragedians, we have much more surviving of Euripides. While we have seven full plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, for Euripides, we have 19 full plays and 18 of those can reliably be said to be his. Then we have a lot of fragments. The fragments of plays are preserved across different media — a lot of them are quotations that come up in other authors, but we also have papyri. This is the latest find of tragedy on papyri. These fragments are unusual because they’re relatively long and give us a lot of information about plays that we previously knew less about.
Penslar, Feldman examine plight of Jewish Americans after 10/7 attack
Scholars trace history of group in U.S., discuss why many wrestling with what it means for Israel, their own place in nation’s culture
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
In the wake the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and subsequent pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S., many Jewish Americans have been grappling with their own identities in relationship to Israel.
In a packed talk at Harvard Law School, Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, and Derek J. Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, marked the anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre by detailing the historically close ties between American Jewry and the state of Israel today. In separate remarks, each underscored why the majority of Jews in the U.S. have felt profoundly betrayed over the past year.
During the 19th century, Jews residing in North America and western Europe experienced increased economic mobility and social integration. Soon they were openly appealing for political interventions on behalf of persecuted Jews in North Africa and the Russian Empire.
During the 20th century, optimism took root among those living in the U.S. “Jews came to feel themselves to be not unusual or exceptional, but rather exemplary citizens of the republic,” said Penslar, who is also director of the Center for Jewish Studies. “And by that argument, antisemitism was not just bad for the Jews. It was bad for everybody. It was un-American.”
Among American Jews, the movement to create a Jewish state became widely popular during World War II as the Nazis murdered two thirds of the Jews in Europe. But American proponents departed from the tenets of Zionism’s central and eastern European founders, who stressed the importance for Jews to prepare for new lives in historic Palestine.
“American Zionism was not about moving to Israel,” Penslar said. “It was a Zionism that was fundamentally optimistic about Jewish life right here in the United States.”
This dual faith in the U.S. and the state of Israel underpins the betrayal experienced by many American Jews today. “They’re feeling more vulnerable than any time since the Second World War,” Penslar noted.
The reaction is especially acute among Jewish Americans on the left who saw their political allies justify the Hamas-led killings of 1,200 people in Israel, Penslar said. But for the majority of Jewish Americans, he added, “you see it largely in the way people are talking about what’s happening in the universities.”
For one, said Feldman, author of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People” (2024), the demonstrations were the opposite of the “post-9/11-style condemnation” that Jewish Americans had expected following Oct. 7. But they also represented a possible “ground shift” in political attitudes and moral discourse on Israel.
“The long process by which American Jewish identity came to be primarily bound up in Israel meant that for Jews to hear the view expressed that Israel’s very existence is morally problematic, or maybe wrongful, is sincerely experienced as antisemitic,” Feldman said.
As an additional consequence, Feldman argued that bipartisan support for Israel is now at stake.
“A core strategic accomplishment of the American Jewish community in its Zionism,” Feldman said, is ensuring the American political system’s support for Israel “no matter which party is in power.”
Evidence that a realignment is underway can be seen in Muslim American voters rejecting a staunchly pro-Israel President Joe Biden during Michigan’s Democratic primary last winter or in former President Donald Trump’s more recent appeals to Jewish voters as Israel’s “protector.”
“The big historical question of what did the spring’s conflicts and protests and encampments and responses mean, with a capital m,” Feldman said, “is really going to depend on what happens in November.”
Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?
long read
Surgeon, professor Marty Makary examines damage wrought when medicine closes ranks around inaccurate dogma
Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary, M.P.H. ’98. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.
“Hi, my name is Chase, and I’ll be your waiter. Does anyone at the table have a nut allergy?”
My two Johns Hopkins students from Africa, Asonganyi Aminkeng and Faith Magwenzi, looked at each other, perplexed.
“What is it with the peanut allergies here?” Asonganyi asked me. “Ever since I landed at JFK from Cameroon, I noticed a food apartheid — food packages either read ‘Contains Tree Nuts’ or ‘Contains No Tree Nuts.’ ”
Asonganyi told me that even on his connecting flight to Baltimore, the flight attendant had made an announcement: “We have someone on the plane with a peanut allergy, so please try not to eat peanuts.” And on his first day at Johns Hopkins, a classmate invited him to dinner. The invite went something like this: 1) Would you like to come over for dinner; and 2) Do you have a peanut or other allergy?
“What’s going on here?” Asonganyi asked with a big smile. “We have no peanut allergies in Africa.”
Faith, who had flown in from Zimbabwe, nodded in agreement.
I looked at them and smiled. “In Egypt, where my family is from, we don’t have peanut allergies either,” I said. “Welcome to America. Peanut allergies are real and can be life-threatening here.”
Their observation reminded me of when my friend’s school banned peanuts from the campus. School administrators actually inquired with security authorities if metal detectors could detect a peanut. And then one day there was an “emergency.” A peanut was found on the floor of a school bus. It was like discovering an IED in Iraq. The kids were ordered to quietly exit the bus single-file until someone arrived to “decontaminate” the bus. Luckily, the peanut did not detonate and harm the public.
How did we get here?
In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6 percent. Most were mild. Then starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge. Doctors began to notice that more and more children affected had severe allergies.
The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids. There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take.
Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy.
The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.
I did a close read of that 1998 UK health department recommendation to see if it cited any scientific study to back up the decree. I found one sentence stating that moms who eat peanuts are more likely to have children with peanut allergies. In other words, it blamed the moms. The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study. So I pulled that up and took a close look.
I couldn’t believe it.
The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.
How could “experts” make a recommendation citing a study that did not even support the recommendation?
Bewildered by how the study seemed so badly misconstrued, I called its lead author, Dr. Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics in Dublin. He shared the same frustration and told me he had opposed the peanut avoidance guideline when it came out. “It’s ridiculous,” he told me. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”
I specifically asked him how he felt about his study being used as the source to justify the sweeping recommendation. “I felt crossed,” he responded, using a little UK slang for feeling betrayed. He had not been consulted on the national guideline.
The 2000 AAP guideline was published in the specialty’s top journal, Pediatrics, activating many pediatricians to evangelize mothers when they brought their babies in for a checkup. Doctors and public health leaders had their new marching orders. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children.
But despite these efforts, things got worse. By 2004, it was clear that the rate of peanut allergies was going the wrong way. Peanut allergies soared. More concerning, extreme peanut allergies, which can be life-threatening, became commonplace in America.
Suddenly, emergency department visits for peanut anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic swelling of the airways — skyrocketed, and schools began enacting peanut bans. By 2007, 18 percent of Virginia schools had banned peanuts altogether. And in 2016, the Parkway School District in Missouri, reported 957 students with documented life-threatening food allergies, most of which were to peanuts. The rate had increased 50 percent from just six years prior, and more than 1,000 percent from a prior generation.
As things got worse, many public health leaders doubled down. If only every parent would comply with the pediatrics association guideline, they thought, we as a country could finally beat down peanut allergies and win the war. The dogma became a self-licking ice cream cone.
But the groupthink could not have been more wrong.
Swimming against the current
Stephen Combs is a salt-of-the-earth pediatrician in rural East Tennessee. At one point, the other pediatricians in Combs’s group noticed something unique about his patients. None of them had peanut allergies. This despite the fact that his colleagues were seeing more and more kids with peanut allergies in their practices. What was going on?
I was curious to learn more about his impressive track record, so I traveled to the beautiful rolling hills of Johnson City, Tennessee, to visit him. (I often learn a lot when I get outside of the bubble of my urban university hospital.)
I discovered that all the pediatricians in Combs’s group were as impressive as he was: making house calls, staying late to see patients, and educating parents on how to raise healthy children. They all practiced pediatrics the same way.
Except for one thing.
Combs had never followed the AAP guideline for young children to avoid peanuts. The reason for his defiance was simple. Combs did his residency at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, where he trained under world-famous pediatric immunologist Rebecca Buckley. When the AAP guideline came out in 2000 with a big splash, Buckley recognized that it violated a basic principle of immunology known as immune tolerance: the body’s natural way of accepting foreign molecules present early in life. It was like the dirt theory, whereby newborns exposed to dirt, dander, and germs may then have lower allergy and asthma risks. Buckley confidently told her students and residents, including Combs, to ignore the AAP recommendation, and in fact, to do the opposite. She explained that peanut abstinence doesn’t prevent peanut allergies, it causes them.
Her explanation turned out to be prophetic.
Since his training with Buckley, Combs has consistently instructed parents to introduce a touch of peanut butter (mixed with water to avoid a choking risk) as soon as a child is able to eat it. To this day, the thousands of children in East Tennessee lucky enough to have Combs as their pediatrician do not have peanut allergies.
Extrapolating the principle to other potential allergens, Combs also encouraged the early introduction of eggs, milk, strawberries, and even early exposure to dogs and cats. As a result, the children in his practice rarely developed an allergy to these things, and when they did, it was mild.
An embarrassingly simple study
Buckley and her trainees were not alone in bucking the AAP’s guidance. In fact, many experts in immunology had long known of mouse studies showing that avoiding certain foods triggers allergies to those foods. But the laboratory immunology community was largely disconnected from the clinical allergist and the pediatric community.
Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, challenged the UK guideline. It “was not evidence-based,” he wrote in The Lancet in 1998. “Public-health measures may have unintended effects … they could increase the prevalence of peanut allergy.”
Two years later, the same year the AAP issued their peanut avoidance recommendation, he was giving a lecture in Israel on allergies and asked the roughly 200 pediatricians in the audience, “How many of you are seeing kids with a peanut allergy?”
Only two or three raised their hands. Back in London, nearly every pediatrician had raised their hand to the same question.
Startled by the discrepancy, he had a Eureka moment. Many Israeli infants are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba. To him, it was no coincidence.
Lack quickly assembled researchers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to launch a formal study. They found that Jewish children in Israel had one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared to Jewish children in the UK, suggesting it was not a genetic predisposition, as the medical establishment had assumed. Lack and his Israeli colleagues titled their publication “Early Consumption of Peanuts in Infancy Is Associated with a Low Prevalence of Peanut Allergy.”
However, their publication in 2008 was not enough to uproot the groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. Many in the medical community dismissed Lack’s findings and continued to insist that young children avoid peanuts. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate the recommendation, to see if it was helping or hurting children.
But things were getting worse. The more health officials implored parents to follow the recommendation, the worse peanut allergies got. The number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in just one decade (2005–14). It spread like a virus. By 2019, one report estimated that one in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools began to ban peanuts and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared. Pharma exploited the situation by price-gouging the desperate parents and schools. Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of an EpiPen from $100 to $600 in the U.S. (It’s $30 in some countries.)
The AAP recommendation had created a vicious cycle. The more prevalent peanut allergies became, the more people avoided peanuts for young children. This, in turn, caused more peanut allergies. Tunnel-vision thinking had created a nightmare scenario for which the only possible solution seemed to be the total eradication of peanuts from the planet.
As things got worse, a dissenting Lack decided to conduct a clinical trial randomizing infants to peanut exposure (at 4-11 months of age) versus no peanut exposure. He found that early peanut exposure resulted in an 86 percent reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation. He blasted his findings to the world in a New England Journal of Medicine publication in 2015, finally proving what immunologists like Buckley had known for decades: Peanut abstinence causes peanut allergies. It was now undeniable; the AAP had it backward.
I reached out to Lack and had breakfast with him when he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a medical conference in 2024. He told me that his initial hypothesis had been based on an early observation as a pediatrician that kids who got their ears pierced sometimes developed a nickel allergy around the piercing. But kids who had orthodontics didn’t. He realized that kids with orthodontics had prior exposure to nickel in the braces, making them immune. This observation was consistent with the concept of “oral tolerance” that he’d studied in mice experiments conducted at the University of Colorado in the 1990s.
He had an interesting observation from his childhood that reminded him that conventional wisdom can change. His grandfather had a heart attack, which doctors treated with strict bed rest — a recommendation that was eventually replaced with cardiac rehab exercise. As a 6-year-old, Lack recalled that his grandfather was not allowed to leave his bed. The family members had to take him his meals. His doctors managed his damaged heart by weakening it further.
“In science, we tend to get in a rut and then dig in,” he told me. “We have to be open-minded.”
Lack is now recognized as a hero in the field of allergy. But when he did his big study, he was heavily criticized.
It would take the AAP two years after Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents. It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.
Did they really need two years? Where was the sense of deep remorse? The affected families deserved to have the medical establishment move with a sense of urgency to correct their recommendation immediately following Lack’s definitive study. Hugh Sampson, another trainee of Rebecca Buckley, led the NIAID report that undid the recommendation. He told me that working with the government agency was frustrating. Sampson is one of the country’s leading allergists. When I asked him what he thought about the entire saga, he told me, “The food allergy community has been appropriately chastised [for getting the peanut recommendation wrong].”
An entire generation — millions of children — had been harmed by groupthink, and many still are feeling the effects. Now, at least the faucet of bad advice was turned off.
Millions of workers are also juggling caregiving. Employers need to rethink.
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Business School report finds rigid hiring policies, work rules, scheduling hurt employees but also productivity, retention, bottom line
Millions of Americans, from hourly retail staffers to corporate vice presidents, wrestle with the demands of work while parenting young children, caring for a sick spouse or aging parent — or both.
That juggling act is made even tougher by rigid practices and rules set by employers, such as inflexible or unpredictable work schedules, and employers’ failure to grasp how employees are struggling and to provide them with support, according to a new Harvard Business Schoolreport.
That disregard harms both workers and companies. Care-related issues are the single most common reason employees leave the workforce. Companies also pay a price, both directly and indirectly, often in waysthey don’t fully understand, the report found.
The Gazette spoke with its author Joseph B. Fuller ’79, M.B.A. ’81, professor of management practice and co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work project at HBS, about the problem and what companies can do. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
There are 50 to 60 million caregivers in the nation. They make up the largest portion of a cohort you study known as “hidden workers” — those who want a job or more hours but are thwarted by employer policies. Who is in this group and why do they leave the workforce?
They are people who have some significant care obligations within their household. Those range from things that would strike people as very ordinary — a two-parent household with kids — or it could be something much more exotic — they have a chronically ill child or spouse. An apogee group is what we call the “sandwich generation,” where they’re caring for dependent children, from a newborn to a teenager, but they’re also caring for one or more seniors — a parent, an in-law.
Well over 50 percent of workers report they have some caregiving obligation. The question becomes: Do the terms and conditions of their employment and the nature of that obligation mesh? A lot of traditional expectations of employers, but also coworkers and even customers, don’t always jibe with the cadence of care.
We can see this in things like work schedule. If I have a child with a chronic condition, anything from severe asthma to a behavioral issue, stuff happens. And if I have to go see the principal of the school tomorrow because of a disciplinary problem or it’s a bad air-quality day and my child really shouldn’t be outdoors, I’m going to keep them home from school. As a normal working adult, I don’t have money to hire a service, so I’m going to miss a day of work.
Fifty percent of women who have left the workforce and say they would have preferred to remain working left because they could not reconcile the obligations of the career path they were on with caring for kids.
Primary caregiver by gender and age
Caregiving, along with higher education and healthcare delivery, has among the highest real-dollar increase in cost in the last 10 to 15 years. Childcare is more expensive than it’s ever been in real dollars. If you’re paying $1,200, $1,300 a month for full-day childcare, for an average American job, that would be equal to the average after-tax, discretionary income that a worker is left with at the end of the month. So, economics underlies many people’s considerations. But it’s also a combination of career considerations and the specific caregiving needs of the family.
You found that hiring processes used by employers have contributed to the difficulties caregivers face when trying to return to work after some circumstance forces them to leave the workplace for a time. Why is that?
Unfortunately, several things start happening if your work history gets interrupted. The first is something that virtually every employer uses to assess candidates called the continuity of employment filter, which is used in an AI-powered tool called an applicant tracking system. It asks an employer: If someone has a gap in their work history, how should I treat that? If there’s a gap of more than six months, 50 percent of employers will drop a person from the candidate pool.
How does the struggle to manage work and caregiving typically manifest on the job? Do most employers even realize some workers are having a hard time?
First of all, employees in most companies only go to their boss or to their company to discuss a caregiving issue as a last resort. Their concern is: If I bring this up, I’m certainly not going to be a candidate for promotion. It’s going to affect my performance evaluation. They fear they’ll be viewed as less committed, that they’re going to be suspect.
The biggest two effects of having caregiving responsibilities that are hard to reconcile with your job are absenteeism and presenteeism. Either you’ll miss work, or you’ll be so distracted while you’re at work you won’t get much done.
For a lot of frontline lower-wage jobs, companies have a rule that if someone is late to work three times in a month or has an un-preplanned absence three times in a quarter, by rule you’re just fired. And that’s completely understandable. They’re running complicated operations; they can’t let every store manager make their own decisions, not only because it would be chaos, but also because if somebody in Topeka is getting fired, but a person who did the same thing in Toledo is being kept because the store managers made different decisions and it all ends up in court, the company loses.
And companies, especially human resources functions, hate administering exceptions. Walmart employs a million people. If all of a sudden everything is customized, they’d be out of business in 6 months.
One thing my early research showed is that caregiving concerns are endemic. They affect roughly 80 percent of the workforce some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time. But the way working relationships have been structured by employers for a century rests on propositions like “I’m paying you and providing a decent place to work. I don’t want to intrude on your life, and I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Besides concerns about fairness, administrative logistics, and lost productivity, there are costs for failing to address the caregiving needs of employees, costs many companies don’t realize they’re paying. What are some of those?
First, there’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. It doesn’t matter if they’re fired, or they quit. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation. That’s a good proxy for how much it’s going to cost to replace that worker.
Second, people who have some tenure with the employer have lots of knowledge based on that experience, which makes them more productive. Say they join your company at age 24 or 25 and then after four or five years, they decide to start a family. They’ve got five years of work experience; they have a network inside the company; they may know customers; they know how you do things. But they conclude they can’t stay given the requirements of the job.
“There’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation.”
Unless employers assist them so they can stay in the job, they give up a productive worker. Their replacement is an unknown quantity. Employers constantly make speculative bets on new employees based on pieces of paper and a couple of interviews to replace a worker the company has a huge amount of data on from personnel files, performance evaluations, etc.
When they replace the worker who leaves because of caregiving conflicts, they incur the direct costs, but they also absorb indirect costs, what we call “tacit knowledge” — how we do things around here. And say that worker is on a team and they’re the glue on that team. Another team member has been thinking about quitting, too. We know from psychological research that person will feel psychological permission to quit if another worker quits.
What my research shows is the more senior you are, and the more money you make, the more likely you are to leave a job because of a caregiving obligation. Employers are always surprised by that. They assume a worker is more likely to leave if they’re low-paid.
A worker in the top quartile of compensation is more likely to leave a job because of a caregiving conflict by a factor of two than a bottom-quartile worker. And that 25 percent to 35 percent cost of replacing a worker goes to 100 percent or more of annual compensation if you’re talking about a top-quartile worker — middle management, upper-middle management, all the way to the executive ranks.
All those things add up. Unfortunately, employers historically aren’t very good at connecting those dots. They don’t understand their own economics.
Why aren’t they better at seeing the full picture of these costs?
Unfortunately, the lack of connection between managers and supervisors of workers, and their lived experience, and the human resources function is really quite surprising. HR, particularly in big companies, just tends to see data. They’re not talking to supervisors who say, “My best workers are leaving regularly and here’s why.” A lot of companies don’t do exit interviews, so they don’t connect data about why somebody leaves in performance reviews. They don’t say, “Is there anything that’s causing you to think about leaving the company?”
What should employers do to remedy this situation?
The first is to realize there’s a big pool of talent out there that’s been marginalized because of caregiving responsibilities.
Employers should review how they search for talent and what conditions they’re putting on applicants in the applicant tracking system and adjust them to include more candidates. There’s this big pool of workers that is being structurally obliged to end up in part-time, low-wage work because of these “disqualifying” factors. I’m not going to say those standards are arbitrary, but they contribute to an artificial shortage of qualified candidates that employers complain about despite policies creating that shortage.
A second is, understand that all your employees are past, current, and future caregivers and that their circumstances will change. Their life path affects their productivity and their propensity to quit or to behave in a way that causes you to fire them.
Understand the care demographics of your workforce. Make their caregiving lives outside work something that’s discussable with their supervisor. There’s a tremendous return on loyalty and engagement from workers who hear from their supervisors.
Do exit interviews, add to your performance review questions like “Have you thought about leaving? What would cause you to do that?” Find out what’s driving absentees and resignations? Look at your own data.
Just invest in having a more sophisticated understanding of your own economics. Because if you do, you’ll make better decisions.
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3 million Americans have dental implants — but procedure wasn’t always ‘routine’
Surgeon recounts changes in field over 40-year career — from titanium screws to bone regeneration — as he accepts Goldhaber Award
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Celebrating 40 years of progress in the field of dental implant surgery, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine honored Daniel Buser — University of Bern Professor and Harvard visiting lecturer — with the Paul Goldhaber Award on Monday. While accepting the honor, the most prestigious granted by the Dental School, the renowned dental surgeon gave an address that spanned both his academic career and the advances in the field, four decades “of pioneers and big breakthroughs.”
Since 2000, Buser said, dental implant surgery has become both “routine” and “highly successful.” Nearly 3 million American have dental implants, a number that is growing by 500,000 annually, according to the American Academy of Implant Dentistry. Despite a trend toward older patients, with good hygiene (and a warning to “not smoke too much”), the procedure has success and survival rates of 95 percent and 98 percent. “Much better than conventional prosthetics,” said Buser. “Better than hip replacement.” He added the field has cut the number of surgical interventions, decreased pain and morbidity, and shortened healing and treatment times.
Over his career, Buser saw a “paradigm shift” in the surfaces of surgical dental implants. While the earliest implants were anchored by a smooth, polished titanium screw (known as the Brånemark surface after Swedish researcher Per-Ingvar Brånemark), the field trended toward “micro-rough” surfaces after research found that they reduced average healing time and failure rates.
Dental implants have success and survival rates of 95 percent and 98 percent. “Better than hip replacement.”
Daniel Buser
The next big breakthrough, explained Buser, was guided bone regeneration, which uses barrier membranes to direct the growth of new bone around an implant. In Bern, he said, the first clinical case, involving the extraction of a premolar replaced by an implant, “worked very nice.”
The technique did have complications, however. Collapse of the membranes and difficulties in healing set off a search for better materials. With research on miniature pigs, “We learned very quickly we needed something to support the membrane.” The answer? Two different fillers, the so-called composite graft, which has now become standard.
Further research has revealed that the placement of the implant has an impact, as does the so-called micro-gap, the space between the various components of the implant. Looking at “possible ways to minimize or eliminate inflammation,” said Buser, “you want to either decrease or eliminate the micro-gap, seal it, or you can physically move the micro-gap up,” higher on the jaw, which reduces the chance of inflammation and bone loss.
Another advance has been bone conditioning, which uses a patient’s own bone chips. Bathing the chips in a mix of the patient’s blood and an isotype bath known as Ringer’s solution to avoid clotting prompts the bone chips to release a growth factor. “We have seen that two of the most important growth factors can be detected very quickly,” he said, opening up more options for healing.
Such advances have been aided by the introduction of cone-beam-computed tomography, a volumetric scanning machine that provides 3D models and serves as a diagnostic tool. Now routine, “this gives us so much information.”
With so many options — such as whether to do immediate implant placement after an extraction or to wait — the current challenge is “all about case selection,” said Buser, noting that each case should dictate an individual approach. Adding that most complications are caused by poorly trained practitioners, he stressed the importance of the kind of teamwork that encourages both research and personal growth. “You have to have lifelong learning. You have to go to conferences to be updated.”
Speaking to a full house as well as an online audience, Buser also touched on being a mentor, a role shared by the late Goldhaber, who served as the dean of the Dental School for 22 years.
“For an academic career, you must have a good mentor,” said Buser. Naming such luminaries in the field as the late André Schroeder, professor of operative dentistry and endodontics at the University of Bern; Robert Schenck, whom Buser recruited to oral and maxillofacial surgery from his original field of orthopedics; and Ray Williams, P.D. ’73, a 2013 Goldhaber honoree and former associate dean for postdoctoral education and head of the Department of Periodontology at HSDM, he encouraged young academics to seek out those who could help them.
He also stressed that such collaboration is a two-way street. “You must be a good team player.” Noting the lessons learned from his own participation in the 1980 Swiss champion Bern handball team, he said, “You achieve much more with a good team.”
A reservoir of virus in the body may explain why some people experience long COVID symptoms
BWH Communications
4 min read
Researchers found people with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms were twice as likely to have SARS-CoV-2 proteins in their blood, compared to those without long COVID symptoms, according to a study out of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Commonly reported long COVID symptoms included fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, joint pain, back pain, headache, sleep disturbance, loss of smell or taste, and gastrointestinal symptoms.
Results are published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection.
Specifically, the team found that 43 percent of those with long COVID symptoms affecting three major systems in the body, including cardiopulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neurologic systems, tested positive for viral proteins within 1 to 14 months of their positive COVID test. But only 21 percent of those who didn’t report any long COVID symptoms tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 biomarkers in this same period.
“If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms.”
Zoe Swank
“If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms,” said lead author Zoe Swank, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology at BWH.
The study analyzed 1,569 blood samples collected from 706 people, including 392 participants from the National Institutes of Health-supported Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, who had previously tested positive for a COVID infection. Using Simoa, an ultrasensitive test for detecting single molecules, researchers looked for whole and partial proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They also analyzed data from the participants’ long COVID symptoms, using electronic medical chart information or surveys that were gathered at the same time as the blood samples were taken.
It’s possible that a persistent infection explains some — but not all — of the long COVID sufferers’ symptoms. If this is the case, testing and treatment could aid in identifying patients who may benefit from treatments such as antiviral medications.
A condition with more than one cause
One of the questions raised by the study is why more than half of patients with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms tested negative for persistent viral proteins.
“This finding suggests there is likely more than one cause of long COVID,” said David Walt, a professor of pathology at BWH and principal investigator on the study. “For example, another possible cause of long-COVID symptoms could be that the virus harms the immune system, causing immune dysfunction to continue after the virus is cleared.”
“Another possible cause of long-COVID symptoms could be that the virus harms the immune system, causing immune dysfunction to continue after the virus is cleared.”
David Walt
To better understand whether an ongoing infection is behind some people’s long COVID symptoms, Swank, Walt, and other researchers are currently conducting follow-up studies. They’re analyzing blood samples and symptom data in larger groups of patients, including people of wide age ranges and those with compromised immune symptoms. This way, they can also see if some people are more likely to have persistent virus in the body.
“There is still a lot that we don’t know about how this virus affects people,” said David C. Goff, a senior scientific program director for the RECOVER Observational Consortium Steering Committee and director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. “These types of studies are critical to help investigators better understand the mechanisms underlying long COVID — which will help bring us closer to identifying the right targets for treatment.”
Goff added that these results also support ongoing efforts to study antiviral treatments.
The SARS-CoV-2 blood test developed by Brigham and Women’s researchers is also currently being used in a national study, called RECOVER-VITAL, that is testing whether an antiviral drug helps patients recover from long COVID. The RECOVER-VITAL trial will test the patients’ blood before and after treatment with an antiviral to see if treatment eliminates persistent viral proteins in the blood.
The idea that a virus can stay in the body and cause ongoing symptoms months after an infection isn’t unique to COVID.
“Other viruses are associated with similar post-acute syndromes,” said Swank. She noted animal studies have found Ebola and Zika proteins in tissues post-infection, and these viruses have also been associated with post-infection illness.
Funding for this work came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Barbara and Amos Hostetter.
“It’s surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a truly just society, grounded in [classical] liberal principles, would actually look like,” said Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics, during a talk Monday with Eric Beerbohm, director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.
The pair discussed Chandler’s new book, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” in which he defends the ideas of the late John Rawls, the renowned 20th century Harvard political philosopher, and attempts to apply them to the economic and political issues of today.
The book offers a full-throated defense of liberal egalitarianism, as Rawls outlined it, and then tries to “bridge the gap between Rawls’ quite abstract, high-level principles and a whole range of practical policy questions,” Chandler said.
Rawls was a deeply influential political, moral and legal philosopher who taught at Harvard from 1962 until his death in 2002 and is best known for his 1971 opus, “A Theory of Justice.”
His theory of “justice as fairness” envisions a society in which every person has an equal right to the basic liberties and opportunities, and where inequalities exist, those with the least power or advantage should be prioritized. And he begins with a thought experiment: Would we design a more just society if nobody knew in advance whether they’d be among the most powerful or the most vulnerable?
Chandler was first inspired to explore this question while he was at Harvard in 2008 on a one-year Henry Fellowship. He wondered why economics and political theory appeared to have drifted apart for progressives since Rawls’ heyday and whether he could find a way to reunite them.
One objective of the book, he explained, was to offer an accessible summary of Rawls’ ideas to a non-academic public and to address some of the common criticisms and misunderstandings about him.
“I think one of the reasons Rawls hasn’t had as much influence as he might have had on public policy is that he said so little about the practical implications of his ideas,” he said.
“I particularly wanted to bring out some of the communitarian aspects of Rawls’ thinking, and to emphasize how his account of economic justice is much richer and also much more radical than his commons.”
“I particularly wanted to bring out some of the communitarian aspects of Rawls’ thinking, and to emphasize how his account of economic justice is much richer and also much more radical than his commons,” essentially his views on sharing of societal resources.
In Rawls’ view, economic justice involves more than how wealth is distributed, but about the balance of power between workers and business owners and the importance of having a sense of financial independence and opportunity.
A secondary goal was to respond to critics of classical liberalism, which embraces individual freedom as a primary value, and try to “rehabilitate” it as a progressive public philosophy.
“I think in popular discourse, particularly on the left, liberalism has come to be associated with the neoliberal ideas of thinkers like [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman,” with their faith in the markets and singular focus on economic growth.
That kind of thinking has come to dominate political discourse and economic policy since the 1980s, Chandler notes in his book. It has left progressives without a solid philosophical mooring for their thinking and policies.
Whereas President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could look to Hayek and Friedman in the 1980s for a source of intellectual coherence and direction, it’s not as obvious today where progressives look for similar inspiration, he added.
“The long-term failure of mainstream progressive parties, like the Democrats here [in the U.S.] and the Labour Party in the U.K., to develop a coherent political vision of their own” is not merely an intellectual problem, but it deeply undermines the parties’ chances for ongoing electoral success, Chandler said.
Rawls, Chandler believes, offers a useful framework for weaving an array of different policies together in a coherent way and provides an intellectual and ethical clarity about why we should pursue progressive policy ideas like workplace democracy or universal basic income or various forms of participatory democratic politics.
Not everyone will agree with Chandler’s point of view, but for politicians and others looking for justifications of certain policies, that clarity could have significant practical value. “Being able to explain why we support different policies is important, and Rawls can help us do that.”
U.S. seems impossibly riven. What if we could start from scratch?
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Key would be focusing on social, political, economic fairness, according to new book on ideas of political philosopher John Rawls
A new book by Daniel Chandler, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” offers a vision for democratic change inspired by the work of John Rawls, the towering political philosopher who joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 and maintained ties to the University until his death in 2002. Rawls’ 1971 magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice,” has influenced generations of philosophers and legal scholars.
In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics who studied at Harvard under Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, explained why Rawls’ ideas speak to the present day. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Which of Rawls’ principles offer the best framework for envisioning change?
The fundamental idea of Rawls’ philosophy is that society should be fair, and he developed a famous thought experiment called the “original position” for thinking about what that might actually mean. If we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organize it if we didn’t know what our position in that society would be, whether we would be rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white, as behind what he called a “veil of ignorance.” It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they were going to end up getting.
“It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they were going to end up getting.”
He uses this thought experiment to identify two fundamental principles, to do with freedom and equality respectively — hence the title of my book — that we can then use to think about how to design the basic institutions of a democratic society: what the Constitution should look like, how to organize the political process, the broad outlines of our economic system, including the role of markets, the nature of property rights, the scope of government intervention, and so on.
Rawls’ first principle is what he called the “basic liberties” principle. That’s the idea that everyone is entitled to a set of truly fundamental freedoms, including both personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, sexuality, but also political freedoms — not just the right to vote, but all of the freedoms that we need to play a part as genuine equals in the political process.
His second principle has two parts. The first is what he called “fair equality of opportunity.” That’s not just the absence of discrimination but the idea that everyone should have a genuinely equal chance to develop and apply their talents and abilities in life. Equality of opportunity is sometimes seen as the less radical partner to equality of outcome, but it’s really a very demanding ideal, one that countries like America and the U.K. fall far short of today.
The second is the “difference principle” — the idea that we should organize our economy so that the least well-off are better off than they would be under any alternative economic system. So, some inequality can be justified because it’s necessary for markets to function well, and higher pay gives people incentives to work hard and innovate, but we need to make sure the benefits are widely shared, and that isn’t something we can just leave to markets.
One of the things that I think is most interesting and important about Rawls’ economic thinking, but has often been overlooked, is that when he’s talking about inequality and economic justice, he’s not only talking about the distribution of financial resources. He’s concerned with how our society distributes power and control, like the balance of power between owners and workers, and also what he calls the “social bases of self-respect,” which include having a sense of independence, of being able to stand on your own two feet, social recognition from our peers, and opportunities for meaningful work.
Historically, one critique of Rawls is that his ideas, while important, are not very pragmatic and don’t offer a roadmap for change. How might the kind of change you propose come to fruition?
I think that’s a fair criticism. You know, although Rawls is really the unrivaled giant of 20th-century political philosophy, his ideas haven’t had much impact on popular debate or public policy, at least not compared to Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. I think it’s this lack of practical application that helps explain this gap. I’ve tried to pick up where Rawls left off and flesh out how we could put his ideas into practice.
In terms of how change can happen, there aren’t easy answers. But we can be pretty certain that change won’t happen unless political parties and the people who shape our public debate are able to articulate a positive and unifying vision of where they want society. The starting point for making the quite deep changes that America needs, to both its political and economic institutions, is to be able to articulate that positive vision.
Some commentators have suggested a binary choice — liberal principles on one side, authoritarian ideas on the other — in the coming presidential election. You say we should reject that idea.
It’s not that I don’t think that choice exists; it’s that I think it’s possible and necessary to try to appeal to people across the spectrum. What I’m rejecting is the idea that society is divided into two fixed camps who can’t speak to one another anymore. It’s still the case that large majorities support liberal freedoms, the existence of a democratic political system, and an economy that is broadly market-based, but genuinely works for everybody. The divide is much more tied to party identification rather than to issues. So, despite how divided things seem right now, I think it’s possible to build a broad-based coalition around these kinds of ideas, and I hope my book provides people with the ideas and arguments to try to do that.
‘Harvard Thinking’: What skeptics get wrong about liberal arts
In podcast episode, an economist, an educator, and a philosopher make the case it’s as essential as ever in today’s job market
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
What is the point of college? It’s a question that many families and potential students think about when it comes to deciding the role of higher education in the future. This question is particularly pressing for those considering a liberal arts education.
“Why should some young person waking up to the world in late adolescence subject themselves to an education of four years or so that expects them to study a range of topics?” asked Susanna Siegel, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, in this episode of “Harvard Thinking.” One reason is that it prepares future generations to think for themselves and contribute to a democratic society.
But it’s not just about critical thinking. David Deming, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy who co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at the Kennedy School, said it also sets students up for success in a constantly evolving workplace.
“Precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, [a liberal arts education] is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon,” Deming said.
Nancy Hill, the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education and a Developmental Psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agrees that the liberal arts can enhance a student’s learning. However, she’s also seen how it can be perceived as a luxury education rather than the standard. Universities and other institutions should work to make this type of education more accessible.
“There isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy,” Hill said. “For people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come into any college … and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas.”
In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Siegel, Deming, and Hill about why a liberal arts education matters — and how to make it attractive again.
Transcript
Nancy Hill: I think we haven’t made the liberal arts education attractive and innovated to make it attractive to people who are doing college in ways that we sometimes forget that that’s the majority of the ways in which people get their four-year degree. It’s overtime, it’s at night, it’s part-time. It’s almost as if the liberal arts education they’re experiencing is a luxury good, and we’re seeing it as an essential aspect of education.
Samantha Laine Perfas: The cost of college tuition is on the rise. Even with ramped-up financial aid efforts from universities, parents and students are still trying to decide whether or not tuition will lead to a smart return on their investment. Jobs increasingly require specific training or skill sets, leading some to question the value of a liberal arts education. Including fields like history, literature, and philosophy, the liberal arts have experienced diminishing enrollment numbers and institutions are trying to figure out their place in universities’ overall ecosystems.
So how do these institutions make a liberal arts education attractive again?
Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today I’m joined by:
David Deming: David Deming, I am the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard.
Laine Perfas: He studies education, inequality, and the future of work, and co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at the Kennedy School. Then:
Hill: Nancy Hill, and I’m the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education and a developmental psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Laine Perfas: Nancy’s research focuses on parenting and adolescent development. And finally:
Susanna Siegel: Susanna Siegel. I’m the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Harvard.
Laine Perfas: She’s written a lot about perception, drawing on both philosophy and the sciences of the mind.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll be taking a critical look at liberal arts education.
I think it’s important to start with, one, what is a liberal arts education and, two, how is it different than other types of higher education?
Siegel: Sometimes when people ask about what a liberal arts education is, and why it’s valuable, you can hear it as a kind of veiled or indirect way of asking what the values of the humanities are, because nobody asks, like, oh gosh, what’s the point of studying STEM fields? But I think there’s another way of hearing the question, which is not so much focused on the humanities, but a different question of like, why should some young person waking up to the world in late adolescence subject themselves to an education of four years or so that expects them to study a range of topics, to expose themselves to a range of different subjects and modes of thought, even while ultimately concentrating on one or two more than others? What’s the value of that plurality? My answer is I take very seriously the relationship between liberalism and liberal arts. I think that W.E.B. Du Bois said in his debate with Booker T. Washington, you know, education is a training for democratic citizenship and one thing we would lose if we lost liberal arts education is we’d become far more susceptible to politics of domination, to systems of governance that really rely on a very tight control over the horizon of ideas.
Hill: I would add to that, because I think when we think about a liberal arts education and when people get into the discourse of the value of a liberal arts education, people think about the price tag, and I think if we lost the liberal arts education, I agree with Susanna, we would lose some of the richness of what it means to live in a civil society, to think about culture, to think about innovation. If we think about colleges as training for vocation, and many people do want a return on investment of their college tuition, particularly as we’re seeing college tuitions raised at such an astronomical rate, people do want to know, what am I getting for it? And I think part of what we are losing as we think about the liberal arts education is really helping people understand its true value; that it might not be able to translate immediately to a job the way some undergraduate majors do, but we haven’t done a good job of saying, what value does it add to the kinds of careers that you might want? We’ve long since passed the stage where people start a job and stay in that job and work their way up and retire with the gold watch. We have to really think about preparing young people and preparing a workforce to really navigate a very creative and innovative career where they’re needed to reinvent themselves in relation to society, their interests, and their goals. And I think a liberal arts education provides that kind of intellectual flexibility and cognitive flexibility that society really needs.
Deming: Since I’m an economist, maybe I should craft an economic argument for what a liberal arts education does for people and how it differs from, let’s say more vocationally oriented training. So like why, if you want to be in finance, why not just major in finance and take a bunch of courses in finance? And the reason, which is something related to what Nancy said, is that people typically go to school at the very beginning of their lives and then whatever they learn has to last them for the next 40 to 50, God willing, years of life. And so the question is, what kind of education will prepare you not just for your first job, but for the rest of your life? The argument for a liberal arts education is the argument that precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, it is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon that we don’t have an answer to now because it hasn’t come around yet. And so that involves the ability to think critically. If someone’s telling me something, how likely is it to be true? What is their motivation? How much should I trust this source of information? How much should I think about somebody’s incentives to tell me the truth or not tell me the truth and how should I weigh evidence when perspectives are competing? Those are all things that are not really vocations. They’re really teaching you how to weigh evidence and how to think critically about other people’s perspectives and to adopt other people’s perspectives. And that’s a kind of teaching you how to think, teaching you how to learn tool kit that I think when done well, liberal arts education can do better than much more specific training for a specific job.
Hill: Yeah, I want to follow up on that because I think in some ways it’s really how we’re talking about what a liberal arts education is in the public discourse. And so I think it’s easier to sell and easier to help people understand the value of a liberal arts education when they’re attending a four-year institution in their early 20s, in the very typical graduate from high school, go to college, graduate in four or six years, as they say. But the vast majority of people who attend college don’t go to college that way. They might go to college part-time, and when you’re paying a single tuition and you can take as many courses as you want, then I think it’s easier to see the value of taking courses that are broad and around one’s area of interest. But if you have to pay for the courses one at a time, a credit at a time, and you’re doing this part-time and you’re seeing it very specifically to your career and upward mobility, I think we haven’t made the liberal arts education attractive and innovated to make it attractive to people who are doing college in ways that we sometimes forget that that’s the majority of the ways in which people get their four-year degree. It’s overtime, it’s at night, it’s part-time, It’s almost as if the liberal arts education they’re experiencing is a luxury good, and we’re seeing it as an essential aspect of education.
Laine Perfas: I hear all of you saying that the liberal arts focuses on critical thinking and analysis. Which is really valuable, but what I’m wondering is, is that enough in the current economy? Can it get people who are taking those classes in the jobs that then allow them to actually pay back the high cost they had to pay for the education in the first place?
Deming: There is no study, at least that I’m aware of, that shows that being a philosophy major makes you a better CEO or something like that. However, there is some evidence that the earnings gap between people who major in liberal arts and people who major in applied fields like computer science and engineering is much larger right after college than it is in adulthood. It’s because people who major in liberal arts tend to catch up. So it suggests that the penalty you think you’re paying for majoring in liberal arts is much less over your lifespan than it appears when you first graduate.
I think it’s important when we think about the landscape of higher education currently to hold two ideas that seem contradictory, but are actually not, in our minds at the same time. So one is that colleges can be doing much better than they currently are. We could be delivering much more value for money and we haven’t adapted to meet the needs of the workforce today. And then at the same time, another thing that’s true is that by and large, most people who go to college get a good return on their investment. That’s accounting for their tuition costs and the opportunity costs of their time; that despite all of its warts it still ends up being a good bet for most people. Now it’s risky and it takes some time to pay off and people get upset because they’re paying quite a lot and the benefits take a long time to be realized and they don’t always happen for everybody, but if you just look at, you know, putting your money in the stock market rather than paying for tuition or investing in other social interventions like public health campaigns or universal basic income or pick your policy, the return on investment in an economic sense for, hey, instead I’m going to park my money into four years of tuition, it tends to be a good investment just in a dollars-and-cents terms. So I don’t think you have to choose between a liberal arts education and a vocational trade. I think there’s lots of ways that we can deliver the breadth and the depth of a liberal arts and sciences education while also doing it in the context that gives people the skills to work in a team, to understand each other, to think critically. I just think there’s so much opportunity that we’re really not picking up.
Hill: David, can I ask you a question about that? It used to be that many companies would hire graduates with any major. In fact, they wanted majors that were adjacent to their field. And then they figured we can train them up on what we need them to do. But it seems now that businesses aren’t really valuing that kind of broad exposure in the ways that they used to. What are you seeing?
Deming: I think they still are hiring those people. Maybe they’re not doing it as much and maybe they’re a bit less happy about it. So it’s always important to look at people’s behavior, not what they say. So if you read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, you’re going to hear a lot of think pieces about how college degrees aren’t that useful. But then if you look at the employment numbers, it turns out that like actually entry-level college graduates, they’re not doing as well as they were in the boom times of the ’90s, but there’s a lot more of them now than there used to be. So it’s not enough to just have a college degree. Now they want you to have an internship and they want you to have done something more relevant. So I think of it more as like a gradual ratcheting up of the standards for getting a quote-unquote good job, which I think makes the case more for the relevance of college.
Hill: But when I think about, as we think about how higher education has changed, now many more high school students are going to college. We’re up to 60 percent of high school students go directly into some form of college, but we’re still only at 37 percent of the workforce having a four-year college degree. So we’re getting this kind of drop-off of people who aren’t finishing. And so we have more than half of the workforce that are figuring out how to make a living wage without a college degree. And I want to make the case that this kind of broad investment in a liberal arts education is useful to everyone.
Deming: I agree with that. I know that we’re here talking about liberal arts education in particular, but we tend to argue a lot about how education should look, but I think the first sort of thing is people need to be more educated. Like, there needs to be more of all of it. And that’s not because I’m in the education field. This is not a self-interested commentary. I’m saying this because education is one of those things that as society becomes richer and more prosperous, and as technology changes our possibilities, we want more of it, not less of it, because the level of sophistication you need to be a productive employee is just increasing over time. And a big worry I have is all the negative vibes around higher education is obscuring this reality and that we’re just not doing enough to educate the next generation of young people for the demands of the economy.
Siegel: Can I introduce a slightly different perspective on some of these questions?
Laine Perfas: Yeah, go for it, Susanna.
Siegel: There’s a way of talking about these questions as we’ve been doing, which is a very natural way of thinking about it in terms of the individual consumer choice. But we could also think about it in terms of the social incentives to offer liberal arts education, and I think some of those incentives might not be visible from the point of view of the kid or of the parent. They really are at the level of principles for organizing society.
I like this idea of organizational intelligence. Anybody who’s ever been in any kind of organization of any size knows the complexities involved in trying to gather all the information that’s distributed across different people’s perspectives in a cooperative scheme. And you can run your organizations in a way that relies very much on brute force. But, you know, people don’t like to be bossed around. If you’re going to have any kind of organization that isn’t just a very top-down, brute-force sort of thing, at any level of life, you need a set of habits where you have practiced encountering other people’s perspectives. Because the habits of interaction you develop in the classroom or meeting people who are coming from who knows where, those skills, those habits, that openness, that will serve you extremely well in organizations. And you could call that a kind of individual skill of critical thinking, but I actually think it’s more than that. I actually think it’s far more relational. That’s the value of liberal arts education, and that’s why it should really matter to society.
Laine Perfas: So I do want to say one thing. When we were considering doing this episode, we did realize that we might run the risk of sounding very biased because of the people who are participating in this episode. All of us are in higher education. All of us are college-educated. So given that, I do want to put on the hat of a skeptic. One thing that I saw in preparing for this episode is that there’s a Gallup poll last year that showed only 36 percent of people right now have confidence in higher education, period. So my question is, since you are all people who have seen the benefits and can clearly see the value, is the problem that we’re just failing to communicate that value or are these institutions failing to deliver?
Siegel: If you sort of look at public opinion and measure people’s reactions to higher education and say, gosh, I’m losing faith in them, it has to be taken into account that this sampling of public opinion is taking place in an era where the university is being targeted for specifically political reasons. And it’s not just the United States, it’s all over the world. Of course, it’s always a good opportunity to ask the questions we’re asking about what are we doing, what principles should guide it, what is its value, and I think those are very important conversations to have, but I think we should be wary of looking at any sort of results we might have as public opinion as if they were somehow tracking what’s going on inside of the universities.
Hill: I want to say a couple of things in response to that. And I think one is if we know our history, which is part of the liberal arts, if we know our history, we’ll remember that public education began in part to ensure that the electorate was informed. And so this idea of connection between education and literacy and exposure to ideas and democratic participation is you know, embedded in who we are as a country here in the United States. I do agree it’s essential to a society, but if it’s so essential, maybe we shouldn’t charge so much for it. And this is back to the return on the investment, that if people are thinking about how do I make a living? — and in my research with adolescents as they’re making these decisions to go to college or not, they’re thinking about the economy. They’re thinking about the likelihood that they’re going to be able to get a job. They’re thinking about whether or not they see the economy as unstable. And so in our research, students who think that the economy is unstable, they disengage. They don’t dig in the way we think about from human capitalist theories that, you know, if the economy is bad, I’m going to go back to school. They disengage because they’re not sure that their efforts will pay off. And so then we say, how about a liberal arts education? And we haven’t made it connect to their sense of insecurity about their future. And some of my colleagues’ work show that when parents think that the economy is insecure, they become much more controlling. They become much more concerned about linking education to a future job. And so there isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy.
Deming: We’ve been talking also about the fact that more and more people are going to college and people see it as an economic necessity, and yet they’re losing confidence in it. So I take that as a political question, which is, why is it that people are so upset with higher ed or they don’t trust institutions of higher education to deliver on what they want? Which isn’t just an economic thing because clearly they’re still going, so in dollar-and-cents terms they still think it makes sense, but it’s really a question of politics and values. And so I think it’s fair, you know, for the public to say, I don’t necessarily trust an institution. We should listen to that if a bunch of people say, look, I know I have to send my kids to college but I don’t trust what’s going to happen with them when they get there. As a society and certainly not as an institution like Harvard, that wants to be seen positively by the public, I don’t think we can afford to just explain that away. I think we have to deal with it.
Laine Perfas: I want to return to something Nancy said at the beginning of the conversation and that’s that sometimes college in general, but specifically a liberal arts education, can feel like a luxury. I know for myself, I’m a first-generation college student and it was a hard road getting to college, graduating as a first-gen student without a clear roadmap, and I would love to hear all of your thoughts on how socioeconomic status, how race, class, all of these other parts of who we are, how they give us a different perspective on this issue.
Deming: It’s a loaded question. You know, Harvard educates the scions of wealthy families and titans of industry and also produces the world’s greatest scientists that develop knowledge and create vaccines that save millions of people. We contain multitudes in that way, and I think we have to recognize that in the way we talk about ourselves and in the criticisms that we receive from outside of the academy.
Siegel: We started off talking about liberal arts education in general in this sort of abstract level that I thought was very helpful. And now suddenly we’re talking about our own specific institution but, you know, if we’re asking about liberal arts in general, I don’t know if we find the kind of performative contradiction that David’s trying to point to when he says, OK, if you’re not part of the elite when you come here, you might well become it when you leave. Just because of the channels that are here, indeed, that’s why many people want to come here so that they can do that. But that’s just us, that’s nothing to do with liberal arts education in general, like Nancy was saying, and I completely agree. We can find the mode of liberal arts education in all kinds of places. Liberal arts education does not equal Ivy League education.
Deming: I do think there’s a sense in which this is the spirit of Sam’s question that the idea of studying liberal arts is a luxury for people who come from privilege, and who are able to go into jobs that are going to make them masters of the universe, so to speak, when they leave a place like Harvard. I do think if you look at the distribution of majors across colleges, liberal arts majors are more common at elite universities than non-elite universities because people who go to these non-elite universities typically go there because they want to get a good job.
Siegel: Yeah, fair enough. I guess there’s a kind of empirical and a principled way of thinking about these questions, and they’re both valuable ways of thinking about them. I was focused on the principled thing of, what would be lost with, from a liberal arts education, just abstracted from its social realization.
Hill: Yeah, I want to come back to Sam’s point about the socioeconomic status part of this. And for people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come in to any college, whether it’s a state college or two-year college or Harvard, and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas, to history, to science, to literature, and broaden their thinking. But for some, that feels risky, that they’ve got one shot. They might be the first person in their family. They might be the first person in their community, and it feels like a lot of pressure, and in our focus groups with teens who are first-generation students it feels like a lot of pressure, that they have to deliver on this opportunity that’s like winning the lottery ticket to be able to go to college. And then they have to turn around and come home and make the case that they’re majoring in philosophy, and I want them to major in philosophy and history and literature and to become thinkers. But we have to give them the language that they can go back home and say, this is why I should be studying this instead of a business degree.
Siegel: Yeah, what we always say to students, because as you can imagine, it comes up a lot in the philosophy department, where I will note that our enrollments have only grown over the past 10 years — we don’t have a crisis of the humanities in the philosophy department. We’re getting more and more concentrators all the time. And it’s because we made this concerted effort to do a lot more outreach and to explain exactly these things that you’re asking about. And one of the things we say is we talk about the communication skills that you get from being able to analyze arguments and rehearse them and put your own reactions in parentheses while you consider opposite and opposing reactions and then be able to become articulate on the page in writing about the relationship between those perspectives. The general communication skills are extremely useful. So none of this is as highfalutin’ as I was talking about before, though I stand by every highfalutin’ thing I said but in terms, if you want to actually communicate to the person, you know, right here now on the ground and say, what can I tell my parents? This is what we suggest that they tell their parents. And it seems to work because our enrollments are growing.
Laine Perfas: Before we close. I wanted to spend a little bit of time thinking about: What is the path forward for liberal arts, either in communicating its current value or evolving to better meet the needs of students today?
Hill: So often we think about [how] the college degree leads to upward mobility. We’re often, whether we say it or not, thinking in economic terms and career trajectory terms. But what does it mean to live a fulfilling life? And when I think about just the rise in mental health disorders, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and all of these things that come from the difficulties we have in connecting with each other and building community with each other, engaging people whose views are different from our own, and being willing to change our mind. And all of those things have impacts on our physical health and our mental health and well-being. And the kind of broad liberal arts education is going to enable us to connect to people across cultures, societies, backgrounds. It’s going to give us skills to deconstruct our identities and reinvent ourselves in new ways. We talk about it in our research. We see how youth come to college. They leave their home communities and they take a germ of themselves with them from those home communities and they let a lot of it go and then they reinvent themselves. We used to think people find themselves in college. They don’t find themselves in college. They learn how to reinvent themselves and rediscover themselves. And I think that is quintessential to the liberal arts education.
Deming: One thing we haven’t talked about at all is technology and how the classroom is, I think, changing in response to technology. It’s not like people couldn’t cheat on their assignments before generative AI. But now it’s just much, much easier And I think what that really says to me is that we really need to rethink how we develop student skills in the classroom through assignments. And I think there’s a real opportunity to do that. I think the liberal arts could lead the charge. Let’s design classroom-based assessments that help them do that directly. Let’s not just give them an essay and then grade it. Let’s have them give a presentation. Let’s make them try to convince somebody of a different point of view. Let’s have them work together with people and then have their peers grade how much they learned from them and things like that. I think there’s a ton of opportunity specifically in the liberal arts to design a classroom environment that is more engaging, is more adapted to new technologies, and is intellectually rigorous. I think my experience is students really respond when you do hold them to high intellectual standards. And so I think there’s an opportunity for not just the liberal arts, but anybody who really wants students to engage critically with things, to redesign their classroom in a way that’s both technologically savvy and engaging for students in this age of AI.
Hill: I totally agree. I think gone are the days of: Write an essay. And I think here are the days where we work on projects and ideas together in teams, convincing each other, debates, deliverables that apply knowledge. I love the idea of technology because I see it as an accelerator. It enables us to move to the next level more quickly. It accelerates our ability to digest and acknowledge and to think critically and to get all the ideas on the table so that we can really do what humans do best.
Siegel: I guess I will put in a good word for the essay. You can have one of your assignments be to write an essay. That’s not at all at odds with a lot of cooperative work or working in groups. I think definitely a both-and situation, when it comes to writing things. I think that’s actually a very important skill I wouldn’t want to lose. But absolutely the model where you’re just kind of, let me impart my information to you, that’s what I would leave behind, you know, hist and lit. The institution, and the classroom, it needs those students. We need everybody, it enriches the institution to have people there. That’s a very powerful message that I think can be empowering for the students as well.
Deming: Thank you all for joining me today. My pleasure.
Siegel: It’s a great conversation. Thank you.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to find links to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Robert Rosenthal was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Robert Rosenthal, one of the most influential psychologists of the past 60 years, died on Jan. 5, 2024, in Riverside, California. He was 90 years old. Rosenthal conducted landmark social psychology experiments on interpersonal expectancy effects, which showed that people can unwittingly convey how they expect others to behave, thereby subtly inducing them to act in accordance with expectation. Such effects, he found, occur with teachers, supervisors, and psychotherapists with their pupils, employees, and patients. He was also a major contributor to statistical and methodological advances in the behavioral sciences.
Rosenthal was born in Giessen, Germany, on March 2, 1933, and was the son of Hermine (Kahn) and Julius Rosenthal. He spent his early years in the town of Limburg, where his father co-owned a dry goods factory. The factory was seized by the Nazis in 1938, and the Rosenthal family fled to Cologne, seeking to conceal their Jewish identity in the anonymity of the big city. Although they had obtained a quota number enabling them to immigrate to America, someone stole it. Fortunately, Julius Rosenthal’s brothers were living in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. They helped the family escape to Africa, obtain a visa, and then settle in New York City in 1940.
Julius Rosenthal moved his family from Queens to Los Angeles, where he opened a department store and where Robert Rosenthal finished his final year of high school. Robert Rosenthal then enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in psychology. He received his B.A. in 1953 while also taking graduate courses in clinical psychology, enabling him to obtain his Ph.D. in 1956. After completing his clinical training, he was appointed Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, and became the Director of clinical training in the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at the University of North Dakota, where he taught for five years. He spent the next 37 years at Harvard University, first as a lecturer on clinical psychology and then as a professor of social psychology. He chaired the Department of Psychology (1992–1995) and was appointed Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology (1995–1999). He retired from Harvard and began working for the University of California, Riverside, in 1999, where he was Distinguished Professor and University Professor until his retirement in 2018.
Although trained as a clinician, Rosenthal’s research soon evolved in the direction of social psychology. In the 1960s, he and Kermit Fode discovered the Experimenter Bias Effect. In one study, he informed student experimenters that one group of rats had been bred to be very proficient at learning to navigate mazes, whereas another group had not. Although both groups were indistinguishable, the “maze-bright” rats outperformed the “maze-dull” ones, apparently because students unintentionally handled them especially well. Rosenthal’s work on the Experimenter Bias Effect encouraged psychologists to conduct their experiments in a double-blind fashion whereby neither the subjects nor the assistants testing them were aware of the hypothesis under test.
Pygmalion in the Classroom was among his most famous experiments, conducted with Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal. They told teachers that the (bogus!) Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition had revealed that certain students, but not others, were about to exhibit a growth spurt in measurable intelligence over the course of the school year. Follow-up intelligence tests indicated that students whose teachers expected intellectual growth did, in fact, exhibit an increase in measured IQ greater than did students whose teachers had no such expectation of them. Apparently, teachers favorably interacted with the students whom they expected to excel, thereby encouraging the very progress supposedly forecast by the test.
Rosenthal also made many contributions to the related field of nonverbal behavior. In 1993 Nalini Ambady and Rosenthal won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Prize for Behavioral Science Research for their work on thin slices of behavior. They found that brief — usually less than one minute — slices of audiotaped or videotaped expressive behavior (e.g., manners of speaking, gestures, and facial expressions) enabled raters to make judgments regarding a person’s competence, likability, and other attributes that were as accurate at predicting, for example, a person’s success as a teacher as comprehensive student evaluations. Brief audiotapes of physicians interacting with their patients distinguished those who had been sued versus those who had not.
In parallel with his work in social psychology, Rosenthal published many articles and books on statistics and methodology. Often collaborating with Donald B. Rubin or Ralph L. Rosnow, he was instrumental in developing meta-analysis, a procedure for summarizing the results of many studies. As co-chair of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Task Force on Statistical Inference, he helped shape guidelines for best practices, such as focused contrast analyses and effect size estimation.
Rosenthal was the recipient of many honors, including the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (1996), the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society (2001), and the Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the APA’s Division 5 (Quantitative and Qualitative Methods) (2002). He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen in 2003, 70 years after he was born at the university’s medical center.
Rosenthal’s wife of 59 years, Marylu (Clayton), passed away in 2010. He is survived by his daughters, Virginia (Ginny) Rosenthal Mahasin and Roberta Rosenthal Hawkins; his son, David Clayton Rosenthal; and six grandchildren.
Rosenthal was a wonderful colleague and the beloved mentor of many students. His personal warmth, kindness, and ever-smiling, down-to-earth manner were as memorable as his curiosity, enthusiasm, and brilliance.
Respectfully submitted,
Jill M. Hooley Ellen J. Langer Mark F. Lenzenweger (Binghamton University) Donald B. Rubin Richard J. McNally, Chair
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late David Gordon Mitten was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Have you seen the Attic black-figure vase in the Harvard Art Museums depicting Herakles playing the kithara and coping with his lionskin at the same time? Or the early Byzantine weighing machine, with its bust-shaped weight depicting an empress? Or the medallion portrait of the comic playwright Menander, uniquely inscribed in antiquity with his name and, therefore, invaluable for identifying uninscribed copies elsewhere? If so, you owe the fascination of seeing these objects at Harvard to David Gordon Mitten, curator, teacher, and archaeologist.
Mitten was born in Youngstown, Ohio. New World archaeology at the University of New Mexico and in the Smithsonian Institution’s River Basin Surveys provided his early training in fieldwork. In 1957 he was awarded his B.A. in Classics at Oberlin College and, in 1962, his Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology at Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career. His participation in the University of Chicago’s Isthmia excavations in Greece yielded his doctoral dissertation on the terracotta figurines from the Isthmian sanctuary of Poseidon, which he wrote under the direction of George Hanfmann. As an excavator, Mitten’s most significant contribution was the discovery of a synagogue from the Roman era at Sardis, the capital of the fabled kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia, where the Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis started annual excavation in 1958. He was an associate director of the Sardis excavation for 40 years.
Upon completion of his Ph.D., Mitten was appointed Instructor in the Fine Arts and, in 1964, Francis Jones Assistant Professor of Classical Art. In 1968 he was appointed associate professor with tenure (a short-lived concept at Harvard), and, the following year, he received a full professorship as the James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in the Department of the Classics. In 1974, succeeding his teacher and mentor, he was appointed Curator of Ancient Art; in 1996, to his humble delight, the position was endowed as the George M. A. Hanfmann Curatorship of Ancient Art.
Until his retirement from the curatorship in 2005, an occasion on which he was celebrated at an international symposium of friends, colleagues, and former students, Mitten acquired a rich array of ancient objects in all media for Harvard, especially bronzes and coins but also marble sculptures and pottery. In 2010 he retired from his professorial chair, having taught generations of students — in the Harvard Divinity School, where he offered a renowned seminar on the archaeology of the New Testament with Helmut Koester; the Division of Continuing Education; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and, with special enthusiasm, Harvard College, where his course Images of Alexander the Great was a legend in the Core Curriculum.
Mitten’s major contributions in print comprise two catalogs, “Master Bronzes from the Classical World,” co-edited with Suzannah Doeringer and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from Harvard in 1967–68 to the City Art Museum of St. Louis and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and “The Gods Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze,” co-edited with Arielle P. Kozloff and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1988–89 to, once again, the Los Angeles County Museum and then to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His special interest in bronzes left Harvard a legacy of important acquisitions, including small objects of personal attire (fibulae, the ancient equivalent of the safety pin) and some larger pieces ranging from elegant Picasso-esque figures of the Greek Geometric period to a Roman statuette of a goddess wearing a bird-shaped headdress.
Mitten’s love of ancient objects benefited not only the Harvard Art Museums, through 30 years of passionate curatorial acquisition, but also generations of students, whom he charmed and enthused with hands-on demonstration of the intricacies of craftsmanship residing in the humblest of objects. Far from protecting these pieces from the hazards of human touch, he would hand round gloves at the beginning of every class and teach his students how handling an object is key to understanding it. He believed in the capacity of fragments to tease students’ imagination and test their connoisseurship, and, alongside glamorous purchases like an Etruscan black-figure amphora depicting the ambush of the Trojan hero Troilus by Achilles, he created a valuable teaching tool by gathering ostensibly trivial fragments of red- and black-figure pottery. Intermittently during his career, he published articles on objects in Harvard’s collections, thereby making them known beyond the confines of the Yard.
Just as Mitten could make an inert object come alive as he cradled it in the palm of his hand or held it up to the light to illustrate a particular swirl of drapery or carefully shaped lock of hair, so, too, could he enthrall an audience with tales of excavating at Sardis or a detective story tracing the pedigree of a new acquisition. He took an intense interest in other people, both their dreams and their challenges, and sought opportunities to further their ambitions. The legacy of his passion for ancient coins was secured with the appointment of Harvard’s first curator of coins, Dr. Carmen Arnold-Biucchi, in 2002. Students of the civilizations adjacent to Greece and Rome also benefited from acquisitions that he made, such as two groups of cylinder seals intricately carved in Mesopotamia long before the Greeks and Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean world.
Mitten was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1976, the Petra Shattuck Teaching Prize from the Harvard Extension School in 1988, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1993. In 2009 he received the Faculty of the Year Award from the Harvard Foundation. Having accepted Islam during his excavations at Sardis in 1969, he became a faculty advisor to the Harvard Islamic Society; he practiced Sufism and frequently delivered the homily at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel. He is survived by his wife Heather Barney; two daughters from his first marriage, Claudia Hon and Eleanor Mitten; his stepdaughter, Sophia Barney-Farrar; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Daniel Albright was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Daniel Albright, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard from 2003 until his untimely death at the age of 69, was a prolific and ingenious analyst of literary modernism, lyric poetry, the challenging early 20th-century intersections of music, science, literature, and art, and the larger theory of aestheticism across the arts. His 16 books, along with his amusing and wide-ranging lecture courses on modernism at Harvard and his always warm and lively conversational manner, defined a place where learning, whimsy, a photographic memory, amusing side glances, a drawling eloquence, mischievous formulations, exact timing, and theatrical pauses delighted his listeners and readers while offering a precise and detailed analytic account of those moments of aesthetic experience that define our personal and exhilarating encounters with works of art.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on Oct. 29, 1945, Albright attended Rice University, where he majored in mathematics until he switched abruptly to English literature. At Yale University, he completed his Ph.D. in three years with a thesis on the poetry of William Butler Yeats. His first book, “The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination in Old Age,” was published at once by Oxford University Press. After Yale, Albright taught for 17 years at the University of Virginia, where he was promoted to full professor and published five books on lyric theory, Yeats, Tennyson, and the modernism of Thomas Mann, Beckett, Nabokov, Schoenberg, and Woolf. While at Virginia, Albright married Karin Larson, with whom he had a son, Christopher.
In the middle third of his academic career, Albright taught for 16 years at the University of Rochester with an affiliate appointment in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. While at Rochester, his many publications on music and the relations between early 20th-century modernism in music and literature began his search for a wider aesthetics of modernism across the arts.
Once at Harvard, the final third of Albright’s career unfolded. In his later books, he developed a theory that he called panaesthetics, a challenge to the notion that each art has not only a specific medium but also unique limits and central preoccupations. Albright’s popular General Education course, Putting Modernism Together, reflected the expanding vision of this phase of his career.
In Albright’s many books, lectures, and articles, he developed a broad interdisciplinary account of modernism, while setting that interest within his account of a lyric tradition that includes Yeats, Tennyson, and the larger theory of lyric poetry. He situated literary modernism within early 20th-century music and science, above all within music because both its lyricism and its experiments with form provided strong analogues with literary modernism.
As a literary and musical interpreter, Albright is characterized by a demonic attentiveness, by learning, by a fanciful mind, and by brilliant writing. Drawn to the artistic extremity of Schoenberg, Beckett, and Nabokov or the collaborative work of Gertrude Stein, Albright took modernism to require, in part, difficulty, and he saw that it involved elaborate and playful engagement with language. His was an empirical, speculative, text-based criticism.
Albright’s first book on Yeats’s imagination in old age could not, with all its attention to the language of poetry and myth, have predicted his second, two-part project on modernism: “Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, Mann” and “Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov, and Schoenberg.” Each of these books set out to isolate a core feature of representation within modernity. In “Representation,” Albright, in his always paradoxical way, worked out the costs of creating an extreme fictive world, an abstract world established by means of the details of the real, a collapsing project always pushed too far in order to work at all. The earlier book on expression and personality started from the opposite direction, studying fictive worlds that express the writer’s personality and biography by means of the central figure of the artist. Here too Albright worked in the direction of paradox since each of these three careers required a swerve into the abstract, the allegorical, and the impersonal after a certain exhaustion of the artistic resources of personality.
Albright’s work in the second half of his career moved this ambition to a larger terrain. Literary modernism itself is now configured and expressed through the competing and companionable modernisms of art, music, and science. These ambitions define Albright’s two major mid-career books “Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism” and “Untwisting the Serpent,” his first attempts at large-scale aesthetics of modernism across the arts. Albright resisted Lessing’s strong argument for the separation of powers within the different domains of art in order to isolate, for our attention, small-scale shared aesthetic features common in the 20th century to music, drama, poetry, and opera. Gestus, or gesture, is one of those small aesthetic units. Opera — with its ambition to unify all of the arts within a performance where words, music, gesture, presence, story, and the visual effects of costume and spectacle are all drawn together — is certainly at the heart of Albright’s idea of the dream of modernism.
From Albright’s earliest work on Yeats to his all-embracing final work on panaesthetics, his career was that of a pathbreaker who moved on to ever newer enlargements of the domain within which we pose our questions about the central works and artists of modernism and its aftermath.
Albright was named a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1973, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1976, and a Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2012. He died suddenly on Jan. 3, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is survived by his domestic partner, Marta S. Rivera Monclova; his son, Christopher Albright; and his ex-wife, Karin.
Albright will be remembered for a style that is that of an aesthete: savoring words, ideas, juxtapositions, and the discoveries of his own brilliant mind and polymath learning. Uniqueness, a rich, high style, a challenging comedy of intellect in the manner of Nabokov, a seriousness about beauty and invention — these are the traits that defined Albright’s intellectual performance.
Respectfully submitted,
John T. Hamilton Christopher Hasty Elaine Scarry Philip Fisher, Chair
Diving into the myths and legends behind sea monsters
Sampling of species from the “Sea Monsters” exhibition include a musky octopus, white shark jaw, and fangtooth fish.
Video and photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Bethany Carland-Adams
HMSC Communications
5 min read
New exhibit lets visitors discover sea creatures often more astonishing than the fantastical beings we may have imagined
The idea of sea monsters has captivated us for centuries. Could there really be something scary lurking in the dark depths? Folklore and popular culture say yes, yet science urges us to dive a little deeper.
“Sea Monsters: Wonders of Nature and Imagination” is a new exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, one of the four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, which investigates the mystery and lore behind some of the ocean’s most fascinating creatures. It was inspired by a popular course taught by Peter Girguis, guest curator and Harvard professor of organic and evolutionary biology.
“This course is really a survey of humankind’s relationship with the ocean, from ancient mariners to current political affairs,” he said. “What’s been most rewarding is seeing the students realize how important the ocean is to humanity and how we often apply monstrosity to things we simply don’t understand.”
Sea monsters are a universal phenomenon, appearing in the myths and legends of cultures around the world. However, many of these exciting stories come from real creatures hidden in the deep. In the exhibition, visitors will ask themselves: Do sea monsters exist? And if so, what do they tell us about ourselves and our connection with the ocean?
Ancient mythology depicts the sea as a realm of chaos, filled with fearsome creatures like the Greek Hydra. Hindu mythology conjured the Makara, a sea monster that symbolizes protection and good fortune. In African folklore, creatures like the Mngwa and the Inkanyamba are feared as evil water spirits. However, with modern science and technologies, we better understand the lives of the real creatures behind these legends. For instance, the New England-based Scituate Sea Monster was ultimately identified as a decaying basking shark; the Kraken in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” is likely the enigmatic deep-sea giant squid.
Harvard Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Peter Girguis visits the exhibit “Sea Monsters: Wonders of Nature and Imagination” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
Visitors will discover the existence of sea creatures whose real lives are often more astonishing than the fantastical beings we may have imagined. Visitors can see these creatures firsthand when peering into displays of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s extensive collections, such as a viperfish, the tentacle and beak of a giant squid, and a Megalodon shark tooth.
The exhibition features historical illustrations of these fabled monsters and detailed ancient mariners’ maps. Ancient maps held important cultural knowledge, often revealed through depictions of mythological creatures that served as warnings of dangerous and uncharted waters. Also on display is a Peruvian ceramic pot made by the ancient Moche people, which shows a crab with human-like features losing a battle with a god. A two-foot Gregorian reflecting telescope made around 1750, decorated with two sea serpents, also appears in the gallery.
Sloane’s viperfish, courtesy of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.
Tentacles and teeth are frequently associated with monsters of the sea. In reality, tentacles are important and adaptable tools used to sense the environment, catch food, and for protection. Surprisingly, the viperfish’s needle-like fangs feel more like toothbrush bristles than daggers. And while the deep-sea anglerfish may look scary, most are just a few inches long and only eat small fish and shrimp. Many of these creatures are captured in eerie and stunning deep-sea photography by Solvin Zankl and others.
The exhibition explores how ocean ecosystems are threatened by creatures such as the crown-of-thorns starfish which feeds on coral polyps and Sargassum seaweed which is growing out of control in some places due to agricultural-nutrient runoff, creating dead zones in the ocean and overwhelming beaches. Even more monstrous than these invaders are the pressures we humans place on the ocean. Plastic pollution and human-influenced climate change are endangering marine life and ecosystems. These are the real sea monsters and the exhibition shows that we have the chance to work toward sustainable solutions that protect our oceans for future generations.
The exhibition is open to the public through June 26, 2026.
Detail of Islandia (1595) Map of Iceland from a 1595 edition of Abraham Ortelius’ atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Courtesy of the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
Girguis shares information on two illustrations with captions that read: “Gustave Dore’s illustration for Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem ‘Orlando Furioso’ shows a knight fighting a monstrous sea creature” and “Victor Nehlig (1830-1909) was a French painter known for his dramatic and narrative scenes. This illustration shows a giant squid attacking a boat, depicting the dangerous encounter between humans and a sea monster, with the crew fighting for their lives.”
Young visitors from the community. Coral and Alexander Ain. watch a projection of the film “Jaws” within the exhibit.
Literary volumes of Homer’s “Odyssey” and Melville’ “Moby Dick” are on display.
Girguis speaks about a display of sea monster drawings.
A collection of maps used for navigation, including a map of Cape Cod (1926) created by Mélanie Elizabeth Leonard of Massachusetts, are on display. Courtesy of the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard Library.
Harvard Powwow brings together Native students, family, friends
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
The 26th annual Harvard Powwow was a family affair for renowned American Indian scholar Tink Tinker of Osage County and his great-niece Lena Tinker ’25, Osage Nation.
“I so appreciate Lena. I’ve watched her grow up,” he said. “We knew when you were little that you were smart. Now you’re almost a Harvard graduate.”
Lena smiled as she remembered her uncle supporting her decision to come to Harvard. “Now getting to have him here my senior year is very special,” she said. “It’s good to have family here.”
Despite the generational differences, the Tinkers were happy to connect with other Natives at the Sept. 28 gathering. “I like the element of thinking back on the powwow history that we have in this country as this place where we come together to gather in community,” Lena said about this year’s theme, “In My Powwow Era.”
Lena Tinker ’25 makes a ribbon skirt for the powwow.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Tink, a professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology, attended the powwow ahead of the first of four trips to campus as visiting Indigenous Spiritual Leader. The four-week residency, part of a collaboration between the Memorial Church and the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), will see Tink working with students, collaborating with faculty and staff, and publicly presenting his work.
“It feels good,” he said of the powwow. “It feels like Indian Country. For me, coming from Denver and being Osage from Oklahoma, I’m hooking up with relatives here. I can hear their voices at the microphone and in the songs. I can see them in their dance steps.”
Following in her great uncle’s service-driven footsteps, Lena has been an active member of the Native community on campus. As a first-year, she joined Natives at Harvard College (NaHC) and now serves as co-president of the student group.
“My first memory of meeting Native people on campus was on the steps of Widener Library on a beautiful, sunny day,” she said. “I remember that first year wondering what the Native community was like here and slowly getting to meet everyone over the course of my four years here.
HUNAP hosted a community building event that included a friendship bracelet-making session.
Photo by Jodi Hilton
Catherine Dondero puts the finishing touches on her ribbon skirt.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“For a lot of us, NaHC is home on this campus and those people are like family. It’s a space that feels special and different from anywhere else at the University,” she added.
While reflecting on their favorite memories of the student group, Lena and classmates brought up those who had graduated, affectionally called their NaHC elders. “We hold that memory in the stories we share with each other on campus,” she said.
Karen Medina-Perez ’24, who has ancestral connections to the Lambayeque and Caxamarca region in the Andes and Afro-Indigenous ancestry from Aroa, Yaracuy, is one such NaHC elder who returned for the powwow to reconnect with old friends and “celebrate our existence.”
In the days leading up to the powwow, HUNAP hosted several community-building events. Students gathered to work on regalia, specifically ribbon shirts and skirts, friendship bracelets, and even took lessons on social dancing from Kabl Wilkerson of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a doctoral candidate in the History Department.
For the elder Tinker, the power of powwows is their ability to bridge the gap among generations of Native people. “That’s the Indian world,” he said. “Far back as I can remember, the social event meant all generations were present, from the littlest to the oldest, and especially the in-betweens.”
“Harvard Powwow is a moment for our community to come together and celebrate,” said Jordan Clark of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, acting executive director of HUNAP. “When we think of community that word is all-encompassing. It spans the University, the region, and generations.”
A photographer who makes historical subjects dance
Wendel White manifests the impetus behind his new monograph during Harvard talk
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
“I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains,” said Wendel White.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
For more than 30 years, photographer Wendel White has dedicated his craft to documenting Black lives throughout American history. In his latest project, “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies,” White turned his lens to African American materials held in collections throughout the 13 original U.S. colonies.
Among White’s 235 subjects are hair clippings from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Civil War-era brogan-style shoe, as well as photographs, diaries, and documents.
He came across the Civil War-era leather and wood-soled shoe at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. While the shoe does not have a known connection with Black or white individuals, White said it made him realize how his work is not “really just about Black life, but how Black life is defined by virtual whiteness.” The collection in North Carolina held particular significance for White, who shared that his great-grandfather escaped enslavement and joined the Union Army in North Carolina.
Brenda Tindal, chief campus curator, contributed an essay to White’s book.
In an intimate conversation with curators and scholars of Black history and visual arts on Sept. 26, White launched his new monograph, “Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies,” which accompanies his exhibition at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.
“I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains,” White said. “The ability of objects to transcend the moment suggests a remarkable mechanism for golden time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space.
“These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States,” he continued. “The photographs form a reliquary and a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory.”
Faculty of Arts and Sciences chief campus curator Brenda Tindal, who moderated the conversation at the Geological Lecture Hall and contributed an essay to White’s book, kicked off the hourlong discussion by crediting the photographer for helping to inform and visualize Black history and culture.
“I’ve been sitting with this work for several months, and in some ways, this tome has become a bit of a prism through which the identity and the quotidian contours of Black life and culture come into such sharp relief,” Tindal said.
White and Tindal, who was recently appointed co-chair of the memorial committee for the Harvard & Legacy of Slavery Initiative, were joined by fellow contributors Cheryl Finley, Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective; Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley; and Deborah Willis, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
While the conversation largely focused on White’s latest project, audiences also learned about his process and attention to detail. Raiford said she was struck by “the way the objects are made to dance” in White’s photography and “the way that they’re held in this warm light that reminds us to have a certain kind of reference for the past and for history.” It was a sentiment echoed by fellow panelists, who praised White for his ability to help viewers reimagine the lives of Black people in the past.
“There seems to be this really sort of subjective narration of Black culture and life, and it’s often through this very narrow contour from slavery to segregation to civil rights. That narrative really situates Black life and culture within this really over-determined domain of struggle,” Tindal said, before asking the panel how archives of African American material culture in public collections help transform the historical perception and understanding of Black history.
Willis pointed to how White frames objects in his project to help uncover stories about love, protection, and respect, and thus move away from the narrow view of Black history.
Special attention was also given to White’s artistic choice to blur part of his photographs. While many of the objects photographed for the project sharply contrast to the black velvet they are placed on, certain areas of each item are blurred.
“One of the things that was helpful for me is that I felt like the blur held back some of the violence of the archives,” said Tracey Hucks, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, from the audience.
White began this project in 2021, after being named a Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. The Peabody grants the annual fellowship to a photographer to document the human condition around the world. Forty-six images of White’s latest work are on display at the Peabody in an exhibition through April 13, 2025.
Harvard community members, some holding signs calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas, gathered on the steps of Widener Library Monday evening during a memorial vigil co-hosted by Harvard Chabad and Harvard Hillel. The event was held to “honor those lost and stand together in solidarity, unity, and hope” on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Speakers offered prayers and shared stories about friends who perished or were taken hostage. Some sang songs in memory of lost loved ones. The names of all the hostages were read.
Participants called for the release of hostages held by Hamas.
Harvard Professor Eric Nelson speaks to the crowd.
Some in the crowd shared personal stories of friends lost in the attack.
Harvard President Alan Garber was among those attending the vigil.
Kennedy School scholars examine spread of Gaza war to include Hezbollah, Iran
A year ago, a terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas sparked the war in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and recently begun to spread to Lebanon and Iran. What happens next?
Scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School came together Monday to discuss the risks of further escalation in the Middle East in a panel led by Meghan O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS.
“It is a day of remembrance for many who lost loved ones a year ago today in the terrorist attacks by Hamas and those who lost loved ones in the many, many deaths that have occurred since that time,” said O’Sullivan, who is also Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. “It’s a day of mourning for many people who are still losing members of their families and loved ones.”
A major point of discussion revolved around the role of Iran, a longtime opponent of Israel, in the ongoing conflict. Last week, Iran launched a major ballistic missile attack on Israel — only the second time the country has been directly attacked by Iran. Iranian officials said the action was in retaliation for the killing of a Hamas leader by Israel in Tehran in July. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the death.
The missile attack was widely viewed as an escalation between Israel and Iran, which has long actively supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and smaller militant groups in the West Bank in conflicts with Israel.
“We’re facing a Middle Eastern crisis,” said O’Sullivan, who served in the George W. Bush administration as deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. “We have moved away from a decade-long war between Israel and Iran by proxy to a place where now Israel and Iran are in conflict with each other directly.”
The panel featured Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and current a senior fellow at Harvard’s Middle East Institute; Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli entrepreneur and former peace negotiator under Prime Minister Ehud Barak; Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Omar H. Rahman, senior fellow with the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
For more than an hour, the panelists discussed Israel’s strategy as the dominant military power in the region, Iran’s involvement, and what America’s role is — and may become.
“What [Israel] has done in terms of degrading Hamas’ capabilities and decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership, these, in my eyes, are brilliant tactical victories,” Djerejian said. “But what about the day after?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his goals are to demilitarize and de-radicalize the opposition in Gaza, but his actions don’t align with those aims, Djerejian said.
“He’s defined the Israeli military movements in Lebanon to change the balance of power on the northern border of Israel. But these are not a strategy. These are mostly tactics without resolving the key issues.”
Rahman was tougher in his assessment of Israel’s actions.
“You’re creating a bottomless pit of despair, trauma, anguish, anger, all the things that will feed the resistance for generations,” he said of the situation in Gaza. “And so Hamas is not going anywhere as an organization. Hezbollah is not going anywhere as an organization.”
He argued that the U.S., which has provided almost $18 billion in aid to Israel in the last year, must reconsider its role in the conflict.
“Does America want to continue underwriting an indefinite Israeli war on the region? Is that something we want to do with our taxpayer money and our support at the cost of our national interest, our credibility, on the international stage?” he said.
Grinstein said that the conflict could end immediately if Hamas were to surrender.
“I do want to say and acknowledge that our tragedy creates a challenge of compassion,” he said. “To look at the other side and feel their tragedy as well, because there is an unimaginable tragedy happening in Gaza. Here could be an easy solution for this war, which is for Hamas leadership to leave Gaza and end the war.”
As for the likelihood of Iran relenting, Sadjadpour said that it’s unlikely.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to see meaningful peace and stability in the entire Middle East until you have a government in Iran, I won’t say democratic, but whose organizing principle is not the revolutionary ideology of 1979 but the national interest of Iran.”
For more information, including a transcript of the event, visit the Belfer Center website.
“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. Take a look, it’s in a book, a Reading Rainbow!” the crowd sang amid applause for the beloved host of the PBS series “Reading Rainbow” that ran from 1983 until 2006. The iconic actor, director, producer, podcaster, and education advocate is also widely known for his roles as Geordi La Forge in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and Kunta Kinte in “Roots.”
Burton beamed as he soaked in the audience’s adoration at the Oct. 1 ceremony and took a moment to honor his mother, Erma Gene Christian, for the influence she had on his education. The actor went on to invoke Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. “I am, by definition, a storyteller,” he said. “I am a storyteller, walking in the tradition of storytellers that have informed and enlightened humanity since before the spoken language.”
The Kuumba Singers perform during the ceremony at Sanders Theatre.
While sharing his appreciation for the award, Burton also thanked Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center, for his “eminent wisdom and patience.” He continued: “You have changed my life and the way I see myself as a citizen of this country.”
The W.E.B. Du Bois Medal is the highest honor given in the field of African and African American Studies at Harvard.
“We come together today to honor those who embody the goals of unifying rather than dividing, respecting rather than disparaging, engaging thoughtfully rather than dismissing out of hand,” Gates said. “Each year here in glorious Sanders Theatre, we honor profound contributions to Black society and culture with the distinguished Du Bois event named in honor of Harvard’s first Black Ph.D.”
Along with Burton, medalists included former Harvard women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith; director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem Thelma Golden; African entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa; civil rights advocate and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, J.D. ’84; and the human-rights and environmental activist Vice President of Colombia Francia Elena Márquez Mina. Special readings from Du Bois’ work were given by Provost John F. Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, and Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Previously announced recipients filmmaker, writer, producer, and professor Spike Lee and musician, songwriter, producer and actor Ice T were unable to attend the event but sent their regrets.
Vice President of Colombia Francia Elena Márquez Mina with Glenn H. Hutchins (from left), Alejandro De La Fuente, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Civil rights advocate and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Hutchins (from left), former Harvard women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, Gov. Maura Healey, and Gates.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey ’92 joined the event to help present the award to Delaney-Smith, who coached Healey during her undergraduate years in the College.
“One of the things that W.E.B. Du Bois said was, ‘Young people learn more from what you are than what you teach.’ I think Kathy Delaney-Smith embodies that statement,” Healey said. The governor shared Delaney-Smith’s many accolades while highlighting her work as a “force for positive social change.”
At the age of 21, Delaney-Smith began working as the girls’ basketball coach at Westwood High School and saw firsthand the inequities that existed in girls’ and women’s sports. In response, she began filing lawsuits under Title IX to get what her team needed. She continued her tireless work at Harvard.
Fellow honoree Crenshaw, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, was welcomed back to Harvard for her impactful work. Crenshaw is credited with being a founder of critical race theory and popularizing the theory of intersectionality.
“I am overwhelmed with pride to accept this medal from the Hutchins Center, from my alma mater, and from Skip Gates,” she said. “It’s exceptionally meaningful for any race scholar to see one’s own name in the same sentence as the foremost scholar, activist of the 20th century, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois.”
Márquez Mina, an activist and lawyer who became Colombia’s first female vice president of African descent, was celebrated as the first Du Bois Medal recipient from Latin America.
In a speech delivered in Spanish, the Colombian vice president recognized Gates for strengthening “the heritage that we are building in Colombia,” and Alejandro De La Fuente, the director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, for playing a fundamental role in shaping the agenda of people of African descent in the Americas in the struggle for social justice.
Past honorees include basketball Hall of Famer, activist, and writer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (2022), hip-hop artist and actor Queen Latifah (2019), boxer and activist Muhammad Ali (2015), and Civil Rights activist and longtime Congressman John Lewis (2014).
Professor Gary Ruvkun answers multiple phone calls following the announcement.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Harvard scientist Gary Ruvkun awarded medicine prize for microRNA insights. ‘My ignorance is bliss,’ he says.
Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Mass General researcher, was the center of attention Monday among Harvard and hospital colleagues after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his role in the discovery of microRNA.
Ruvkun, who shared the prize with his longtime collaborator Victor Ambros, formerly of Harvard and today a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, waved to fellow researchers and cracked a few jokes during a news conference at Mass General, not too far away from his lab at the Richard B. Simches Research Center.
“It’s been a good morning,” he said.
Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, in 1952, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982, and became a principal investigator at Mass General and at the Medical School in 1985. Ruvkun and Ambros were Harvard colleagues when they began to collaborate on studies of the role played by two genes, lin-4 and lin-14, in regulating abnormal development in the roundworm C. elegans.
In work conducted at Harvard and published in 1993, Ambros cloned C. elegans’ lin-4 gene and found that it did not code for a protein, as most other genes did. Instead, it encoded a very small strand of RNA, just 22 bases long. Next, Ruvkun discovered a tiny RNA string with the ability to bind to lin-14’s messenger RNA, large molecules that carry genetic information from the gene to the cell’s ribosome, where the information gets translated into protein. By disrupting this process, the microRNA disrupted the gene’s expression and affected development.
Seven years later, Ruvkun’s lab found a second microRNA, called let-7, that also blocks the expression of its target gene, again altering development. But it was the subsequent discovery of let-7 in a range of living things, from worms to fish to humans, that illustrated that its role is fundamental enough that it has been conserved over millions of years of evolution. That finding sparked an explosion of interest in the role of microRNA in regulating development. Today, more than 1,000 human genes for microRNA have been discovered. These genes play roles in normal and abnormal development and in heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions.
Ruvkun received the call informing him of the prize at 5:30 a.m. Monday
“The phone rang and we don’t get middle-of-the-night phone calls,” he said. “We answered it and it was the secretary of the Nobel committee and it sounded real. We’ve received awards for this and it’s always been wonderful. It’s a big deal.”
During the news conference, Ruvkun thanked Mass General for supporting his work and that of other microbiologists. Even after 40 years, there’s no end in sight to his research, he said. C. elegans has some 20,000 genes. There are thousands he knows nothing about.
“The surprises are what keep you young in science and I’m constantly surprised,” Ruvkun said. “My ignorance is bliss.”
Harvard President Alan M. Garber extended his congratulations to the new Nobel laureates, praising their pioneering research.
“Nobody who knows Gary or his work could be surprised by this recognition for his research on microRNA,” he said. “A brilliant investigator, his curiosity has led him to one remarkable insight into fundamental biology after another. The implications of discoveries like Gary’s and Victor’s aren’t always obvious at the outset. With promising medical applications of microRNA research on the horizon, we are reminded — again — that basic research can lead to dramatic progress in addressing human diseases.”
Speakers at the news conference celebrated Ruvkun’s achievement and, like Garber, noted that his work demonstrates the power of basic science.
“We celebrate with the entire world your incredible achievements — we celebrate the power of science, the power of brilliant minds,” said David Brown, president of academic medical centers for Mass General Brigham and the Mass General Trustees Professor of Emergency Medicine at HMS. “I’m thrilled to welcome you as Nobel laureate Dr. Gary Ruvkun — and that has a nice ring to it. Dr. Ruvkun and his colleagues have pushed the boundaries of science on our understanding of life on this planet.”
Dean George Q. Daley of the Medical School echoed Brown’s praise.
“The revelation of microRNA regulation is absolutely a shining example of how curiosity driven research can be turned into actionable knowledge that will advance human health for the betterment of humanity,” he said.
Wang Dongling poses after performing a piece titled “Flying Flowers and Scattered Snow: Wang Dongling’s Calligraphy of Su Dongpo’s West Lake Poems.”
Photos by Jodi Hilton
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Calligrapher Wang Dongling creates piece with ‘chaotic script’ before Harvard Art Museums audience
At first it looked almost as if Wang Dongling was sweeping the floor with one hand, using a brush about a yard long. The graceful strokes trailed compacted, staccato black lines and sweeping curves on a rectangular white sheet the size of a living-room rug.
The artist, dressed in black, his dark hair collar-length with streaks of gray, has been creating large-scale calligraphic works for decades. On Friday, in front of an eager crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Harvard Art Museums, he did it again in “Flying Flowers and Scattered Snow: Wang Dongling’s Calligraphy of Su Dongpo’s West Lake Poems.”
Drawn with calligraphy ink on paper, Dongling uses his own brand of “chaotic script” (luan shu 亂書) to reproduce ancient texts “that have been written down thousands of times before,” Sarah Laursen, the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art at the Harvard Art Museums said.
His style, she said, “could be seen as a descendant of the ‘wild cursive script’ of the Tang dynasty. However, he also draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, choosing to layer his characters on top of each other, and integrating physical performance into his practice — elements that have never been used in combination before.”
At Harvard, Dongling recreated the “West Lake” poems of Chinese poet, calligrapher, and essayist Su Dongpo. The poems depict the ornate scenery of the lake located in Hangzhou, China.
“He’s bringing that experience of his hometown, through these poems, all the way with him to Harvard.”
Shining (Christina) Sun
“It’s in the city where he has lived for decades,” said Shining (Christina) Sun, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Sun is part of the team that helped organize Wang’s visit and served as his translator on campus.
“He’s bringing that experience of his hometown, through these poems, all the way with him to Harvard,” she said.
Onlookers gathered on both the ground and balcony levels to watch Dongling in action. Making swooping, inky strokes, the almost 80-year-old artist got lost in the work — placing characters in a way that looked almost predetermined, despite the improvisational nature of his process.
“He’s really focused when he does it,” Sun said. “He can either do it in isolated tranquility or among a huge crowd. But there’s an atmospheric interplay always going on.”
Dongling, through Sun, recounted a recent performance at the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He said he totally blocked out the crowd and forgot anyone was watching until people started clapping.
That seemed to happen with the Harvard spectators as well, who watched intently through the nearly 30-minute performance. Polite applause broke out after the artist announced he was finished.
“He actually has works where he uses Virtual Reality to create a 3D installation,” Sun said. “He has done not only VR but also projective technologies, where he projected art on top of another piece of words, like Matisse. So he creates that palimpsest between the ancient and current.”
Hosted in conjunction with the Harvard Art Museums Materials Lab, or M/Lab, the demonstration was part of an effort to facilitate interactions between the public and experts in the art world.
“My co-organizer at the M/Lab, Francesca Bewer, and I were also very excited that the performance could take place in the Calderwood Courtyard, with its vantage points on every floor. This took many hands behind the scenes, from facilities and collections management to the director’s office,” Laursen said.
The Art Museums are in the process of formally acquiring the artwork created last week, as well as the brush used to create it. Once they have entered the collection, they will be available for students and other researchers to view in the Art Study Center by appointment and may be used in future exhibitions.
Laursen added that for those interested in seeing some of Dongling’s inspirations, works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró are currently on view on the first floor of the museums.
“In particular, I would encourage readers to visit Jackson Pollock’s “No. 2” (1965.554) in Gallery 1200 and think about the energetic but controlled physical movement of the artist as he created the work and the rhythmic balance of light and dark,” she said.
The museums are open and free to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Study finds nearly 40 percent of Americans have used technology for tasks at work and at home
ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 caused a near-instant sensation. It gave most users their first opportunity to try out a new type of artificial intelligence that uses existing data and published materials to create content known as generative AI.
Once the initial buzz faded, economists were eager to find out who was using the technology and how often, what they were doing with it, and whether they used it at work, at home, or both. How quickly and robustly the public adopts a technology is widely thought to predict its economic impact.
As of August, nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults aged 18-64 had used generative AI, according to new survey research. Of those employed, 28 percent used it at work, while nearly 33 percent used it away from work. That pickup rate is significantly faster than the public embrace of the internet (20 percent after two years) or the personal computer (20 percent after three years, the earliest researchers could measure).
The Gazette spoke with David J. Deming, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and professor of economics and education at Harvard Graduate of Education, about what he and co-authors Alexander Bick, an economic policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Adam Blandin, assistant economic professor at Vanderbilt University, found and what it could mean for business. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Why is it important to measure how quickly Americans have embraced generative AI tools like ChatGPT relative to PCs and the internet?
For a new technology like this, it’s really important for us to have some baseline understanding of how much it’s used and by whom, and what are they using it for. To do that, you need a high-quality, nationally representative survey. So, we recreated all of the question wording and the structure of the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the big survey that produces the unemployment rate every month. It’s the main source of labor market data in the U.S.
The CPS, back in 1984, started asking questions about usage of the personal computer at home. In 2001, it started asking questions about internet usage. And so, we took the same question ordering, replacing those technologies with generative AI, so we could directly compare it to the speed of adoption of other technologies, asking the same people the same questions.
That’s how we are able to show the usage rate in our data, which is 39.4 percent, is actually higher than both personal computers and the internet at the same stage in their product cycles.
In which specific tasks is AI most useful at work?
In which specific tasks is AI most useful at home?
Were you and your team surprised by these findings?
I personally was surprised at the high rate of usage. Whenever I tell colleagues about this, I always ask, “What do you think we found?” before I tell them. Most of my colleagues are aging academics like me, so we tend to underestimate generative AI usage. When I ask my graduate students or undergraduates, they tend to estimate numbers that are higher than the actual number we found. And I think that really tells you something about it. We found that young people are using generative AI at much, much higher rates than older people, which is very common across other technologies.
I didn’t come into this thinking this is what we’re going to find. I just was interested in the answer because I’d read a lot of things suggesting it was mostly hype, and I read a lot of things suggesting it was the Next Big Thing. And so, we wanted to know where the truth was.
What accounts for such swift adoption?
I can give you some informed speculation. One is that generative AI is built on top of those previous two technologies. You could think about the fact that people have computers in their home, and they have access to the internet, as base layers that allow you to easily adopt some new technology like generative AI. The personal computer, when it was released, was big and expensive and not everyone had it at home. The internet was less expensive, but we built this incredible grid that allowed people to be connected. Without those two things, you wouldn’t have generative AI. I think one of the reasons why it’s been adopted quickly is because the base level technologies were already there, and you could, in some sense, think about generative AI as a complementary innovation to the internet.
Demographic differences in AI use at work
Adoption is not uniform across demographic groups. Men, younger people, those with a college or graduate school education, and people in white-collar jobs are more likely to use generative AI and more often. What accounts for the usage gaps?
The bit about younger people and more educated people adopting a technology is actually common to almost every new technology. In studies of the adoption of personal computers, people found the same thing. The one thing that was different, relative to PCs, was gender. Women used PCs at work more than men in the 1980s largely because the job of administrative assistant or secretary, and office jobs in general, skewed very female and they were using computers whereas generative AI is not as concentrated in occupations. It’s everywhere. We find higher usage in STEM and management careers and those do skew male.
I don’t think access is explaining it because a lot of people use computers on the job. We found very, very broad adoption across occupations. It’s highest in STEM jobs and management, but 22 percent of blue-collar occupations were using AI. And usage rates were above 20 percent in every category of occupations except personal services, so it’s really common across places.
If you look at how many companies say they’re using it, it’s actually a pretty low share who are formally incorporating it into their operations. People are using it informally for a lot of different purposes, to help write emails, using it to look up things, using it to obtain documentation on how to do something. I think a lot of variation reflects the fact that some people like to tinker, and companies aren’t telling you don’t use it, but they’re not necessarily formally requiring you to use it.
This is something we’re really interested in tracking. We’ve already started our discussions about the next wave, and we’ll try to update the data over time and ask more questions about usage and dig into some of the threads that were left hanging.
AI use at work by occupation
AI use at work by industry group
This is the first-ever national survey on this subject. Should business and tech executives consider acting on any of these findings?
I would say most definitely yes. Another way to think about this is if you were to go back to 1984 and tell people, “Hey, there’s this new thing called the personal computer. I have a crystal ball. Twenty years from now, everybody’s going to have one of these and every single new technological development and every single new product is going to be using it as the base.” Knowing that now, what would you do differently? You would change a lot. You could make billions and billions of dollars.
I think this survey is saying, “We don’t have a crystal ball, but it sure looks like generative AI is going to be on that scale.” And so, the spoils will go to people who can figure out how to harness it first and best. So yes, I think they should be paying attention. I think a lot of them are already.
Much like the internet was a base layer for a lot of other technologies, you’ll see that the people who figure out how to use this technology that’s so versatile, that can do so many things well, but doesn’t yet have a killer app — the people who find that killer app, who build something on top of it, are going to really, really profit and benefit. I think that’s what the next five or 10 years will be about.
These companies are about trying to build human-level intelligence. That’s fine, but there are a lot of commercial applications that don’t require that. They need to be built with this thing as an input into it, rather than this being the product itself. So, I think you’ll see a lot of that in the next few years, and it’s going to be really exciting.
‘Heartbreaking’ encounter inspired long view on alcohol
Student makes it her mission to detail effects of prenatal exposure
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
A series focused on the personal side of Harvard research and teaching.
The woman came in crying. She was disheveled and pregnant, and appeared to be intoxicated. She had a 5-year-old girl in tow and was looking for help from the crisis center where Anna Shchetinina volunteered.
The mother got the help she needed. She sobered up, left her abusive partner, and eventually started a career in the medical field. Still, 15 years later, Shchetinina can’t stop thinking about the kids.
“One encounter changed everything for researcher who hopes to help mothers and families detect and treat the effects of dangerous drinking.”
“I didn’t realize then that the mother’s drinking was probably going to impact her children’s whole lives, but now I understand that every decision matters, especially during sensitive and critical periods,” she said. “Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is a very unique condition. It is 100 percent preventable, but it’s incurable and has very drastic consequences: cognitive, behavioral, and physical.”
In April, Shchetinina published a study in the journal PLOS One examining the prevalence of alcohol use disorder among pregnant and parenting women. The work has provided a foundation for her doctoral studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she’s examining the lifelong risks associated with prenatal alcohol exposure. Among the potential consequences is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, whose most severe form is fetal alcohol syndrome.
In the worst cases of exposure, the mother loses her pregnancy. When the baby survives, the effects often go unnoticed until school age, when performance, behavior and even routines that children typically carry out independently — getting up in the morning, making the bed, putting on clothes — become a challenge. Over time, damage wrought by prenatal exposure to alcohol can affect memory, self-control, emotions, attention, and problem-solving.
“There are a lot of unknowns in this field. We are still just beginning to understand what its effects are on adult health: When people with prenatal alcohol exposure mature, what happens to them?”
“It’s usually diagnosed later, about when the child starts school and by that time it can be difficult to address,” Shchetinina said. “Diagnostics aren’t easy when so much time has passed. We might not get a good, clear history of the pregnancy. Mothers might not remember everything they did during those nine months if it’s been six years since then. Also, some of the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure are similar to the impacts of other adverse experiences, like abuse or neglect. It gets trickier and trickier to diagnose as more time passes.”
The first widely read scientific paper on the risks of drinking during pregnancy was published in 1973, Shchetinina said. Research on the lasting effects remains scarce. In her Harvard work, she is using data from three large studies — two in the U.S. and one in Europe — to cast light on long-term consequences.
“There are a lot of unknowns in this field,” she said. “We are still just beginning to understand what its effects are on adult health: When people with prenatal alcohol exposure mature, what happens to them?”
She might have gone her whole life without asking the question, never mind enrolling at Harvard, if it wasn’t for the mother she met at the crisis center in her hometown of Petrozavodsk, a Russian city about 260 miles from St. Petersburg. “It was just heartbreaking,” said Shchetinina, who at the time was a law student. “I started learning more and more about the topic and I got more and more interested in it.”
A handmade brooch of forget-me-nots given to Shchetinina by a former client.
The crisis center had ties to a Minnesota nonprofit, today called the Proof Alliance, that focuses on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Representatives of the organization visited Petrozavodsk to discuss the dangers of drinking during pregnancy. Shchetinina listened, learned, and eventually decided to make a break with lawyering and focus squarely on public health. She came to the U.S. under the Fulbright program, an educational exchange sponsored by the U.S. government, and earned a master’s degree in public health at the University of Minnesota. Her next stop was the Chan School.
Shchetinina expects to graduate in 2026 and continue her research, likely in the U.S. due to dramatic changes in Russia since she left. The crisis center closed after the invasion of Ukraine and Shchetinina’s dissent about the conflict potentially puts her in danger, she said.
For the April paper, Shchetinina and her doctoral adviser, Natalie Slopen, an assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences, looked at alcohol use among reproductive-age women in the U.S. Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health 2015-2021, they examined responses from 120,000 women aged 18 to 49. Three percent were pregnant, half were parenting at least one child but not pregnant, and the rest were neither pregnant nor parenting.
The responses showed that about 13 percent of the women not pregnant and without kids had drinking habits that met the definition of alcohol-use disorder, but only 4 percent of them were receiving treatment. The disorder was about half as common among the pregnant and parenting group, ranging from 6.3 percent to 6.6 percent, but a significant treatment gap remained, with just 5 percent of the women in treatment.
The research, Slopen said, brought specialists up to date on the pandemic years, when surveys showed that drinking among women increased. It also explored barriers to treatment, a first step toward increasing access. Treatment was higher among those with insurance — Medicaid or private insurance — and respondents indicated that financial barriers were a hurdle to accessing care. Others said that treatment was not a priority, which Shchetinina thinks might have been an effect of stigma attached to alcohol use among women, especially while pregnant.
Said Slopen: “It’s important to characterize the need for treatment and the barriers that exist for individuals who may be experiencing alcohol use disorders and need treatment. This is important both for public health efforts directed toward those who are pregnant and those who are not but who may be pregnant in the future.”
Shchetinina agreed, adding that the findings also highlight a need for better interventions for non-pregnant and non-parenting women, who had higher rates of alcohol use disorder. She pointed out that the results showed that women who were arrested or had a history of arrests were in treatment more often. That could be an indication that the biggest obstacle exists at gateways to care.
“We saw that women who had a history of arrest had higher odds of getting treatment, meaning that getting arrested might have provided an entry into the treatment system,” she said. “However, the judicial system serving as an entry point to health care is problematic and should not be the easiest path to getting help. Providers need to be more proactive and society needs to be more supportive.”
‘Harvard Extension School degree candidates put challenging academics at the center, not the margins, of their lives.’
Nearly 400 Harvard Extension School degree candidates and guests gathered at Memorial Church on Sept. 20 to celebrate convocation, marking a moment of unity and achievement for this global network of students.
This was the fifth convocation for HES degree candidates. For some, it was their first time visiting Cambridge, with many meeting classmates in person after only seeing them through online classes.
Among those experiencing this milestone was Jean Michael Lif, a Master of Liberal Arts candidate in international relations, who flew in from the Dominican Republic specifically for the event. Having only been on campus twice before, Lif expressed his joy at finally connecting with his peers face-to-face.
“It’s something really beautiful,” he shared, reflecting on what initially felt like a daunting commitment. Lif began his HES journey while working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Dominican Republic as the financial coordinator for European markets. Lif said he needed a master’s degree that provided both academic rigor and flexibility and he saw HES as the perfect fit. Now, he manages a media company dedicated to elevating the image and culture of his country and eventually hopes to return to a role in government.
Suzanne Spreadbury, HES dean of academic programs, welcomed the group. “Harvard Extension School degree candidates put challenging academics at the center, not the margins, of their lives,” she said.
Spreadbury highlighted the extraordinary projects undertaken by past graduates, from partnering with NASA scientists to evaluate satellite data to collaborating with the North American Blackfeet Nation tribe on a wetland restoration project. She remarked that while these accomplishments are noteworthy, they are also quite ordinary for HES graduates, emphasizing the academic rigor and support from staff that propels students.
Dean of the Harvard Extension School and Continuing Education Nancy Coleman closed the ceremony by addressing the group. Coleman acknowledged the unique challenges that many students have experienced in their pursuit of education.
“We cannot deny that our world is facing extreme challenges, many of which we’ve never seen before,” Coleman began. “We know what they are because we live them every day — in the media, in social media, and maybe around our kitchen tables.” Yet amidst these obstacles, Coleman praised the students for choosing to pursue their academic goals, particularly at a place as rigorous as Harvard. “You have challenged yourself in the pursuit of something bigger, and that is optimism,” she added.
Coleman encouraged students to harness this optimism, to use the knowledge they’ve gained at HES to push through difficulties and make meaningful changes in their communities. “Each and every one of you has the power to ask the difficult questions, to courageously change the course of your history, and the optimism to succeed.”
A tale of three cities — and their turn to right in heartland
Government professor’s new book focuses on roles of race, class, and religion in evolution of former New Deal Democrats
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
White, working-class voters have been defecting from the Democratic Party for more than six decades in the nation’s heartland.
In her new book “How the Heartland Went Red,”Stephanie Ternullo tracks the evolution of three predominantly white cities in the post-industrial Midwest to understand the shift. The assistant professor of government detailed her findings at a campus talk.
“I wanted places that at once shared the same demographics, and still do, but took different political trajectories,” she said of her project, which helps illuminate the roles of race, class, and religion in the change. One city remains solidly blue. A second has been dominated by Republicans since the 1960s, and a third was split until Donald Trump won them over with his 2016 candidacy.
Ternullo’s work follows decades of what the political scientist calls an “explosion” of scholarship on the relationship between social identity and partisanship. “The classic account,” she explained at the event last month hosted by Harvard’s Center for Race, Inequality and Social Equity Studies, “is that voting is essentially a group experience.”
The Great Depression and World War II represented the height of class politics, Ternullo said. Between 1932 and 1944, a total of 467 predominantly white, working-class U.S. counties lined up behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to her analysis. Voters in these municipalities favored the New Deal Democrat four elections in a row.
Then came re-orderings along racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines. “About two-thirds of the counties turned right after the racialrealignment of the 1960s,” Ternullo said, gesturing to transformations set in motion by the civil rights movement. “Another 11 percent turned to the right with consolidation of the religious right in the early 2000s.”
Along the way came deindustrialization and the decline of organized labor, a cornerstone of the New Deal coalition. The transformation was all but complete with the arrival of the Tea Party and former President Donald Trump, both documented by social scientists as capitalizing on status threats felt by white, working-class voters. By 2016, 96 percent of the original “New Deal” counties were solidly on the right.
Ternullo’s book returns to this important subset of Roosevelt’s historic voting bloc. She conducted more than a year of intensive field work in a trio of Upper Midwestern cities. All three, pseudonymized in the book, have overwhelmingly white populations numbering between 16,000 and 28,000 people today. All three boasted strong industrial economics at mid-20th century. Today, each is aging faster than the larger U.S. population.
Ternullo’s book returns to this important subset of Roosevelt’s historic voting bloc. She conducted more than a year of intensive field work in a trio of Upper Midwestern cities.
The book’s outlier is a city Ternullo calls Motorville, Wisconsin. It retains many of the same unionized, private manufacturing employers that operated in the 1950s. Residents are, however, scarred after decades of mergers and layoffs. What really sets it apart, Ternullo argued, is the fact that it retains a local labor council, or a community-specific unit of the AFL-CIO.
“This is exceedingly rare in the 21st century,” she noted. “If you go to a labor council meeting, you’ll see the postal workers there. People representing supermarket clerks are there. The IBEW is there. And they’re talking about issues relevant to local politics and community life.”
Lutherton, Indiana, is the Republican stronghold in Ternullo’s book. Residents there carry the generational memory of losing the city’s largest employer in the 1970s. Anchoring its economy today is a unionized auto parts manufacturer that was later lured by the local economic council. Of the three case studies, Lutherton is the only one to gain population since 1980.
Union membership in the city remains strong, though organized labor lacks a politically mobilized presence. “But the city does have a set of well-resourced churches and nonprofits that coordinate a private problem-solving network that jumps into action anytime new social problems emerge,” Ternullo said.
The largest employer in Gravesend, Minnesota, burned down in the 1990s and opted against rebuilding. Of the three cities, Gravesend has the lowest percentage of unionized workers today. It also counts the highest share of service sector jobs.
At one point, Gravesend enjoyed the active presence of unions and churches. They were never as robust as those in Motorville and Lutherton, and they ended up declining with the town’s manufacturing sector. “That leaves people feeling like their community is dying, and they have no coherent leadership telling them how to resolve it,” Ternullo offered.
“My argument is that people make sense of local economic conditions and national politics from within these organizational contexts.”
The book digs into the economic and political histories of all three communities, completed with the help of archival research, social media analysis, and interviews with community leaders. But the recent talk focused largely on the role unions and churches can play in an era of nationalized politics.
“My argument is that people make sense of local economic conditions and national politics from within these organizational contexts,” said Ternullo, who emphasized that the effects extend even to neighbors without direct group membership.
Motorville is in this way a bit of an anachronism, with residents viewing the Democrats as strongly representative of working-class interests. Voters in Gravesend, on the other hand, described a sense of betrayal by the party they supported not long ago. As one 60-something Gravesender put it: “… the Democratic Party has gotten for more of a giveaway thing. You know, by letting all these illegals in and all this kind of stuff.”
Local forces are especially powerful for what Ternullo called “cross-pressured voters,” or those whose loyalties to different social groups are contested with every election. In recent decades, she noted, they include not just working-class white voters but also U.S. citizens of Asian and Latin American descent.
“Place can help make certain social identities more salient than others,” Ternullo said. “It can help prioritize certain interpretations of politics over others, and ultimately lead people to find a home in one party.”
Amazon immersion fosters partnerships, offers students, researchers hard look at threats to economic security, environment of rainforest as Earth warms
MANAUS, BRAZIL — Students were hours into exploring the Amazon rainforest when their guide caught the glint of something special.
Thiago G. Carvalho, a staff zoologist with Museu da Amazônia (Musa), removed the caterpillar-like creature from a tree branch and raised it on the pads of his fingertips like an offering. He wanted the group to appreciate this fuzzy little insect patterned with greens and golds.
“We have to learn as biologists to see beauty in all kinds of life,” Carvalho said, noting that he couldn’t be sure of the exact genus in an area so rich with biodiversity. “And this little guy is beautiful.”
The find was one of thousands during a recent teaching and research intensive organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion explored the region’s intricate ecosystems as well as urgent threats to its economic security, environment, and public health. A primary goal was expanding partnerships with scientists and other innovators who work in a place of central importance to the global climate. But the 10-day course also served a more fundamental purpose.
“Most Brazilians don’t know what the Amazon is,” said Marcia Castro, the Andelot Professor of Demography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and chair of the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program. “And for those outside Brazil, it’s even bigger … the information they get is filtered. Sometimes it’s biased. Other times they think they have the perfect solution to solve all the Amazon’s problems.”
Speaking at the immersion’s kickoff in this city of 2.3 million, Castro pressed the students, professors, and young academics to bring a different mindset. “Be curious, listen — don’t judge,” she said.
A few hours later, the group toured Musa, a 250-acre reserve at the city’s edge veined with outdoor exhibits and walking trails. As Carvalho plucked dragonfly larvae and other life forms from the forest, the visitors grew more observant, focused. The Brazilian state of Amazonas, where invertebrates account for the majority of biodiversity, proved full of inviting detail.
Soon a trio of students were staring at a boa constrictor in a tank. Another set of visitors crouched to inspect a young tarantula Carvalho spotted. Others paused over the line of leaf-cutter ants soldiering by.
Christopher Hilgemberg leads water quality testing demonstrations on the Rio Uatumã.
Nicholas Arisco exits a boat along the Uatumã River. “I didn’t expect the rivers to be this big,” he said.
Professor Naomi Oreskes talks to the group as the boat travels the Rio Uatumã.
As a first-time visitor to the Amazon, Professor Scott Edwards lectures at Camp 41.
“I love studying ant colonies! They’re so interesting!” cried David Caleb Brown ’25, an applied math concentrator from Alabama currently investigating how high-altitude remote sensing balloons can be used to fight deforestation in the Amazon.
Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the multidisciplinary experience was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and academics represented the College and four Harvard graduate Schools as well as universities across South America in fields that included the sciences, romance languages, public policy, and law.
All are engaged in research that impacts the Amazon, from fighting the rise of illegal gold mining to promoting sustainable agriculture and limiting government corruption. But for many, the immersion marked their first visit to the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
“Being here and seeing everything around me is a childhood dream come true,” shared Dariana González-Aguilar ’25, an integrative biology concentrator with roots in North Carolina and central Mexico who hopes to work on conservation in Brazil.
“The whole idea is to give people a chance to get to know this extremely important biome,” said Castro, a Rio de Janeiro native who has studied malaria in the region since 1999 and teaches a three-week course in Brazil every January (the 2024 iteration was set in the Amazon). “I hope in the end everyone goes back to Harvard, or goes back to their homes in Brazil, transformed but above all inspired to continue their work.”
“Being here and seeing everything around me is a childhood dream come true,” said Dariana González Aguilar.
Deep dive into the Amazon basin
For three days, participants immersed themselves in the vast topaz of the Amazon basin, home to nearly 20 percent of the world’s river waters. Boarding the Victória Amazônica with the group was Scot Martin, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who has deep ties to the region known as Amazonia.
Martin first visited in 2007 and now travels to Manaus regularly. He has picked up Portuguese, started following World Cup soccer, and partners with UEA researchers on various projects. “The Amazon is a place that inspires in every regard,” he said as the boat traveled a quiet stretch of the Rio Uatumã.
Scot Martin, seen lecturing at Amazonas State University in Manaus, Brazil, first visited the region in 2007 and now travels there regularly.
In a lecture, Martin charted the inner workings of the Amazon watershed, with its famous system of “flying rivers.” Trees act as the rainforest’s “water pumps,” he explained, taking in H2O and gradually releasing it skyward via a process called evapotranspiration. That’s why deforestation means lower river levels across the Amazon basin and less rainfall far beyond.
“I had imagined the deforestation was driven by cattle ranching,” said Chun-Yu Su ’27, a sophomore from Taiwan concentrating in integrative biology. “But Professor Martin pointed out there’s heterogeneity in terms of geography, because the Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the continental U.S.” In some areas, the land was deforested for large-scale ranching and soybean fields. In others, it was driven by smaller-scale agriculture, including subsistence farming.
Consequences include extreme drought, increased wildfire risk, and crop loss in the Amazon and its neighboring “breadbasket” regions, Martin said. Future implications could include water rationing and power shortages across Brazil, a nation heavily dependent on hydroelectric. “And then you have one that was big last year,” he added, noting that water levels would be even lower in the last months of 2024. “The only way to get to most towns in the State of Amazonas is by river navigation or air. When the drought hit, these communities were really cut off.”
Martin also outlined one of his projects with UEA collaborators, this one involving a team that monitors water quality in area rivers. Specifically, the team is investigating the source of high mercury levels across the Amazon basin, where communities are at heightened risk of exposure because residents consume so much fresh-water fish. Co-leading this research is Martin’s SEAS colleague Elsie Sunderland, the Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry and a global expert on mercury contamination.
One culprit is illegal gold mining, on the rise in Amazonia since the early 2000s. It’s a “messy business,” Martin explained, with mercury used to isolate gold from river sediment. The mercury-gold amalgam is then roasted, releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere while leaving behind the prized metal. In parts of the northern Amazon where illegal mining is highly prevalent, widespread mercury poisoning has been found in some Indigenous communities, he said.
On a still evening, a team from UEA demonstrated how their partnership with Martin works. They ferried the group in a fleet of small motorboats across a remote stretch of the Rio Uatumã, speeding past cow pastures before settling near the shoreline.
“I do a lot of mapping of the Amazon,” remarked Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow from Connecticut studying health and populations at the Chan School. “I didn’t expect the rivers to be this big.”
Collected samples were transferred to the floating laboratory UEA recently built to test water for contaminants such as bacteria and phosphorus. Analyzing for mercury is done in Sunderland’s lab at Harvard.
Back on Victória Amazônica, UEA biotechnology Professor Rafael Lopes e Oliveira underscored the logistical challenges of performing this work. The Amazon basin vacillates between drought and downpour, a challenge to researchers as well as those residing in rural communities, he explained through a DRCLAS translator. If you want to study biochemistry or microbiology, he said, you need to understand culture and interpersonal relationships, because access depends on local communities.
‘Social construction of ignorance’
Joining the immersion for their first visits to the Amazon were Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, and Scott V. Edwards ’86, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology as well as curator of ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
“I’m part of a small group of scientists talking about a field called agnotology, or studying the social construction of ignorance,” Oreskes explained one afternoon, speaking to the group sitting cross-legged in the boat’s air-conditioned dining room.
Her insights on “market fundamentalism” — the idea that free markets can solve all of society’s problems — proved especially pertinent to Amazonia. Reviewing ideas explored in 2010’s “Merchants of Doubt” and 2023’s “The Big Myth,” Oreskes underscored the “negative externalities” of business ventures that drive climate change — essentially, taking profits from activities that damage the environment but leaving costs of cleanup and environmental rehabilitation to communities.
“We’ve had many lectures on deforestation and science,” said Peruvian Lucero Beatriz Reymundo Dámaso, a master’s candidate in anthropology at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina. “I appreciate that Naomi came in and said, ‘Wait — there’s also this cultural component.’”
The river trek featured several stops in the Uatumã Sustainable Development Reserve, where residents have banded together to fight exploitive development. André Vianna from the Manaus-based NGO Idesam outlined the initiative’s purpose of bridging conservation goals with marketing and supply chain supports for small, rural producers. Today, the area is zoned by the state of Amazonas for ventures that conserve the rainforest.
Furnituremaker Elizângela Cavalcante introduced the group to the São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi community of artisans, planters, and “extractivistas” (or those who harvest the rainforest’s abundance sustainably). She walked participants past the community’s tiny gift shop, where açaí beaded jewelry and elegant wooden bowls were available for purchase, and charmed visitors with stories of marriage, work, and family life.
“For me, it was remarkable to learn how women are leading business development and taking care of sustainability,” said Vinícius Prado, Ph.D. ’27, a former program officer for the United Nations Population Fund from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, who is studying population health sciences at the Chan School. “They already are overburdened with their work on caregiving added to their economic activities … and yet they are concerned about the environment and creating a better world for future generations.”
The group also met with José Monteiro, keeper of the Pousada Mirante do Uatumã inn and a 30-acre agroforestry plot launched in 2008 with support from Idesam. Monteiro had previously deforested his land in favor of cattle ranching. Today, the family property yields shade as well as farm-fresh eggs and Brazil nuts.
“It was really interesting because I asked him: ‘How are you doing? Are you earning a better living?’” Oreskes said. “He said they weren’t; it’s about a wash. But the life is so much better.”
It was a reminder for Oreskes that green transitions seldom trigger immediate financial rewards. “This is true even in the United States, with putting in solar panels or installing better windows on your house,” Oreskes said. “Often there’s an upfront investment, but you get it back in the long run.”
The mixed blessing of roads
Heat and humidity challenge those conducting research in Amazonia, but the lack of reliable roads serves up additional impediments. From the Victória Amazônica, traveling to the next stop required one hour on a speed boat and another four hours by bus. At a rural meeting point, groups of three or four transferred to heavy-duty trucks, some of the only vehicles capable of navigating the final stretch of watery and deeply rutted roadway.
Located 70 miles north of Manaus, Camp 41 is a reservation and research station established in 1979 by the late Thomas E. Lovejoy III, a George Mason University ecologist and Amazon preservationist. It was part of an initiative to protect pristine rainforest fragments as roads, developers, and cattle ranchers moved in. The site has since served as a base for scientists tracking diverse species of birds and butterflies as well as monkeys.
Nicholas Arisco (left) with Massachusetts-born ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft (right), a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research.
Welcoming the group there this summer was Massachusetts-born ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus and a top authority on avian life in the Amazon. He traced his own involvement with the camp to a 1987 bird-monitoring internship.
“I ended up moving my whole life down here,” Cohn-Haft said. “I married a Brazilian. I conduct my life in Portuguese, teach graduate students in Portuguese. And it’s all thanks to this project.”
A series of tin-roof pavilions where tight rows of hammocks can be tied for overnight stays populate the camp. After one restful night, evolutionary biologist Edwards draped a sheet from one of these structures for his slide presentation. Using a tree branch to underscore key points, he addressed the evolutionary roots of Amazonia’s enormous spread of plant and animal life, which accounts for 10 percent of biodiversity worldwide.
A highlight concerned the Amazon’s ties with the Caribbean. “The Amazon River used to flow west,” marveled Edwards, showing a map of ancient Lake Pebas that stretched north from where the Andes Mountains eventually formed 20 million years ago. As evidence, he cited everything from fossilized mollusks found throughout the western Amazon to the region’s famous river dolphins, including the beloved boto (or pink dolphin).
“Some of the plants in western Amazonia are more adapted to what you might see in an estuary or a delta,” said Edwards. “These are possibly relics of species there when this lake system was still present.”
Two nights at Camp 21 left plenty of time for experiencing this biodiversity up-close. Day treks brought glimpses of blue morpho butterflies and views of an overstuffed harpy eagle nest. Venturing out by night yielded varieties of spider, lizard, and frog through the beacon of a flashlight.
“I was looking at a book yesterday with an image of a gecko,” recalled Evanna Jaramillo, a master’s candidate in tropical ecology and conservation at Ecuador’s University San Francisco de Quito. “I thought, ‘I wish I could see a gecko.’ And it came true that night! It was tiny, and I don’t know how I even saw it because everything here is inconspicuous. You have to turn over every leaf!”
The forest proved a comfortable place to wander. Despite extreme humidity there were no mosquitoes, and temperatures hovered near 80°F. During a morning bird walk, Cohn-Haft talked about the interplay between these conditions and the rainforest’s extraordinary biodiversity.
“One of the secrets behind there being so many species in the tropics is that many are highly specialized,” he explained. All that specialization evolved with help from the equator’s environmental constancy, with the forest’s understory offering an additional degree of stability.
“And the more specialized you become, in some ways, the better competitor you are. You can survive in your own little world just fine. But any kind of change and suddenly you’re screwed,” Cohn-Haft continued. “So climate change is a killer for tropical forests and highly specialized organisms.”
Tapping knowledge of regional specialists
Manaus is a hub for scientists studying biodiversity and those addressing threats to Amazonia. With the city as their base, immersion organizers took the opportunity to program lectures with respected specialists and stops at influential institutions.
“The thinking is, how can we increase our presence in the Amazon? How can we provide opportunities to that student looking for a passion project?” offered Tim Linden, associate director of the DRCLAS Brazil Office. “We want to deepen collaborations with local institutions like Amazonas State University. And there are other organizations of scientific excellence like INPA. There are innovative sustainable development projects led by entrepreneurs in the region and different NGOs.”
One of the biggest names on the itinerary was Philip Fearnside, a biologist and prolific researcher with INPA. “He’s a person I cite in all of my papers,” said Kathryn Baragwanath, a Chilean political economist and 2023-24 Academy Scholar with the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies who just started as a University of Melbourne senior lecturer. “I was very excited to be in front of him.”
Fearnside’s presentation underscored the stakes for the region — and the world. The Amazon captures huge amounts of carbon. Its destruction would trigger an immediate spike in greenhouse gases and global temperatures. In addition, failing to curb emissions worldwide means the eventual collapse of the Amazon biome.
Other high-profile experts leaned into solutions to Amazonia’s challenges. They included Gersem Baniwa, Indigenous philosopher and University of Brasilia anthropology professor, Virgilio Viana, Ph.D. ’89, Sustainable Amazon Foundation director, and Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former Minister of the Environment, who played a key role in negotiating the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
“We’re here to listen and learn from individuals who have been guardians of the Amazon for so long,” said Eduardo Vasconcelos ’25, a double government and economics concentrator from Brasília whose senior thesis investigates how local policymaking can better preserve the ecosystem. “I’m inspired to conduct my research in a way that supports those on the frontlines.”
Tasso Azevedo, a social entrepreneur based in São Paulo, outlined for the group his widely cited MapBiomas project, which relies on satellite imagery to track land use changes throughout South America and even Asia. Castro and Martin have already published research that draws on Azevedo’s Brazilian data, along with at least three immersion participants studying the country’s environment, health, and government.
“If we want to achieve sustainable development goals, and we don’t have much time left … we need all these disciplines working together,” said Castro, who also chairs the Chan School’s Department of Global Health and Population.
And Ivo Makuxi, a young lawyer from the neighboring state of Roraima who lectured before slipping into the role of immersion participant, spoke to the complexities of Brazilian political history and constitutional law as they relate to Indigenous land rights.
The global community should care about the issue, he explained, because Indigenous peoples have historically proved excellent stewards. While 20 percent of the Amazon has already been deforested, just 1 percent of rainforest that falls within Brazil’s Indigenous territories has been cleared.
“The Amazon is a special place for a lot of people,” Makuxi, who takes his last name from the Indigenous community to which he belongs, said in an interview at Camp 41. “People say it’s the lungs of the world. What we say is it’s our home.”
“Navigating the Amazon,” featuring Harvard faculty and undergraduates who conducted recent research in the Amazon Rainforest, 4-6 p.m. Oct. 8, Harvard Kennedy School.
A birder’s biggest enemy in rainforest: complacency
Chun-Yu Su (from left), Scott Edwards, Naomi Oreskes, Mario Cohn-Haft, and Oliver Lazarus birdwatching in the Amazon Rainforest.
Photo and video by James Byard/Harvard Staff
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Senior integrative biology concentrator spots 121 species during research, teaching intensive in Amazon
CAMP 41, Brazil — The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion reminded Nick Kowalske of the dangers of complacency.
Over the 10-day research and teaching intensive hosted this summer by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), the senior integrative biology concentrator spotted and identified 121 species while exploring the Brazil state of Amazonas. Highlights include a toco toucan, red-billed pied tanager, and neotropic cormorant, all documented on eBird.org.
As a long-time birder, he knew it was easy to get spoiled by the abundance of avian life. “I frequently catch myself saying, ‘Oh, it’s just a cormorant,’” said Kowalske, who completed a DRCLAS biodiversity internship earlier in the summer at Instituto Terra Luminous near São Paulo. “But I try to remain excited about the common things.”
With a sharp eye and an even sharper mind for the region’s biodiversity, the Dallas native’s knowledge proved an asset to anybody with binoculars. Some of it was acquired while volunteering in Ecuador a few summers ago. And some came from studying up on the Amazon’s bird life before the big trip.
His ecological education, however, began much earlier. “It started when I was 4 or 5 years old,” Kowalske said. “Every night I would make my mom sit and read the ‘Encyclopedia of Animals’ with me.”
Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the August immersion was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and young academics from Harvard and universities across South America explored the world’s most diverse biome while learning from locals about the Amazon’s beauty and climate, economy, and public health challenges.
Bird lovers were pleased from Day One, which brought the group to the top of a 138-foot observation tower at the Museu da Amazônia (Musa), a sprawling natural history museum and rainforest reserve on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas.
“Looking down into the canopy and seeing toucans and macaws flying everywhere was just ridiculous,” said Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who fell hard for birding during the immersion.
Also memorable was the two-night stay at Camp 41, a far-flung research station and preserved rainforest fragment located about 70 miles north of Manaus. For ornithologist Scott V. Edwards, professor and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the trip’s best moment concerned a yellow-headed vulture that perched itself above the dining shed.
“I’m not so much into the rarity of things,” explained Edwards, who also serves as curator of ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I’m more into getting a good view.”
Camp 41 proved especially prime for fans of birdsong. “It’s a lot harder to see stuff here in the woods, but it’s fun to just listen,” said ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, the group’s host at the site as well as a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus.
Participants gathered at picnic tables one morning before dawn, with Cohn-Haft immediately recognizing the low-pitched hoot-hoot of a blue-crown motmot. As the sun rose, the chorus grew to include a black nunbird, red-billed woodcreeper and chestnut-rumped woodcreeper, among many others Cohn-Haft identified by ear.
“I’m sure we’ve heard well over 50 species of birds today,” he said that night.
At Camp 41, Kowalske added more than 40 species to his tally, including three varieties of manakin, a swallow-tailed kite, and a whiskered flycatcher with its baby in their nest. “It’s great to see Nick in his element,” Edwards said. “I’ve been very impressed.”
A whiskered flycatcher.
Photo by Nick Kowalske
For Kowalske, the best birding was found at São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi, a small community of eco-friendly artisans and planters on the Rio Uatumã. “We saw red-and-green macaws at eye level in short palms between the houses,” Kowalske recalled. “It was an absolutely fantastic view of a magnificent bird.”
His biggest surprise unfolded next to a rural schoolhouse near Camp 41. Kowalske and Arisco moved in for a closer look at some açaí trees with a flock of toucans, including a few green aracari and one channel-billed toucan.
Then Arisco pointed to a far more diminutive creature in the treetops.
Kowalske shrugged it off at first when asked what it was. “I said ‘Oh, it’s another flycatcher,’” he recalled with a grin. “I didn’t even really look. And complacency is evil … so don’t do that.”
When he zoomed in with his Nikon DSLR, Kowalske recognized it was a rare and “legendary sighting” called a dusky purpletuft. The bird was last spotted around Camp 41 by Cohn-Haft in 1987 when he first arrived for a bird-monitoring internship.
“These birds are known primarily from the Guyanas and Suriname, but their range, we now know, extends farther south,” Kowalske rattled off. “It was super cool to see — even if it was just a little bird in the canopy.”
Amazon immersion fosters partnerships, offers students, researchers hard look at threats to economic security, environment of rainforest as Earth warms
Climate activist urges people to counter a culture run on fear and fossil fuel
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
“It is time to normalize the existence of the climate emergency,” said Luisa Neubauer, opening her talk “Defending Democracy and Safeguarding Our Planet: A Dual Imperative.” Instead, she said, “In every single household in the country, someone is asking: ‘Are you going to the climate strike? Shouldn’t we be angry? Shouldn’t we be active?’”
As Germany’s leading youth climate activist and organizer of the “Fridays for Future Germany” protests, Neubauer presented a holistic approach to the climate crisis that stressed individual engagement in what has become a battle for how we define ourselves.
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies event last week was co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.George Sarrinikolaou, the institute’s executive director and assistant provost for climate and sustainability, gave opening remarks, noting that “at a time when the climate is deteriorating and … a time of war in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan,” Neubauer is “mobilizing millions of people to advocate for science-based climate measures.”
Neubauer, who is a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at CES and author of several books on climate activism (most recently “Beginning to End the Climate Crisis: A History of Our Future”) then explained her address as a bit of “thinking out loud” about how to be “more effective as a movement.”
“Hope isn’t a goodie bag to take home. Hope is work. Hope is our promise to the world to look for possibilities.”
Luisa Neubauer
“The discourse has gotten so discouraging,” she said. Exhibiting a slide showing the increasingly early flowering of cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan, she pointed out the undeniability of the science. “What we’re seeing right now is a climate change that exceeds our modern understanding of a changing climate,” she added.
All that data hasn’t counted for much, however, she said. Instead, she cited as “a stupid mistake, the idea that the presence of all that science would be our best argument for changing something.”
A new approach is necessary, she stressed. Instead of simply focusing on the data, we need to understand how fossil fuels are woven into our culture. Quoting President George H.W. Bush at the 1992 Earth Summit that, “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” she explained how decarbonization has been presented as a threat not only to prosperity but to happiness.
“The power of pop culture has led us to normalize our idea of what is a good life,” she said. Noting Western societies’ love of automobiles and the so-called freedom they offer, she pointed out that we live in “a cultural arena that has inhaled the very fossil fuel idea of a good life into every single aspect” — a culture, she added, where “a car would be safe, but I wouldn’t be.”
Fracking, for example, has become accepted by both presidential candidates as essential to our short-term vision of prosperity. “We’ve gotten to the point where the mainstream political understanding is that if you really love a country, you love it to the point of destruction.”
Living in a world where our biggest fear may be “Are they going to take away my car?” presents a particular challenge to anyone who cares about the climate crisis and longer-term issues.
“We need to understand these irrational historical connections,” said Neubauer. Outlining how climate change is presented — or ignored — in popular culture and how fossil fuels are presented as part of “the good life,” she encouraged the audience to see how widespread the battle is. “When we talk about the climate we never just talk about the climate,” she said. “We talk about everything in the room.”
To counter this, Neubauer said, we need to “widen our understanding of what is a climate discourse” to encourage people to “think deeply about the complexity of wealth.”
“If decarbonizing our democracy means ending with so many old ideas of what is a good life, then I would very much believe we need some good proposals.” Burrowing down to specifics, she said, “If people have spent their lives of dreaming of their own house, then people need new dreams.”
Changing societal goals is a huge task, she acknowledged. This can lead to cynicism and hopelessness. However, she encouraged activists to also embrace the human instinct to nurture and to heal. With this in mind, she discussed the nature of hope.
“Hope is very realistic,” she said. “Hope isn’t a goodie bag to take home. Hope is work. Hope is our promise to the world to look for possibilities. It doesn’t mean we’re going to get everything, but we’re daring to believe in what is possible.”
To mobilize that hope, she said, “Someone will have to start, and everyone is someone.”
The problem is huge, but, “we understand the assignment,” she said. Facing “a crisis that was produced by millions of people living their lives and dreaming their dreams,” we all must take action not only to educate others about climate change but to share awareness about how our culture has been built on fossil fuels and about how unsustainable such a lifestyle is for the Earth.
“A vast part of the environmental degradation is produced by very normal people every day,” said Neubauer. “We have long understood that tackling the worst catastrophes will not rely on this handful of people, institutions or tech billionaires, but rather the opposite.
“Humankind is quite capable of collaboration,” she stressed. “When tackling the climate crisis we have this huge advantage of we know what we’re fighting against. We know what we want.”
Gabby Anderson ’26 (from left), Veronica Leahy ’23, Abraham Rebollo-Trujillo ’20, and James Caven ’22 discuss their career choices in the arts. Kalya Bey ’25 moderated.
Photos by Marin Gray ’26
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Alumni in the arts share insights and lifelong impact of campus involvement
Sometimes all it takes is one small brush with the arts to change a career trajectory.
Kevin Lin ’12 knows this as well as anyone. An Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator at Harvard, Lin was preparing for a career in biology when he made a spontaneous decision junior year to volunteer for an American Repertory Theater production. One A.R.T. internship and one Harvardwood 101 trip later, Lin found himself applying to intern in the theater department of Creative Artists Agency after graduation.
“I figured that, for one last hurrah before going to grad school for biology — which I had already applied to — I might as well do an internship in theater,” he told an audience of students gathered in the Agassiz Theatre last week. Now Lin is an agent, representing theater artists like Leslie Odom Jr. and Darren Criss, Columbia Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Olympic diving champion Tom Daley.
“It was very clear to me that I’m not going to be a writer, I’m not an actor, I’m not a director, but I want to be surrounded by people who are extraordinary,” Lin said. “In my position now, my day is filled with insanely talented people who inspire me on a daily basis.”
“From freshman fall through junior year I knew I had this theater passion, and I knew that it felt impractical,” said Julia Riew ’22 (center) with OFA Director Fiona Coffey and Kevin Lin ’12.
Lin was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural Creative Careers Conference co-hosted by the Office for the Arts at Harvard, the Harvard Alumni Association, and the Mignone Center for Career Success. The conference brought together current students interested in the arts with alums working in the field for a panel discussion and networking reception. The event concluded with a reimagined student performance of “The Human Comedy” (1983), the result of a weeklong musical theater residency with alumni that included Broadway producer Jack Viertel ’71, director Sammi Cannold, M.A. ’16, and arranger Ian Chan ’23.
“I think there are so many extraordinary jobs in the arts that are not super visible,” said Fiona Coffey, director of the Office for the Arts. “When you can see how people have forged these very unique and specific careers, it opens up students’ minds to what’s possible. It gives them permission to dream in a similar way.”
Alumna composer-lyricist and novelist Julia Riew ’22, the other keynote speaker, started at Harvard on the pre-med track. Although she had always loved musical theater, she was intimidated when didn’t see many other Asian American students pursuing the field.
“From freshman fall through junior year I knew I had this theater passion, and I knew that it felt impractical,” Riew said. “I’d literally go home and cry after class every day. I’d be writing musicals in the back of Life Sciences 1B, not listening to the lecture.”
Ultimately Riew decided to jointly concentrate in music and Theater, Dance & Media. Now, she is represented by Lin, and working on projects in musical theater, literature, film, and TV. Riew emphasized to students the importance of using their time as undergraduates to explore their craft.
“There’s this opportunity to make bad theater and put it onstage. I was like, ‘When else, other than College, am I going to be able to write a show and have it go up onstage and not have to spend a dime of my own money?’” she said.
James Caven ’22, a writer’s assistant on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” spoke on a panel alongside fellow alumni Abraham Rebollo-Trujillo ’20, a dramaturg and actor, Veronica Leahy ’23, a musician and composer, and current junior Gabby Anderson ’26, a guard on the women’s basketball team and artist and entrepreneur who makes customized sneaker art.
Caven, who was involved in the Harvard Lampoon and the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club while being an Integrated Biology concentrator, spoke to students about the fast-paced realities of comedy writing, which involves producing a new show every day between first pitches at 9 a.m. and the show taping at 5 p.m. Caven said he was encouraged to apply for his position by a fellow alumnus also involved with the Lampoon.
Anderson said balancing her art career with being a student is definitely time-consuming, but she makes it easier by combining the two whenever she can, sometimes submitting paintings (and accompanying essays) for econ class projects.
“I find myself very inspired, not only when I play basketball, but taking courses. Even econ sometimes makes me think, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to make this huge painting about the economic state of the U.S. right now,’” Anderson said. “Because my hobby is also my career, I’m more passionate about it, which motivates me. I’m having fun so it doesn’t necessarily feel like work.”
Students in the audience asked alumni about a range of topics, from how to self-advocate and how to navigate family approval around a career in the arts to how to decide which creative projects to accept or decline.
Leahy, who entered Harvard believing she would study math, was a TDM and music concentrator in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program. She told students, who were curious about networking, that many of the performance and directing opportunities she has now are a direct result of professional and social connections she made on campus.
“Truly the people that you are making art with now are the people that you might be making art with for the rest of your life, or definitely for the next couple of years,” Leahy said. “Just enjoy it, appreciate it, and really take advantage of being here with all these talented people.”
Why do election polls seem to have such a mixed track record?
Democratic industry veteran looks at past races, details adjustments made amid shifting political dynamics in nation
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Political polls underestimated the support for Donald Trump and overstated the backing for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Four years later, the polling correctly anticipated Joe Biden’s win over Trump, but both national and statewide polls saw a much wider edge than he ultimately received.
A task force report by the American Association of Public Opinion Research called the 2020 race the profession’s biggest misfire since 1980, when polls forecast a close race and instead Ronald Reagan beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by a landslide.
The Gazette spoke with John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster in 2020 and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics this fall, about what happened in the past two elections and how the field has tried to make adjustments amid shifts in the nation’s political dynamics.
A co-founder of The Wall Street Journal poll, Anzalone also worked for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton (2016) and Barack Obama (2008 and 2012). His firm, Impact Research, has conducted polls for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is not involved in that work. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Photo by Martha Stewart
What went wrong in the last two elections, and has the industry made any course corrections?
What’s really important is that we differentiate what professional pollsters who work for campaigns do, and what the public media polls do, because it’s very, very different. You’re not seeing campaign polls.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t error. There was, especially in ’16. But there are not many media polls that are spending a lot of money like we do to do daily interviews the right way, using multimodal methodologies, doing quotas, etc. We get branded by the fact that there are now dozens and dozens of cheap media polls that I think are a problem.
In 2016, there were a lot of legitimate concerns about polling error. What we found internally, in a group of pollsters, is that we weren’t getting the right proportion of non-college-educated voters. We were getting too many service-oriented, non-college-educated voters. We weren’t getting enough people who work with their hands or work in the factory or in agriculture, drivers, and things like that. We also saw that a lot of our small-town rural interviews were in the county seat, not in the rural areas. And so, we changed up a lot in terms of how we’re getting our interviews and quotas with non-college-educated voters.
You have to acknowledge that Trump so changed what’s going on in the political dynamics in America. And there was no way to model out who was coming out in 2016. There just wasn’t. We saw a little bit of that in 2020, as well.
I think the challenges have a lot to do with modeling who’s going to turn out. That has been an absolute mystery in the Trump era. I couldn’t tell you who’s going to turn out now.
What metrics do pollsters find best gauge who will turn out to vote?
We do an enthusiasm level, and we do a likelihood, but most of what we’re doing is message development and strategy. Most of what media polls do is the big number/little number, the head-to-head, the traits, the job ratings, etc. Pollsters who are in the political space to help campaigns are message development strategists. Everything that we do goes into a TV ad or a digital ad or a speech. Yes, the head-to-head is important, and we want to get that right, but media polls have turned every pollster into a prognosticator, and that’s a misread of what we do.
“Media polls have turned every pollster into a prognosticator, and that’s a misread of what we do.”
Many who were on the fence about voting when it was a Biden versus Trump matchup now say they plan to vote. How does polling capture this new, still-changing electorate?
All you can do is try to guess what percentage of your sample should be “new voters.” You have the voter history of 2022, 2020, 2018, and 2016, and you have new registrants. That’s not a perfect science. Who says that this cycle will be the same as past cycles, where you have to be up a certain percentage nationally to win the battleground states?
This is a tough industry on a good day. It has been a more difficult challenge during the Trump years figuring out how we can get hard-to-reach voters. Now we know there’s a universe that doesn’t want to take a live call or doesn’t trust a live call, so we’ve corrected for a lot of that. We’re constantly going to have to evolve, and we’re going to constantly have to correct and do better because of all of the challenges that we have.
But I’m proud of our industry, and I’m proud of the fact that, professionally, what we do — which you don’t see — we do really well. Polling is really expensive, and most media outlets don’t spend the money necessary to do it right.
What kinds of things might both the Trump and Harris campaigns want to know from their internal polling at this point in the race?
Presidential campaigns, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, are going to test both positive messaging based on the strength of issues and character traits, and they’re going to test all of the contrasts. There’s nothing each side hasn’t tested in terms of positive frames on each and negative frames on each. It’s September, they’ve been polling for eight months.
What every campaign does is they dial-test their convention speeches, and they dial-test their debates. [That is, monitor responses of sample audiences to get their immediate response to words, phrases, and ideas in real time.] So, they’re seeing what hits with swing voters. The convention speeches for both of them, you can guarantee they dial-tested, and that helped refine some of the things that they would say in the debate. And then, they’ll dial test the debates because they’ve got two months of rallies, two months of speeches, and they have TV ads, so the more data, the better. They have the foundation of their research on message, development, and contrast, and now, it’s all about refinement.
You say most media polls aren’t very reliable. Which are the better ones?
The Wall Street Journal is the gold standard, without a doubt, because it’s multimodal. I think that Pew Research Center is the gold standard of online polls because they’ve built their own online database. And then, I think the NBC poll is really good because you have a Democratic firm and a Republican firm running it, like The Wall Street Journal poll.
Blue, green, gold: Why eyes of wild cats vary in color
Wendy Heywood
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Study traces iris diversity to gray-eyed ancestor
Fans of Clementine, the cat who recently captivated TikTok with her rare eye color, should take note.
The piercing golden gaze of cheetahs, the striking blue stare of snow leopards, and the luminous green glare of leopards are all traits that can be traced to one ancestor, an ocelot-like feline progenitor that roamed Earth over 30 million years ago.
In a new study published in iScience, Harvard researchers say this ancestral population likely featured felines with both brown and gray eyes, the latter paving the way for the rapid and wide diversification of iris color seen in cat species today.
“When I started this study I asked, ‘What do we know about eye color?’ And the truth is, very little, as there are basically almost no phylogenetic evolutionary studies on eye color,” said lead author Julius Tabin, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.
Most studies focus on the distribution of eye colors in a species, or on the genes involved in making eye color in humans and domesticated animals. Studies on eye color in animal populations are rare due to the challenges of preservation and lack of diversity — most animals have brown eyes.
While eye color in humans is likely a result of sexual selection, and in domesticated animals a result of artificial selection, Tabin wondered what spurred the wide diversity in wild Felidae. Without fossil preservation to rely on, Tabin took a novel approach analyzing digital images from sources such as iNaturalist to identify and categorize the varied eye colors in 52 felid taxa.
Tabin and co-author Katherine Chiasson, a master’s student at Johns Hopkins University, created an algorithm to map iris colors onto a phylogenetic tree of Felidae.
“Most species have a singular eye color with no variation. So, it’s really surprising that once you get into the cats — lions, tigers, panthers, etc.— we see all these different eye colors.”
Julius Tabin
“We found a lot of variability of color between species,” said Tabin, “but shockingly, we also found a lot of intraspecific variability. Most species have a singular eye color with no variation. So, it’s really surprising that once you get into the cats — lions, tigers, panthers, etc.— we see all these different eye colors. There are actually very few Felidae species that have only a singular eye color in their population.”
Equipped with the colors mapped onto the phylogenetic tree, the researchers set out to reconstruct the ancestral state. They found that early, pre-felid lineages (the ancestor of felids and their closest relatives, the linsangs) had brown eyes only. However, after the linsang species branched off, gray-eyed felines appeared alongside brown-eyed ones.
Examples of the five felid eye colors, with inter- and intraspecific variation. Each row contains an example of each of the five eye colors, and each column contains two representatives of the same species.
Top row credits: Piet Bakker, Pexels; Luis D. Romero, Shutterstock; Tambako The Jaguar, Flickr; dinoanimals.com; Song Dazhao, CFCA. Bottom row credits: Ronda Gregorio, Smithsonian National Zoo; Nayer Youakim; Tambako The Jaguar, Flickr; Tambako The Jaguar, Flickr; Abujoy, Wikimedia Commons
“It’s likely this happened due to a genetic mutation that drastically decreased the pigment in the eye,” Tabin said. Melanin can be either eumelanin, which is brown, or pheomelanin, which is yellow. To go from a brown eye to a gray eye would require a decrease of eumelanin. That decrease would lead to an eye that is not fully brown and not fully gray, but a brownish gray color, which is what the researchers found.
Those gray-eyed felines opened the door to a burst of greens, yellows, and blues, providing an anchor between brown eyes and the new colors.
“Blue eyes require carefully balanced low levels of pigment and are likely recessive in felids. A wild population would probably not be able to maintain blue eyes in a population with only one blue-eyed individual among a sea of brown eyes. It’s probable that you would need something lighter than brown, but not as light as blue, to be the mediator. And that’s what you see: In every single cat species with blue eyes, they also have gray eyes,” said Tabin.
Tabin and Chiasson also observed that brown eyes and yellow eyes rarely coexist in a species. They said they were surprised to find a positive correlation between yellow eyes and round pupils, and a negative correlation between brown eyes and round pupils.
The researchers found no significant correlations for activity mode, zoogeographical region, habitat, and uniformity of eye color, which leaves the adaptive benefit of having varied eye colors an open question to pursue.
The researchers not only reconstructed the general eye color types present at each evolutionary node, but they were also able to predict the exact color of each ancestor’s eye.
“Being able to reconstruct color quantitatively is one of the paper’s greatest strengths, because it means we are the first animals to see the color of these eyes since these felids were alive millions of years ago,” Tabin said.
“The fact that rigorous studies like ours can be done by anyone with an internet connection and some curiosity is indicative of a field-wide revolution that is increasing the accessibility of science around the world.”
Katherine Chiasson
For Chiasson the study was special in part because all the resources they used are freely available online. “The fact that rigorous studies like ours can be done by anyone with an internet connection and some curiosity is indicative of a field-wide revolution that is increasing the accessibility of science around the world.”
The study opens opportunity for more investigation of the evolutionary importance of gray eyes, as well as eye-color evolution in natural populations, Tabin said. “I’m still riding high on the excitement of knowing that the felid ancestor had both brown and gray eyes, because that’s something I didn’t go in expecting or even thinking about.”
Claire Messud (from left) talks with Imani Perry, Clarissa Tossin, and Sharon Weinberger.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Both spring from hard questions, benefit from interdisciplinary feedback, former Radcliffe fellows say
Some may be surprised to learn that academic and other intellectual breakthroughs and art spring from the same source.
Both begin with hard questions, and even when they lead to many answers or no answers at all, they should be pursued to advance knowledge and understanding, said artists and scholars during a panel discussion last Friday on how writing and art can stir the public imagination.
The interdisciplinary panel of writers included two novelists, a computer scientist, a journalist, a visual artist, and a scholar of race, all Radcliffe fellows. The discussion was part of the festivities marking the 25th anniversary of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was moderated by Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In her opening remarks, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, highlighted the distinctive aspect of the institute she leads.
“True to Radcliffe’s interdisciplinary mission, fellows represent a broad range of scholarly, professional, and creative fields. They come to Radcliffe from different types of institutions and at various stages of their careers,” said Brown-Nagin, also a professor of history at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Pulitzer Prize recipients and National Book Award winners work alongside promising artists and scholars in the early stages of the careers. Filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and novelists exchange ideas with historians, biologists, physicists, social scientists, physicians, lawyers and more.”
Panelists agreed that the only way to push the boundaries of what we know is by asking new questions or finding fresh ways of looking old ones.
“Every book that I write, every article begins with a question, and I try to answer it using all the bibliographies, but also the methods that are at my disposal,” said Imani Perry, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies.
Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge RI ’19, author of the novels “Libertie” and “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” agreed. During her Radcliffe year, Greenidge faced many questions while working on “Libertie,” her second historical novel.
“With an artistic project, oftentimes the point is that you’re asking a question that doesn’t have an answer or that could have multiple answers at once,” she said.
For Sharon Weinberger RI ’16, national security and foreign policy editor at the Wall Street Journal, the hardest part is to come up with the initial question but also decide whether it is important enough to pursue.
“First of all, it may not be answerable,” she said. “And if you could answer it, maybe it’s not that important. And that’s where I think the interdisciplinary part is helpful. Having colleagues who say, ‘Is that an interesting question?’ ‘Would you want to know the answer?’’’
Computer scientist Francine Berman RI ’20, faculty associate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said being surrounded by fellows from different disciplines allowed her to examine the social and environmental impacts of technology on people’s daily lives and the ways in which technology could be used to further the common good.
“Radcliffe is a great place to ask big questions,” said Berman. “For me, the big questions really have to do with how we thrive in a technological world and what strategies we can use to reduce the risk of the technologies we deal with every day, and that certainly includes AI, and to promote the benefits.”
Messud quoted the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”) in asking panelists to talk about the role of imagination in their intellectual ventures.
Clarissa Tossin RI ’18, interdisciplinary artist, said imagination is central to her art.
“Imagination, for me, is everything,” said Tossin. “I do research to do my work, but then I have to do that extra leap, which is where the imagination enters to guide me where I can go because it’s not just a scientific or scholarly inquiry.”
For writers, imagination helps create stories, characters and entire worlds, they said. And scholars said they benefit from learning storytelling techniques to make their writing more vivid and reach a broader audience.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, Perry said imagination works in both scholarship and nonfiction. Scholars might be constrained by the facts, she said, but imagination intervenes to help put all the facts together to tell a story that would resonate with readers and to envision possible futures.
“It’s the work of the imagination,” said Perry, “but the undercurrent of all the work is getting closer to a just and good world. And that absolutely requires the imagination, to get us toward something that we have not yet fully seen.”
Falls put older adults at increased risk of Alzheimer’s
Researchers found dementia more frequently diagnosed within one year of a fall, compared to other types of injuries
BWH Communications
4 min read
In a study that included 2 million older adults who sustained a traumatic injury, 10.6 percent of patients who experienced a fall were subsequently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Falls also increased the risk of a future dementia diagnosis by 21 percent, according to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The researchers analyzed Medicare Fee-for-Service data from 2014 to 2015, which included 2,453,655 older adult patients who experienced a traumatic injury, as well as follow-up data for one year after the initial fall. The researchers found that half of the patients in the study received their injuries in a fall, and that these patients were significantly likelier to be diagnosed with dementia within one year after their injuries.
“The relationship between falls and dementia appears to be a two-way street,” said senior author Molly Jarman, assistant professor in the Department of Surgery and deputy director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health at the Brigham. “Cognitive decline can increase the likelihood of falls, but trauma from those falls may also accelerate dementia’s progression and make a diagnosis more likely down the line. Thus, falls may be able to act as precursor events that can help us identify people who need further cognitive screening.”
“Cognitive decline can increase the likelihood of falls, but trauma from those falls may also accelerate dementia’s progression.”
Molly Jarman
More than 14 million older adults, or one in four, report falls each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and falls are also the leading cause of injury in older adults. These injuries can have long-lasting or permanent consequences, including declines in functional status, overall loss of independence, or risk of death.
To improve the early identification of dementia, the researchers recommend implementing cognitive screenings in older adults who experience an injurious fall that results in either an emergency department visit or admission to the hospital.
The research suggests that completing cognitive screenings in older patients after a fall could help detect dementia sooner. However, this is easier said than done, particularly in light of disparities in access to primary care among older adults.
“One of the biggest challenges we face is the lack of ownership in the process of follow-up screening for cognitive impairment, because there may not be adequate time for these screenings in an emergency department or trauma center setting,” said Alexander J. Ordoobadi, the first author of the study and a resident physician in the Department of Surgery at the Brigham.
“Ideally, after an injury, older adults should receive follow-up care with a primary care provider or geriatrician who can monitor their cognitive health and long-term functional recovery after the injury, but many older adults don’t have a regular primary care provider and lack access to a geriatrician,” he added.
The study results additionally highlight the need for more clinicians who can provide care for older adults, including cognitive assessments after fall injuries.
“Our study highlights the opportunity to intervene early and the need for more clinicians who can provide comprehensive care for older adults,” said Jarman. “If we can establish that falls serve as early indicators of dementia, we could identify other precursors and early events that we could intervene on, which would significantly improve our approach to managing cognitive health in older adults.”
This study was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health under award number K01AG065414.
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After months of listening and learning, open inquiry co-chairs detail working group's recommendations
In April, President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning announced a faculty working group to examine how community members experience Harvard classrooms and the broader campus environment and to make recommendations on how the University can most effectively nurture and reinforce a culture of open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas.
The Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which released its report on Tuesday, was initiated to address concerns that members of the community feel constrained in their ability to share their views, with some students, faculty, and staff members expressing hesitancy to discuss controversial issues out of concerns about peer judgment, social media criticism, professional or reputational damage, and the potential for complaints about bullying and harassment. The working group conducted surveys and held extensive listening sessions across Harvard’s campuses and found that among students, 55 percent of respondents said they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues inside the classroom, with 45 percent indicating that they are reluctant to share their views about such topics.
Among Harvard faculty members and instructors, 59 percent of survey respondents reported that they are comfortable pursuing research on a controversial topic; 49 percent reported that they are comfortable leading a classroom discussion about controversial issues; and 32 percent reported that they are comfortable discussing such issues outside of class. The working group underscored that, while these findings are not unique to Harvard, the reluctance of community members to discuss controversial topics demands attention. The report thus highlights activities and pedagogical best practices already in place across the University and makes recommendations to nurture open inquiry across its campuses.
The Gazette discussed the report with the co-chairs of the working group: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, and professor of history; and Professor of Government Eric Beerbohm, faculty dean of Quincy House.
The working group faced what seems a difficult task, assessing an emerging cultural problem at odds with strongly held beliefs about the nature of the educational experience at Harvard. How did you tackle this issue?
Brown-Nagin: We engaged a broad cross-section of the Harvard community over a period of several months. As co-chairs, we met with faculty representatives of every Harvard School. We conducted 23 listening sessions with more than 600 Harvard affiliates, including faculty, instructors, students, staff, and representatives of the Harvard Alumni Association. We also surveyed undergraduates, graduate, and professional school students from all of the Schools as well as faculty, instructors, and staff. I found the conversations with so many different members of our community fascinating. One could really appreciate the cultural differences and the wide variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are represented across the Schools.
Were people eager to talk about this?
Beerbohm: Implementing Chatham House-style norms during our listening sessions really made a difference. It created a space where people felt safe to open up about their hesitations around discussing contested topics. Students, staff, and faculty shared their fears about being misunderstood or misrepresented, whether in class or outside it. One student said something that really stuck with me: “I want to speak freely, but I’m constantly worried that if I say the wrong thing, I’ll end up all over Sidechat or TikTok and be labeled forever.” That captures a key concern we highlighted in our report — many students are reluctant to share their views because they’re afraid of peer judgment and social media backlash. But what’s encouraging is that our discussions often pointed toward solutions. Many participants expressed a hunger for tools to help them disagree more constructively.
Did anything surprise you in these conversations?
Brown-Nagin: We often think of Harvard in terms of the whole instead of the parts, and this was an assignment that brought to the fore both the whole and the parts. In speaking to the different groups across the University, I was impressed by the hunger for engagement about the issues at hand, the unified commitment to excellence in teaching and learning, and support across the University for learning communities in which everyone can thrive. Students, faculty, instructors all want the tools and the policies in place that will enable the kind of intellectually engaging community that people arrive on this campus to pursue.
Coming from the Law School, where we teach about an adversarial system, there’s comfort with disagreement and an expectation that arguments can be made in support of many different positions. The same is true for my understanding of the history profession, which also involves the interpretation of evidence. So, one thing I did find surprising was the extent to which some across campus do not necessarily welcome debate and disagreement. To me, they’re a big part of the point of higher education. Becoming a professional in any field should mean learning how to be persuasive, how to marshal evidence in support of an argument, how to reason.
What did the committee find through its work?
Brown-Nagin: A majority of Harvard students — including 55 percent of survey respondents — reported that they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues in the classroom. However, other students, including 45 percent of survey respondents, reported that they are reluctant — some very reluctant — to share their views about charged topics. We also identified key drivers of this reluctance to talk about controversial issues. The first is concern about peer judgment. Harvard students respect one another. They respect one another’s talents and positions, and they’re very concerned about what others think about them. There is reluctance because of worries about criticism on social media. There is unease about potential reputational damage from speaking out. We also noted some concern about potential bullying and harassment complaints being made against them as a result of comments in class. The other thing we found is that this reluctance is not confined to students. There are many faculty and instructors who also expressed a reluctance to teach about controversial topics.I should note that this concern is greatest — as one might expect — among untenured faculty or non-ladder instructors.
It is critically important to appreciate that the reluctance to speak about controversial issues is hardly unique to Harvard or to the higher education sector, generally. It is a widespread problem across American society and institutions. However, given our mission of excellence through the pursuit of truth and the creation and dissemination of knowledge across generations, the difficulty in speaking openly and respectfully is especially harmful in higher education.
Beerbohm: It’s a significant challenge and not unique to Harvard, but I think Harvard is uniquely placed — with our full immersion system of undergraduate life, in particular — to tackle it. I think we can learn a lot and share a lot with broader higher education.
“Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry.”
Eric Beerbohm
Are there substantial best practices already in place that might lead us toward a community-wide answer to this challenge?
Brown-Nagin: Absolutely, there are people all over our campuses who are already engaged in doing the work of promoting constructive disagreement. But we still have work to do. The point of the report’s appendix is to showcase some of the models and resources that are already available and suggest to readers that although we are reporting on challenges, we also have tools available to move toward remedies.
Beerbohm: Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry. Many of our faculty are employing innovative classroom techniques designed to foster constructive disagreement. This involves creating spaces for respectful, good-faith dialogues where participants are genuinely curious about each other’s perspectives. One promising practice is the use of anonymous polling at the start of discussions, which allows students to see the diversity of views within the room and feel more comfortable sharing their own perspectives. In my own teaching, I’ve started to use large-language models to identify and engage students who hold outlier views. I’ve found that hearing these students’ voices, in particular, can expand the space for ideas and arguments.
A cross-section of our courses already focus on the skill of constructive disagreement, and this is something we could expand across the University. Take Michael Sandel’s course, “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” It engages about 700 students in some of the most contested issues of our time. What’s great is that some sections meet in the Houses, with follow-up discussions in our dining halls. This creates a spillover effect — a kind of co-curriculum that engages with students who aren’t enrolled in the course.
We envision the Bok Center for Teaching, the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning, and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics developing required teaching modules that, early on, foster the intellectual virtues necessary for productive discourse — qualities like humility, fairness, and curiosity. We can also reward faculty who excel at navigating difficult discussions and share successful practices across Harvard’s different Schools. Our professional Schools have some of the leading experts in facilitation and negotiation, and we hope to tap into their expertise as we build community-wide solutions. The real challenge is creating consistency so that these modules aren’t just one-off experiences but become a defining part of our students’ time here.
“We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education.”
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Let’s talk about the recommendations. Is there a particular thread that ties them all together?
Brown-Nagin: What we are suggesting through the recommendations is that there is an imperative for the University and the Schools to take steps to ensure that everyone is aware of what is expected of us. We have to broadly appreciate lively classroom interactions, disagreement, a spectrum of viewpoints in order for us to move toward a realization of our goals of open inquiry and constructive disagreement. We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education. Another overarching theme in the recommendations is that the capacity to engage in challenging conversations can be taught and learned. These are challenges on which we can make progress. There are many different Schools that are committed already to making progress and my hope is that the report can galvanize greater commitment to the goals of the working group and to the tools necessary to achieve them.
Beerbohm: We’re recommending what you might call a “full stack” solution — one that doesn’t stop at orientation but runs throughout a student’s entire experience at Harvard. This means cultivating these skills from the moment students set foot on campus and reinforcing them through every aspect of University life — from the Yard and the Houses to student organizations, and of course, within the classroom itself.
Our report emphasizes that this culture of empathetic curiosity has to be immersive. It’s not just about isolated events or courses; it’s about embedding the norms of open inquiry across curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular spaces. This includes creating environments where students and faculty alike are encouraged to engage with views they profoundly disagree with. We stress the importance of modeling these practices ourselves. That means faculty demonstrating what my colleague Ned Hall calls “collaborative disagreement”—bringing students and alumni into these discussions, and creating spaces where diverse perspectives can be explored without fears of conversations going viral on social-media platforms. The goal is to make these ideals — of open-mindedness and big-heartedness — central to our students’ experience.
The report makes several recommendations. Are there ones that you think particularly important?
Brown-Nagin: I would cite the recommendations about confidentiality of classroom discussions and responsible social media usage as absolutely key to making progress on some of the challenges that we identified. So many different people expressed concerns that statements made in class might be disseminated in ways that could be harmful to the speaker’s reputation; that fear is obviously detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Several of our Schools have mandated the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution of classroom statements that we cite in the appendix and that we hope will be more widely adopted to mitigate fears about communicating in class and to build trust in the classroom. The reluctance to freely communicate inside and even outside of class is strongly related to concerns about reputational damage from social media postings. There is a widespread concern about being attacked on social media and it, too, is highly detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Fortunately, there are many people on campus who are well acquainted with these and who can help us find ways to both promote responsible usage and ensure the freedom of expression absolutely also vital to achieving our goals.
Beerbohm: There’s a kind of collective action problem when it comes to open inquiry. Members of our community seek challenging dialogue but many report hesitation in initiating it. As faculty, we can play a crucial role in breaking this stalemate. Through case studies, simulations, role-playing, in-class games, and debate, we can signal our commitment to creating a learning environment where students feel safe to disagree — with each other and with us. It’s important to set clear classroom norms that encourage critical thinking and respectful debate, making it explicit that diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but are essential for intellectual growth. This isn’t virtue signaling but a deliberate effort to reshape classroom norms to foster trust and openness, giving our students the permission to stick their necks out and experiment with ideas and arguments. One student shared with us, “I sometimes feel there’s an invisible script in class that I’m expected to follow, and if I deviate from it, the atmosphere goes cold.” Our challenge is to counteract this by demonstrating that there is no script — that the most valuable contributions come from genuine engagement and independent thought, not from echoing presumed viewpoints.
Is that moment when the classroom goes cold also the moment when the faculty member should step in and open up the conversation? Is there an element of faculty skill-building needed here?
Beerbohm: Absolutely. When the classroom atmosphere goes cold — when we sense that students are starting to bite their tongues — it’s a signal that we need to create structures that allow the conversation to reopen. This might mean assigning roles for students, running a simulation where each student knows they are advocating for a position, even if they disagree with it. The ability to argue a point you personally don’t hold is a cardinal take-home skill, not just in law school but across disciplines. It’s Socratic at its core. We’re also envisioning faculty workshops where we can share best practices, techniques that have been successful in keeping classroom discourse open and constructive. This doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all approach, but it is our pedagogical responsibility to establish this ethos early in our syllabi and in the first weeks of class. The norms of how we respond to and harness disagreement need to be clear and practiced from the start. Our report highlights the need for a carefully worked-out pedagogy around disagreement, and this is where skill-building among faculty and graduate students can make a real difference.
How does norm-setting happen?
Beerbohm: We take a pluralistic approach to norm-setting. Some of our colleagues co-create a compact with their students on the first day of class, defining how discussions should unfold in ways that are both rigorous and respectful. Others provide a set of guidelines for dialogue and invite students to discuss and refine them. There are also faculty who don’t formally set out rules but instead model the behavior from the outset, allowing students to observe and internalize these norms through experience. We were careful not to prescribe one particular method in our report. Each of these methods — whether co-creation, guided discussion, or modeling — can be effective, depending on the instructor’s style and the classroom dynamic. The key is to ensure that students — through a pedagogy inside and outside the classroom — embrace norms of constructive dialogue grounded in empathy and curiosity.
How will mastering this ability to have conversations across differences help students when they leave campus?
Brown-Nagin: In addition to pursuing truth and creating knowledge, the University and certainly the College explicitly aspire to educate leaders who can contribute to broader society. And our view is that learning to thrive on a campus that includes many identities, experiences, and viewpoints is excellent preparation for living in a democratic society committed to pluralism and opportunity for all.
Brown-Nagin: I think our community is eager to imagine how open inquiry could move us toward a better way of talking about the kinds of issues that are being tackled by those task forces. Few of us have been unmoved by the events of the past year. In our listening sessions, we heard from a wide range of students about experiences inside and outside the classroom that touch on the charges of those task forces. Some of the most gripping stories came from Israeli and Jewish students whose attempts to engage in dialogue were rejected by other students, who have disavowed talking to Zionists on the assumption — mistaken in many cases — that all of those students agree with whatever premises are being ascribed to Zionism. We also heard from Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students who had been called “terrorists” on the assumption that anyone who cares about or stands up for the rights of the Palestinian people supports terrorism. Some reported that criticisms of Israeli government policy were wrongly conflated with a challenge to the right of Israel to exist.
So there very much is an intersection between the goals of open inquiry and constructive dialogue and the imperatives of those task forces. These are very complicated, painful issues. But if we are to live up to our expectations, our aspirations to open inquiry and constructive dialogue, we have to be able to engage across those differences. Open inquiry is for everyone, for all backgrounds and identities, and I hope that this work can be a part of an effort to create opportunities and spaces for community members to connect across those particular boundaries.
Beerbohm: I’d like to add that our report aligns with the important work of our sibling Working Group on Institutional Voice. That report raises concerns about how, when University leaders speak on certain issues, they might inadvertently pre-empt individual speech and, in some cases, hinder open inquiry. The fear is that official statements can close off debate by signaling an institutional stance that may discourage the diverse and rigorous exchanges essential to the pursuit of truth.
Our report offers a vision for how a university that speaks less as a collective entity can foster a vibrant dialogue among its members. We emphasize our responsibility is to create an environment where differences are not only tolerated but welcomed. The goal isn’t to prescribe viewpoints but to support a culture where people are encouraged to engage with the sources of each other’s disagreements and, through that engagement, uncover new insights. Taken together, the reports present a unified vision: a commitment to open, rigorous dialogue. It’s a vision in which intellectual diversity is embraced as part of the search for truth — which is what unites us as a community.
Celebrating 25th anniversary of Radcliffe Institute
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Three Harvard presidents, two Nobel laureates gather to mark ‘unique legacy and remarkable impact’
Three Harvard presidents and two Nobel laureates gathered with Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin last Thursday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
During the celebration, Brown-Nagin reflected on the institute’s “unique legacy and remarkable impact” and noted the many important contributions made by Radcliffe pioneers, including Mary Ingraham Bunting, a microbiologist and the college’s fifth dean, which ultimately led to the institute’s founding and success.
“Bunting was one of the main trailblazers. She was also acknowledging the many women who were educated at Radcliffe as students who went on to become leaders in many different fields, along with prior administrators going back to Radcliffe College who, in their own way, pushed/supported the idea of what eventually became the institute as we know it in 1999,” she said.
Radcliffe Institute Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin with an image of Mary Ingraham Bunting.
Brown-Nagin also announced the launch of a new three-year initiative on academic freedom and a project by Schlesinger Library to digitize its substantial collection of archival material from Radcliffe College’s own 120-year history.
The Radcliffe Institute was established in 1999 following Radcliffe College’s formal merger with Harvard.
At its heart is the fellowship program, which promotes interdisciplinary exposure for participants, with a particular focus on lending a hand to female scholars, who, for years, were very much in the minority in their departments and institutions and at a distinct disadvantage when it came to financial and professional support.
“The goal was twofold: to encourage and catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers,” Brown-Nagin said.
During the celebration, Harvard President Alan M. Garber spoke with distinguished economists Claudia Goldin and Oliver Hart about their careers, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and how today’s technology might have reshaped their prior research.
They were each awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Goldin in 2023 and Hart in 2016.
Both laureates spent a year as Radcliffe fellows and recalled being challenged and inspired by their experience engaging with other fellows whose expertise was outside of economics — arts and humanities, hard sciences, and the law — and how they were able to use the fellowship’s time and resources to pursue research that informed their later work.
Goldin, a labor economist who is currently researching the many giant steps women have taken economically over the last several decades and “why women won,” talked about how she was able to collaborate with former fellow Claudia Olivetti, a young economist who became a valued colleague, co-author and, eventually, her best friend for the last 18 years.
“It was truly magical,” said Goldin, a 2005-06 fellow, of her time at Radcliffe.
President Emeritus Neil Rudenstine was presented with a Radcliffe medal.
Hart, an economic theorist and a 2020-21 fellow, said he’s most excited about what he’s working on now, research that builds on his earlier scholarship by forging an alternative approach to the traditional way legal contracts are constructed. “I think it may be, in the long run, my most significant,” he said.
Garber, an economist and physician, was appointed provost in 2011 by the then-President Drew Gilpin Faust, before stepping in earlier this year to serve as interim and now president. He recognized Brown-Nagin for her deep involvement in key University initiatives in recent years.
As a legal scholar and historian, she chaired the group that produced the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report in 2022, which made recommendations to the University about redressing harms that occurred during its 400-year history.
Brown-Nagin currently co-heads a University working group on fostering “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” that Garber said would soon issue its own report.
Gilpin Faust, president emerita of Harvard and the institute’s founding dean, presented a Radcliffe medal to Neil L. Rudenstine, the University’s president from 1991 to 2001, in recognition of his leading role in reimagining the former women’s college into a robust center of independent and interdisciplinary scholarship at Harvard.
Accepting this rare award, Rudenstine recalled the daunting challenge before them in those early days and the worry “whether we could possibly live up to the idea of a truly distinguished Advanced Institute worthy of both Radcliffe and Harvard” that would flourish like Radcliffe College had over the previous century.
Today, “the institute embodies, in my mind, exactly what we hoped it would do,” which was to sustain and embolden intellectual achievement and imagination, said Rudenstine.
“It’s done so much to bring Harvard as well as Radcliffe to the fore in ways we never could have imagined 25 years ago.”
Boston Globe advice columnist Meredith Goldstein (left) and “Love Letters” podcast producer Christine Ahanotu discuss young love following “Romeo and Juliet” at the Loeb Drama Center.
Photo by Jodi Hilton
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Globe relationship columnist sorts timeless elements of youth, love, social divisions of 16th-century classic in new A.R.T. production
Meredith Goldstein did not leap at the chance to host an after-show conversation about the American Repertory Theater’s production of “Romeo and Juliet.”
It is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s best-known and most-performed plays. Besides the live performances of the 16th-century classic staged around the country and the world each year, there have been scores of interpretations, adaptations, and send-ups on television and film. Could there possibly be anything new to say?
But as The Boston Globe’s relationship columnist and podcaster watched the new A.R.T. production it occurred to her that there are a lot of themes worth talking about — and new ways to talk about them — which she did with the audience after last Thursday’s performance.
“I was reminded of the great humor — I laughed so much more than I thought I would,” Goldstein said. “I really wanted to talk about [younger people]. In writing an advice column for 15 years, I’m constantly shocked by the lack of empathy for young people with problems.”
The pair discussed with the audience their previous encounters with “Romeo and Juliet” and what struck them differently about the story during A.R.T.’s production.
For both Goldstein and Ahanotu, people’s ability — or inability — to change was worth noting.
“Our ability to change is influenced greatly by our age,” Ahanotu said. “The things that seem like huge decisions when we are teenagers … It’s easy as we age to forget that newness and the novelty, but it’s a really real thing.”
Our brains don’t really settle until we’re 25, sometimes even older, Goldstein said. Romeo and Juliet are teenagers. While their behavior seems outlandish at times, even foolish, it’s also a pretty accurate portrayal of how younger people might act. One thing that was missing in their lives was good advice.
“Having counsel and help is really important, and I think this play shows how terrible adults can be about that and how sometimes they can’t see beyond their own priorities,” Goldstein said.
Directed by Tony Award-winner Diane Paulus and choreographed by two-time Olivier Award winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the production stars Rudy Pankow (“Outer Banks”Netflix series) as Romeo and Emilia Suárez (“Up Here” Hulu series) as Juliet.
The cast portrays the roles with nuance, staying true to Shakespeare’s language but bringing an updated approach to movement, delivery, and staging that made their characters feel more contemporary.
Audience members observed the selfishness of the adults, pointed out how much of the plot is driven by the irrationality of teenage hormones, and wondered how things would have turned out if the characters had practiced better communication.
“As much as things change is as much as they remain the same,” Ahanotu said. The play is full of class, race, social, age, and gender divisions — with characters constantly taking sides. “Why is it that we allow [those divides] to affect the people that we love?”
Toward the end of the conversation, Ahanotu and Goldstein talked about how Romeo’s behavior might be described in the social-media-inflected language of today. Was he “love-bombing” Juliet, showering her with immense positivity all at once? Was he “monkey-branching,” having spent the whole beginning of the play confessing his heartbreak over Rosaline and just like that, “Juliet is the sun”?
One audience member asked how Goldstein thought Romeo would have performed on today’s dating apps. Would he be considered a menace?
“I think he would be the absolute worst, but I understand why everyone would swipe right,” Goldstein said, eliciting laughs. “Talk about a pickup artist … It’s brilliant and terrible.”
Romeo and Juliet will be running until Oct. 6. For showtimes and to purchase tickets, visit A.R.T.’s website.
Wrong, says cybersecurity expert. Con artists use time-tested tricks that can work on anyone regardless of age, IQ — what’s changed is scale.
Online scams are on the rise. Last year, American consumers lost $12.5 billion due to cybercrime, which represents a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to a report by the FBI. Cybercriminals use psychological trickery to dupe victims into giving up their money, and their tactics are becoming more sophisticated. They post fake ads on social media platforms, send emails with phishing links or malware, and recently in the Boston area, solicit payments for unpaid tolls via text message.
The Gazette asked cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier, an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, what the government, tech companies, and consumers can do to prevent online scams. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Many people think only older adults can be conned. Is there anyone who is free from falling for a scam?
It’s not a function of intelligence, or education, whether you’ll fall for them. Scams affect people regardless of age, income levels, education, and IQ. In some ways, people who are smarter become victims precisely because they think it can’t happen to them. They say, “I’m too smart, I would never fall for that,” and they do because maybe it catches them on a bad day. Author and cyberspace activist Cory Doctorow wrote an essay about how he got scammed with a fake message from his bank the same day he was having a bank problem. Or remember the 2016 phishing email John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, clicked on, which led to the DNC email hacking leak? It can happen to anyone.
How has the scammers’ modus operandi changed with the rise of technology?
It’s not different from the way it used to work in the past, where a con artist would bump into you on the street and start talking with you. The difference is that online they can do it millions of times. The speed and the scale are what has changed, but if you read about the big scams of the 1920s, they were just as profitable.
According to the FBI, consumers lost $12.5 billion to cybercrime fraud last year.
It’s hard to know if the numbers are accurate. A lot of people don’t report because it’s embarrassing to be the victim of fraud. You feel terrible because you were tricked, you were fooled, and you’re out a lot of money. I have sympathy for scam victims.
Will AI make online scams harder to detect?
We’re starting to see AI-generated phishing emails, AI-generated fake videos, and AI-generated fake phone calls. And there are more targeted scams, where scammers target the CFO of a company pretending to be the CEO. If you ask me how to prevent it, the answer is I don’t know.
Cryptocurrency seems to be of the most common payment methods for scams. Why is that?
It is an easy way to move money around. Online scams have been made easier by cryptocurrency, which allows instantaneous transfer of wealth in a way that can’t be taken back. Scammers often ask their victims for a Bitcoin payment. You could track the rise of both ransomware and online scams to cryptocurrency.
The banking system is better equipped to block suspicious transactions. If you try to wire money to Russia, the bank is going to call you and say, “What are you doing?” But if you send money to a scammer in Russia via cryptocurrency, nobody notices. More regulation would be valuable, just to make it harder for a regular person to buy and sell cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a disaster in so many ways. I wrote an essay about it.
Bruce Schneier.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Should a request for a Bitcoin payment be a red flag?
Yes, but by the time the person who has fallen for the scam hears that a Bitcoin transaction must take place, they had already bought the scam, and what is normally a red flag isn’t a red flag. The whole point of a scam is emotional trickery; a scam works because it works with emotions; and that’s why it’s hard to regulate or prevent it.
What’s the responsibility of social media companies to screen fake ads that can lead to scams?
It would be great if Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram would screen fake advertisements. They don’t do a good job because fake ads generate the same revenue as real ads. Why should they screen it? It’s profitable.
When we talk about the responsibility of social media companies, we must understand that the customers of Facebook are its advertisers. Us, the people using Facebook, are the product. Does Facebook have any responsibility to their customers? They certainly do, and they do well by their customers because they give them money. Do they do well by us, the product? We hope they do, but there’s little economic incentive.
Surveillance is the business model of the internet. Facebook and Google make money spying on you. They use your personal information to manipulate you, and they sell the right to manipulate you to ad companies. What a crappy business model that is. We could declare that business model illegal, but that is very unlikely, because it would involve a rethinking of how tech companies make money. But there are lots of alternatives. You can imagine requiring companies to be subscription-based or requiring advertising that’s not personalized. Today, when you see an ad, it’s a targeted ad that is sent to you based on the information tech companies have on you by tracking your searches and your posts.
Should the government regulate social media companies and ask them to screen for fraud?
I don’t know of any regulation that will reduce online scams because if someone sends you a text message, and you start chatting with them, and they tell you about an investment opportunity, and you start giving them money, what new regulation can prevent that? It’s already illegal.
Yet, I would like to see more screening on the part of the companies. I think comprehensive privacy regulation in the United States is important, but several bills have gone nowhere. Europe has General Data Protection Regulation, which includes privacy protections and penalties for companies that don’t comply. It’s good but it’s still not great. Already there are several states in the country that have GDPR-like legislation. In the class I teach every year, I pull a map of states that have privacy regulations, and every year, more states are following the trend.
Don’t click on unexpected emails or answer texts with links, which could lead to scams.
Beware of romance, job, and investment opportunities that sound too good to be true.
To spot and avoid scams, visit fbi.gov/scams or ftc.gov/scams.
Do you have any advice on how to avoid falling for an online scam?
I don’t have any special advice to avoid falling for an online scam but the one you’ve gotten all your life: If it seems too good to be true, it is.
Coming up with tips is hard because when you’re in a vulnerable moment, you’re not going to remember them or even listen to them. Scams target human psychology and like offline scams throughout history, they try to convince you of something that isn’t true and get you to give money for something that isn’t what you think it is. There is nothing new there. What is new is the scale and that they’re made easier through cryptocurrency. But like offline scams, online scams can involve romance, investing, charity, and all sorts of things where human emotions can get the best of you; where suddenly you’re not thinking, you’re emoting, and you do something that turns out to be, in retrospect, stupid.
You must have a good bullshit detector, but even if you do, you’re going to make mistakes. I think I have a good bullshit detector, but I also think I’ve been lucky. I’m not going to say, “I would never fall for it,” because the next week something might happen.
Two bereaved mothers who know price of war work for peace
Layla Alsheikh, Robi Damelin argue path to Mideast reconciliation begins with acknowledging common humanity
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Layla Alsheikh and Robi Damelin know the never-ending pain of losing a child.
Each had a son who died in the decadeslong deadly conflict between their communities in the Middle East. Through intention and a long process of healing, these women are now friends and travel the world advocating for peace, a mission made more urgent by the current fighting. The two spoke during a Harvard Divinity School event Monday.
“Today, we are privileged to have with us two people — one Israeli and one Palestinian — who are willing to share with us their experiences of loss so that we might be reminded of what is truly at stake at war and how none of us wins,” Marla Frederick, dean of the Divinity School and John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity, said during the discussion.
Alsheikh’s 6-month-old died of complications following a teargas attack on their village by Israeli forces in 2002. Damelin’s 24-year-old son David, a member of the peace movement, was killed by a Palestinian sniper during his mandated military service in the Israeli armed forces that same year.
The losses remain profound and fresh.
“Every time [I thought about what happened] I felt there’s a piece of my heart and my soul under the ground,” Alsheikh said. “It was so hard for me.”
“There’s nothing worse than losing a child,” Damelin said. “Somebody comes and slashes your heart, and it’ll never be the same.”
For both Damelin and Alsheikh, there’s been a desire to untangle the longstanding hate and pain of both sides of the conflict. Empathy has been key.
“I’ve spent such a lot of my life trying to understand why,” Damelin said at the discussion, done in partnership with American Friends of the Parents Circle — Families Forum (PCFF). “Why a young man who grows up in Gaza could do the things he did on the 7th of October?”
Sixteen years after her son died, Alsheikh was approached by a friend who wanted her to attend a meeting of PCFF, an Israeli-Palestinian nonprofit group of bereaved families seeking reconciliation instead of revenge by modeling constructive dialogue.
At the meeting she connected with the other Palestinian women, but still felt distrustful of the Israeli families there, all of whom had lost a close loved one. She decided to share her story with the group.
“Please don’t pro-Israel and please don’t pro-Palestine: pro-peace. This is what we need.”
Layla Alsheikh
When she broke down in tears, an Israeli woman stood up, apologized, and said, “I didn’t hurt you, but the people who hurt you are from my own people. I’m a mother too. I can understand your pain.” The women embraced.
“That was the first time I thought someone cared about me or could understand me,” Alsheikh said.
She continued to work with the organization and share their message of reconciliation. But it’s been a hard road.
A few years ago, an Israeli man in one of her meetings shared that he had been an officer in the army in the region where she lost her son.
At the time, he routinely stopped Palestinian families from receiving medical care — an experience Alsheikh had while caring for her son. It wasn’t until his own child became sick and he was stopped by guards that he realized the pain he had caused other families.
He quit the military, was jailed for refusing to serve, and eventually founded a nonprofit where former combatants from both sides work together for peace.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘This is so hard for me to listen to you. But at the same time, I want to thank you. Because if you hide that part of your story, I will never forgive you,’” she said. “‘But I will forgive you, because you have the courage and honesty to speak in front of me.’”
That was a major moment of reconciliation for her.
Damelin agreed that peace work is painful. But she also believes that preventing other people from experiencing the kind ofloss she has is worth it.
“One of the first things that I said [when David was killed was], ‘You can’t kill anybody in the name of my child,’” she said.
Years after her son was killed, three soldiers knocked on her door. They told her that they had caught the man who killed her son. She didn’t sleep for months.
“You can go around the world talking about peace just like I did … But then there’s a case that comes along [that tests you],” she said. “I couldn’t do this work in integrity if I wasn’t willing to walk the talk.”
She decided to write a letter to the man’s family, telling of her son David, the pain of her loss, but also of her desire to reconcile. She had the letter delivered by Palestinian friends.
Named a 2015 Woman of Impact by Women in the World, Damelin has continued to travel globally advocating for reconciliation and peace on behalf of the PCFF.
Recently, the group partnered with Georgetown University to create an online dialogue program called Listening from the Heart, which provides tools for participants and facilitators to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its complexity.
At the end of the event, Teddy Hickman-Maynard, associate dean for Ministry Studies, asked the two women if they had any final thoughts for the community.
“Please don’t pro-Israel and please don’t pro-Palestine: pro-peace. This is what we need,” Alsheikh said. “If you fight all the time, that won’t help us in any way. But if you are pro-peace, that will help us more than you think.”
Concentrated routines just as effective as regular weekly exercise in protecting against heart, digestive conditions as well as neurological illnesses
MGH Communications
3 min read
Being a “weekend warrior” is just as effective as regular weekly exercise in reducing the risk of developing more than 200 diseases, according to a new study out of Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
Results of the study are published in Circulation.
CDC guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week for overall health. Among people who meet these recommendations, those who exercise 20-30 minutes most days of the week experience benefits equal to those who go five to six days between longer exercise sessions.
The team analyzed information on 89,573 individuals in the prospective U.K. Biobank study who wore wrist accelerometers that recorded their total physical activity and time spent at different exercise intensities over one week. Participants’ physical activity patterns were categorized as weekend warrior, regular, or inactive, using the guideline-based threshold of 150 minutes per week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
The team then looked for associations between physical activity patterns and incidence of 678 conditions across 16 types of diseases, including mental health, digestive, neurological, and other categories.
The investigators’ analyses revealed that weekend warrior and regular physical activity patterns were each associated with substantially lower risks of 264 diseases compared with inactivity. Associations were strongest for cardiometabolic conditions such as hypertension (23 percent and 28 percent lower risks over a median of six years with weekend warrior and regular exercise, respectively) and diabetes (43 percent and 46 percent lower risks, respectively). However, associations also spanned all disease categories tested.
“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most.”
Shaan Khurshid
“Because there appears to be similar benefits for weekend warrior versus regular activity, it may be the total volume of activity, rather than the pattern, that matters most,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid, a faculty member in the Demoulas Center for Cardiac Arrhythmias at MGH.
“Future interventions testing the effectiveness of concentrated activity to improve public health are warranted, and patients should be encouraged to engage in guideline-adherent physical activity using any pattern that may work best for them,” he added.
Authorship: Shinwan Kany, Mostafa A. Al-Alusi, Joel T. Rämö, James P. Pirruccello, Timothy W. Churchill, Steven A. Lubitz, Mahnaz Maddah, J. Sawalla Guseh, Patrick T. Ellinor, and Shaan Khurshid.
Disclosures: Ellinor receives sponsored research support from Bayer AG, IBM Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Novo Nordisk; he has also served on advisory boards or consulted for MyoKardia and Bayer AG. Lubitz is an employee of Novartis as of July 2022 and received sponsored research support from Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Fitbit, Medtronic, Premier, and IBM, and has consulted for Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Blackstone Life Sciences, and Invitae.
This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (K08HL159346, K23HL159262-01A1, 1RO1HL092577, 1R01HL157635, 5R01HL139731, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, R01HL157635, T32HL007208, K23HL169839-01., the Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (521832260), the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the American Heart Association (19AMFDP34990046, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, 18SFRN34250007, 2023CDA1050571), the president and fellows of Harvard College (5KL2TR002542-04), the European Union (MAESTRIA 965286).
Research suggests the scuttling sea robin may serve as evolutionary model for trait development, including in humans
Promising new research focusing on the sea robin, an unpromising-looking fish that scuttles around the ocean floor on “legs,” may lead to new insights in trait development, including in humans.
Allard’s ensuing deep dive led to a collaboration with Stanford researchers studying the fish’s developmental genetics and culminated in back-to-back papers in Current Biology, co-authored by Bellono and Amy Herbert and David Kingsley at Stanford University, and others. Their research provides the most comprehensive understanding to date on how sea robins use their legs, what genes control the emergence of those legs, and how these animals could be used as a conceptual framework for learning about other evolutionary adaptations.
It turns out sea robin “legs” are actually extensions of their pectoral fins, of which they have three on each side. Allard first sought to determine whether the legs are bona fide sensory organs, which scientists had suspected but never confirmed.
He ran experiments observing captive sea robins hunting prey, in which they alternate between short bouts of swimming and “walking.” They also occasionally scratch at the sand surface to find buried prey, like mussels and other shellfish, without visual cues.
Corey Allard (left) and Nicholas Bellono.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
The researchers realized that the legs were sensitive to both mechanical and chemical stimuli. They even buried capsules containing only single chemicals, and the fish could easily find them.
Serendipity led to another chance discovery. They received a fresh shipment of fish mid-study that looked like the originals, but the new fish, Allard said, did not dig and find buried prey or capsules like the originals could. “I thought they were just some duds, or maybe the setup didn’t work,” joked Bellono, whose lab investigates sensory biology and cellular physiology of many marine animals, including octopuses, jellyfish, and sea slugs.
It turned out the researchers had acquired a different species of sea robin. In their studies, they ended up characterizingthem both — Prionotus carolinus, which dig to find buried prey and are highly sensitive to touch and chemical signals, and P. evolans, which lack these sensory capabilities and use their legs for locomotion and probing, but not for digging.
Examining the leg differences between the two fish, they found those of the digging variety were shovel-shaped and covered in protrusions called papillae, similar to our taste buds. The non-digging fish’s legs were rod-shaped and lacked papillae. Based on these differences, the researchers concluded that papillae are evolutionary sub-specializations.
Illustration by Lily Soucy
Allard’s paper describing the evolution of sea robins’ novel sensory organs included analysis of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology to examine leg form and structure across species and time. The digging species are restricted to only a few locations, he found, suggesting a relatively recent evolution of this trait.
Studying sea robin legs wasn’t just about hanging out with the unusualanimals (although that was fun too). The walking fish are a potentially powerful model organism to compare specialized traits, and to teach us about how evolution allows for adaptation to very specific environments.
About 6 million years ago, humans evolved the ability to walk upright, separating from their primate ancestors. Bipedalism is a defining feature of our species, and we only know so much about how, when, and why that change occurred.
Sea robins and their adaptation to living on the ocean floor could offer clues. For example, there are genetic transcription factors that control the development of the sea robins’ legs that are also found in the limbs of other animals, including humans.
Prionotus carolinus.
Photos by Anik Grearson
Under belly of prionotus carolinus.
Prionotus scitulus.
Allard’s study co-authors included Italian physicist Agnese Seminara and biologist Maude Baldwin from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
The second study that was focused on genetics included the Kingsley lab at Stanford and comprehensively examined the genetic underpinnings of the walking fish’s unusual trait.
The researchers used techniques including transcriptomic and genomic editing to identify which gene transcription factors are used in leg formation and function in the sea robins. They also generated hybrids between two sea robin species with distinct leg shapes to explore the genetic basis for these differences.
“Amy and Corey did a lot to describe this animal, and I think it’s pretty rare to go from the description of the behavior, to the description of the molecules, to the description of an evolutionary hypothesis,” Bellono said. “I think this is a nice blueprint for how one poses a scientific question and rigorously follows it with a curious and open mind.”
The research was sponsored in part by the Harvard Brain Initiative, the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Institutes of Health.
‘Unseen Truth’ shows the real picture behind ‘Caucasian’ ideals
Sarah Lewis explores the false foundation of America’s racial hierarchy in new book
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Sarah Lewis was deep into archival research for her latest book project when she stumbled upon an unusual set of images that made her question everything she thought she understood about race. The photographs, from the late 1800s, showed female performers in a P.T. Barnum sideshow known as the “Circassian Beauties,” who looked, as Lewis described, “like Angela Davis, but were billed as exemplars of white racial purity from the region of the Caucasus.” It was a show that proved influential even in political life, and had consequences for liberation practices and the early Civil Rights movement.
“What the performance did was skewer our idea of race,” explained Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies. “I was confronted with this moment when Americans could see the fiction underneath the entire system of racial hierarchy, and fashioned a new regime through which to keep it stable and to keep that fiction in place. I was compelled by this untold story in American life.”
In her new book, “The Unseen Truth,” Lewis uses Americans’ fascination with the Caucasus region — and the incorrect association of the term “Caucasian” with whiteness — as a case study for examining how the fiction of a racial hierarchy was strategically stabilized. She sat down with the Gazette to talk about this hidden history, her extensive research, and how the project changed her. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
What led you to take on this project?
It was really understanding the depth of fascination about the [Caucasus region] on the part of Woodrow Wilson that made me write the book. It begins and ends with the federalization of segregation and the use of racial detailing as a form of instantiating the unspeakable in American government, and in American life. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has said, “There comes a point when we must decide if something belongs to history or if it belongs to fiction.” We’ve never looked squarely at the idea of the term “Caucasian” and called it a fiction out loud. We’ve covered it up and found other ways to keep it to maintain a system. America’s racial divide is built on a lie. Black clerks working in Wilson’s administration, who were early, unsung Civil Rights leaders — like Swan Marshall Kendrick and Freeman Henry Morris Murray — saw that. They knew. We all live with the regime that was created in the face of that moment. I think part of what makes racial domination so difficult to dislodge is that it’s predicated on a regime, a complex system of assembling narratives to justify the unspeakable. The reason to write the book was to make clear the legacy that covering up these fictions have spawned.
Where did American’s fascination with the Caucasus region come from?
The Caucasian War takes place and ends at the same time as the American Civil War, and there were parallels between them that made the Caucasian War topical for embattled American nation. One was the associations with slavery (white slavery for the Caucasus). Both were southern, seceded nations. But the main reason had to do with the instability of racial formation. To see the region that’s been seen as the homeland of whiteness effectively obliterated provoked nervousness for the American public on both sides.
Did this fixation with the Caucasus region end?
The way history has been framed to date, the answer has been yes. Yet what the primary documents in the archives reveal is, in fact, the answer is no. There was sustained curiosity about the region, and that curiosity had implications for the racial regime we live with today. Woodrow Wilson, as late as 1919, requests a report about the look of women from the Caucasus region, when he likely should have been doing anything else. Langston Hughes, as late as the 1930s, goes to the Transcaucasus region and finds himself stunned that the people there look nothing like this image of whiteness he’s been given and instead are, as he describes, “brown as russet pears and dark as chocolate.” You have these serial examples, buried beneath the seemingly fixed racial order. There was a conscious questioning about whether race really rests on a foundation of data. The Caucasian War does end. There are other terms used when the idea of the Caucasus region is understood to be a fabricated source for the idea of whiteness: Aryan, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. However, this foundational fiction remains a source of concern with consequences for how we secured this racial regime, and that is what has not been addressed before.
Much of this book is about the ways we are conditioned not to see. Can you explain that idea?
It’s nearly a maxim now: Images help us see and shore up ideas about race. An example of this is the geyser of stereotypes circulating through racist caricatures in the 19th and 20th century. But what’s really important to understand is that the use of race itself as a structuring force in American society altered, quite literally, how we see, how we make sense of what’s in front of us. It is why our debates about monuments are about more than the sculpture and the material and the location. We have come to understand this racialized world through how we visually constructed it. This book is deeply invested in what we fail to discuss often, which is how race changed how we see.
You end the book with a moment when the research suddenly became very real. Could you describe that?
I had a researcher’s dream and nightmare take place at once. This group of Circassians — a group from the Caucasian diaspora — came to a work-in-progress talk I gave at NYU. Afterward they sent me a flash drive as a way of thanking me for the research. On it were articles and maps they had found about this cleavage between the Caucus as a geography and the Caucusian ideal as a racial concept. I held my breath as I looked, because I had spent 10 years trying to amass that myself. I stopped and nearly rewrote the whole book, not because they had located things I hadn’t, but it raised the stakes. The idea of race is like a photograph without a negative; there’s no factual basis for the idea of racial domination or supremacy of any kind. And to have the very people from the Caucasus region tell me that they know, and urge me on to de-mythologize the region, did make me go back into the text and ensure that the point was clear.
Are you looking forward to having this research out in the world?
Well, the process of writing the book itself is the reward. I’m grateful that I trusted the archive and the evidence that I found, and I hope I did justice to the untold stories, as I believe they’re critical for our current understanding. There are lies about American life and the use of race in society that are just hidden in plain sight. It is an intense historic era we’re in today and I have such belief and love for global society and the country I’m in. My hope is that this book shows how you can also love this country without lying about it. And hopefully it shows where those lies are.
The nasal spray coats the nasal cavity, capturing large respiratory droplets and serving as a physical barrier against a broad spectrum of viruses and bacteria, while effectively neutralizing them.
Courtesy of Randal McKenzie, McKenzie Illustrations
In preclinical studies, spray offered nearly 100% protection from respiratory infections by COVID-19, influenza, viruses, and pneumonia-causing bacteria
BWH Communications
4 min read
A drug-free nasal spray that forms a gel-like matrix that captures and neutralizes germs may offer another layer of protection against respiratory infections, according to a study out of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Based on preclinical studies, researchers at BWH say the broad-spectrum nasal spray is long-lasting, safe, and, if validated in humans, could play a key role in reducing respiratory diseases and safeguarding public health against new threats. The results are published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Most viruses enter our system through the nose. When we catch an airborne infection like the flu and COVID, we breathe out tiny droplets of fluids that contain the pathogen. Healthy people around us breathe in these pathogen-containing droplets, which attach inside their nose and infect the cells that line the nasal passageways. The pathogen replicates and can be released back into the air when an individual who is sick, whether they know it or not, sneezes, coughs, laughs, sings, or even just breathes.
Vaccines against these viruses can be beneficial, but they’re imperfect. Vaccinated people still get infected and spread the infection to others. Masks are also helpful but aren’t perfect, either — they can leak, and many people wear them improperly or choose not to wear them at all.
“The COVID pandemic showed us what respiratory pathogens can do to humanity in a very short time. That threat hasn’t gone away.”
Jeffrey Karp
“The COVID pandemic showed us what respiratory pathogens can do to humanity in a very short time. That threat hasn’t gone away. Not only do we have the flu to deal with seasonally, but we now have COVID, too,” said co-senior author Jeffrey Karp, distinguished chair in anesthesiology at BWH.
The new study details the research team’s efforts to create a nasal spray to defend against airborne respiratory illness.
“The spray, called Pathogen Capture and Neutralizing Spray (PCANS) in the paper, was developed using ingredients from the FDA’s Inactive Ingredient Database (IID), which have been previously used in approved nasal sprays, or from the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list of the FDA,” said co-senior author Nitin Joshi, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at BWH. “We developed a drug-free formulation using these compounds to block germs in three ways — PCANS forms a gel-like matrix that traps respiratory droplets, immobilizes the germs, and effectively neutralizes them, preventing infection.”
The researchers did the experiments detailed in the study under laboratory settings. They have not studied PCANS directly in humans. The researchers developed the formulation and studied its ability to capture respiratory droplets in a 3D-printed replica of a human nose. They showed that when sprayed in the nasal cavity replica, PCANS captured twice as many droplets as mucus alone.
“PCANS forms a gel, increasing its mechanical strength by a hundred times, forming a solid barrier,” said primary author John Joseph, a former postdoctoral fellow at BWH. “It blocked and neutralized almost 100 percent of all viruses and bacteria we tested, including Influenza, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, adenovirus, K Pneumonia and more.”
Experiments in mice showed that a single dose of the PCANS nasal spray could effectively block infection from an influenza virus (PR8) at 25 times the lethal dose. Virus levels in the lungs were reduced by >99.99 percent, and the inflammatory cells and cytokines in the lungs of PCANS-treated animals were normal.
“The formulation’s ability to inactivate a broad spectrum of pathogens, including the deadly PR8 influenza virus, demonstrates its high effectiveness,” said co-senior author Yohannes Tesfaigzi, AstraZeneca Professor of Medicine in the Field of Respiratory and Inflammatory Diseases at BWH. “In a rigorous mouse model study, prophylactic treatment with PCANS demonstrated exceptional efficacy, with treated mice exhibiting complete protection, while the untreated group showed no such benefit.”
While the study’s limitations include the lack of human studies of PCANS, it provides a strong foundation for future research to explore the full potential of PCANS in a broader context. The researchers are exploring whether PCANS can also block allergens, opening a potential new avenue for allergy relief.
This study was supported by funding from the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
‘Harvard Thinking’: Taking the phones out of school
In podcast episode, experts discuss growing movement to restrict devices in class
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Cellphones have become a major problem in schools.
“We have been living with this incredibly seductive technology for several years and what is finally coming to light is that constant exposure to social media and games and other tech products is actually phenomenally distracting and harmful,” said Susan Linn, the author of “Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children” and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
More and more schools are banning or restricting cellphone use in the classroom. Not only are schools taking on this issue, but states and cities — like Florida, New York, Los Angeles, and Indiana — have made moves to limit use as well. In light of the surgeon general’s warning of the profound risk that technology poses to youth, it just makes sense.
“Just finding ways to get that harm out of teen hands during the school day might be another way that we can protect teen mental health,” said Laurie Santos ’97, Ph.D. ’03, a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast. At the end of the day, Joy McGrath ’96, the head of school at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, says the focus should be on what students gain from not having their phones, not what they lose.
“My hope, of course, as an educator, is that students who’ve had those experiences are able to go on to their next context and share some of these tactics or skills that help other people put their phones down and have some meaningful connection,” McGrath said.
In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Linn, Santos, and McGrath about what we all stand to gain by limiting cellphone use in the classroom.
Transcript
Laurie Santos: Often we get so focused on the education that happens within the classroom that we’re forgetting about the incredible education that happens in schools, in the hallways, at the dining room table, on the playground, and so on. And I really worry that might be the spot where we’re losing the most educational opportunity for having these devices around us.
Samantha Laine Perfas: There’s a growing movement to ban cellphones in schools. And some states, like Florida, Indiana, California, and Minnesota, have passed or introduced legislation restricting cellphone use in the classroom. Both parents and students have pushed back, citing safety concerns or not being able to reach each other during the day. Yet schools say the removal of phones eliminates distractions and fosters face-to-face interactions that students themselves have come to appreciate.
So, what would it look like to take phones out of classrooms?
Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today we’re joined by:
Joy McGrath: Joy McGrath. I am the head of school at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware.
Laine Perfas: St. Andrew’s is a boarding school serving Grades 9 through 12 and has had a longstanding ban on students’ cellphones on their campus. Prior to becoming head of school, Joy worked at Yale University as chief of staff to Yale’s president. She graduated from Harvard College in 1996. Then:
Santos: Laurie Santos. I’m a professor of psychology at Yale University and host of “The Happiness Lab” podcast.
Laine Perfas: She received her doctorate in psychology at Harvard and has written extensively about the link between technology and our well-being. And finally:
Susan Linn: Susan Linn. I’m the author of “Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.”
Laine Perfas: She’s also a psychologist, a research associate at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll discuss efforts to ban students’ cellphones in schools.
Why is this happening right now?
Linn: I think that we have been living with this incredibly seductive technology for several years and that what is finally coming to light is that constant exposure to social media and games and other tech products is actually phenomenally distracting and harmful. The research tells us that 97 percent of students have a phone and, according to the National Education Association, 83 percent of teachers think that we should ban cellphones.
Santos: Yeah, and I agree with Susan completely on this. Common Sense Media, which is this organization that looks a lot at kids’ use of tech, finds that over 50 percent of tweens and almost 70 percent of teens say that their phones distract them from schoolwork during the school day. They’ve also done some work showing that, on average, teens get over 200 notifications a day, a quarter of which happen during the school day, right? I mean, when you think about that kind of level of distraction, that’s just unheard of in the human species. But I think there’s another piece of it too, which is that there’s growing worries that technology and social media in particular might have some real costs for teen mental health. It’s important to be balanced about this, right? Technology has both benefits and costs when it comes to teen mental health, but overall, folks like the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, another Harvard grad, have been talking really carefully about the fact that there’s a profound risk of harm that comes with some of these technologies. And so just finding ways to get that harm out of teen hands during the school day might be another way that we can protect teen mental health. And then I’m curious what Joy has to say about this, but I think there’s also just an educator piece where it’s a pain in the butt for teachers to have to enforce this kind of thing. I think there’s lots of dramas and headaches from phone misuse in classrooms. So it becomes another sort of enforcement issue on top of the things that teachers have to deal with all the time, just something else they have to worry about and police.
McGrath: One of the things maybe we can unpack later in the conversation is this word “ban” that we’re using, because I think ban may conjure different notions in different people’s heads. But certainly it is true that sensible guidelines and significant guardrails are needed to protect the development of children: their psychological development, their social development, their intellectual development, all of those things. Social media and the smartphones that carry social media are all about distraction and time; and the time in particularly my school, is Grades 9 through 12, so I’ll talk about adolescence. That time is so incredibly precious and, Laurie is really the expert in this, but what is happening in the human brain in that age group is incredibly important. And that time is still childhood. When families come to look at our school, which people are opting in here to our program, including our cellphone restrictions, and in many cases we find they’re looking for it; they’re shopping for that, including people who work in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley who want to get the social media and the phones out of their children’s hands. And I think it’s partly what Laurie was just alluding to, that it is very hard for teachers to put these guardrails in place unilaterally. It is also very hard for families to put them in place unilaterally because the devices are connecting children to children. And so if you’re the only family at the school or in the classroom or on the block that is putting sensible restrictions in place for your child, that can be a very difficult row to hoe for a parent.
Linn: I just want to point out that it’s not just teenagers who use phones all the time. Ever-younger children are getting smartphones and bringing them to school. I think that’s really important.
Laine Perfas: Actually, I had a situation this past weekend. I have a son who’s about to be 3, and there was a little girl and she kept asking me all these questions, and then out of nowhere, she went, “I’m 5. I have a cellphone. Does he have a cellphone?” And I was like, “No.” And she was like, “Oh, when are you going to give him one?” And I was like, “When he’s 20.” And the look on her face! She was appalled and really questioning my parenting skills, but I was actually quite surprised that a 5-year-old would be having their own cellphone. So it is, I think it’s a good point that it is getting younger and younger.
Santos: And I think that’s something that comes up as we think about bans or maybe a less strict word of restrictions. We need to think about what’s developmentally appropriate, right? The kind of ban or kind of restrictions we might put on a senior year high school classroom is going to look totally different than the ban that we might put in preschool or kindergarten, in the case that you’re talking about. And so I think it’s really important to understand psychologically what’s developmentally appropriate.
Laine Perfas: Yeah, Joy brought up a good point about unpacking the word ban. What do we mean when we talk about bans?
Santos: I think there are different ways to talk about it, right? There’s a kind of full ban: Never bring these things into the building. There might be a situation where during some points in the school day, phones are secured. That’s tricky because it often involves schools that require the resources to hold everybody’s phone securely and to have someone there to distribute phones back during the periods of time when students need them and things. But they’re also just specific-use kind of restrictions that teachers and administrators might put in classrooms. For example, no social media use during the classroom, but you’re able to use your devices to go on, for example, Wikipedia, or to use a tech-focused app that we’re using in the classroom. And so I think when we think of banning phones, often we don’t mean these things can never come into the building and they’re gone for all age groups and so on. Often what we’re talking about is, what’s an educationally appropriate restricted use that we can have?
McGrath: For us, we’re a boarding school at St. Andrew’s, so our students are here around the clock. So we have to think about it the way parents might think about it. Our 12th-graders are permitted, if they wish, to have their phones in their rooms overnight because they’re going to be going to college and they need to learn to regulate that. Our values, as you say, are, first of all, that education is to foster independence. If we’re going to have those developmental opportunities for independence, we have to have those opportunities to play, to form good social relationships, to interact in person, to study, to sleep, to do those things.
And then we’ve been thinking a lot about what happens when kids leave our school. Because when I visit our alumni who are freshmen in college, and I’ll often say, “What in college were you least prepared for?” And probably the most frequent answer I get now about what they miss most about St. Andrew’s is the other students in college form friendships and socialize with their phones in their hands. Essentially our students are forming friendships in a manner of what now seems like ancient history and that pre-device time, because we don’t have our phones around the schools.
Linn: I think that limiting certain things that kids can do on their phones while allowing them to have their phones in class — I think that’s problematic. Once you get on your phone, it’s really hard not to do other things. When I got my smartphone, I stopped wearing a watch. And then I realized that every time I’ve checked the time, I also checked my email, and I checked my texts and, things like that. So, I think that it’s really best for the students and the teachers and their education and their mental health to make sure that phones are not part of the active school day. Yes, technology is certainly part of our lives, but part of being able to live with it and to live a productive, healthy life is to be able to know when to use it and when not to use it. And so I’m wondering, if your students, when they tell you this, are they telling you this because they’re distressed that they didn’t have phones during the school day? Or no, it sounds to me like it’s something they’re looking back on and they’re really thankful.
McGrath: They’re thankful for it and they’re innovating solutions in their college context that are making that situation better. So one student, a young woman, told me that she took an Amazon box very early in her time in college, decorated it, put it in a room, and when kids come in a room to hang out, all the cellphones go in it and they put them under the bed for that hangout time. Everybody’s happier and she feels really good about that. My hope, of course, as an educator, is that students who’ve had those experiences are able to go on to their next context and maybe share some of these tactics or skills that help other people as well put their phones down and have some meaningful connection.
If you think about your cafeteria or your dining hall, that is a really important place to preserve that for kids, that human interaction time around meals; that is an ancient human way of forming relationships and overcoming the boundaries we may draw between ourselves and what today we would call polarization in society. And so I think we think about classrooms as a knee-jerk for a quote-unquote ban, but I always advocate for if you’re going to do it in one place, think about that dining hall or that cafeteria.
Santos: Yeah, Joy, I love that you’ve brought that up because this is something I’ve seen as a psychologist, right? There’s a growing amount of work just showing how little we socially interact just when our devices are around us. The psychologist Liz Dunn, incidentally, also a Harvard undergrad graduate, she’s a professor at UBC now, and she’s done some lovely work just looking at what are the kind of social costs to having your phone around you, even if you’re not looking at it, right? It’s just out on the desk or it’s out on a dining hall table, and what she finds is that people smile at one another 30 percent less when their phones are around. Because part of your brain is, and part of your attention is, getting picked up by this phone.
But your comment about the dining hall resonated for me in a different way. For a long time, I was a head of college on campus, what Harvard used to call master and is now called faculty deans, this is a position of a faculty member who lived at Yale in the colleges, but at Harvard in the Houses with students. And so, I would eat with them in the dining hall and one of the things I was expecting when I first became a head of college was for the dining hall to be, you know, the loudest place on the planet with everybody talking to one another and so on. And it’s different than when I went to Harvard back in the ’90s; right now you have a lot of students with these big Bose headphones on and they’re looking at a screen and they’re just not interacting with one another. This opportunity cost of face-to-face in-real-life social connection with, you know, the smartest people around you, including people whose identities might differ and might have different political opinions than you and so on. But I think we’re not paying attention to what’s lost. I love your comment, Joy, because often we get so focused on the education that happens within the classroom that we’re forgetting about the incredible education that happens in schools, in the hallways, at the dining room table, on the playground, and so on. And I really worry that might be the spot where we’re losing the most educational opportunity for having these devices around us.
Laine Perfas: I really appreciate that because as I mentioned earlier, when you hear the idea of a ban or a restriction, it feels like something’s being taken away. But if we look at it as an opportunity to protect students during such a pivotal time in their development, it provides a totally different way of looking at it and I think that can be really helpful as we go through this transition as a country. I also mentioned earlier, there’s a growing number of states, cities, districts that have enacted or introduced policies that restrict phone use in some way. I am wondering how that’s been going and, in the places where it’s not been going particularly well, what’s happening there.
Santos: My understanding of when it doesn’t go well is when a policy is just rolled out without explanation, without community buy-in, whether that’s from parents or the students themselves or teachers. I think the best way to do this would be at a school-by-school level and to really involve everybody and having a conversation about your community norms when it comes to digital tech use. You know, as you said, these things aren’t going away. We all see the benefits of these as well as the drawbacks. That’s true for our students, too. I think one of the things that’s striking is pretty much every survey that’s been done with teens or even tweens, they find that they see the benefits of technology, of course, but they also see a lot of the drawbacks, right? And I think for the most part, they want some help about how to navigate these sorts of decisions. And so I think, the more stakeholders we can bring to the table to have this honest conversation about, how can we as a community co-create these norms, right? And in fact, how can we co-create norms that the adults in the school will have to follow too? Even in the Yale classroom in my “Science of Happiness” class I talk a lot about the problems of social media and being on technology and distraction and I’d occasionally see students in my courtyard who’d be like, “Dr. Santos, like, you’re on your phone now. I thought you told me it’s distracting,” right? And so I think finding norms that the adults can say, “Hey, I agreed to these too. I’m committed to modeling these kinds of norms and values for my students or for my own kids in my own home” — I think those kinds of co-created values wind up being much more powerful than what seems like somebody from on high kind of coming up with this decision.
Linn: The Phone-Free School Movement, that organization has created just a fabulous tool kit for school administrators to help them create policies around phones that really benefit students and not tech companies. And I think one of the things that we’re facing is that the tech industry has huge amounts of money and does huge amounts of lobbying. We’re facing this enormous industry whose interest in teenagers and children is not to promote their well-being, but to promote the company’s own profits. And so I think that’s why, if this is difficult, that’s a huge reason.
McGrath: I just wanted to pick up on something Susan said and then something Laurie said and tie them together, because it is true that apps and social media are targeting young people and that they have a lot of power and a lot of money. But the reason that they’re targeting young people is the same reason that advertisers have targeted young people forever, which is young people have an incredible amount of power. And everybody who works with young people believes that and knows that is true. And Laurie was talking about how important developing shared community norms would be in a process of instituting sensible restrictions on phones in a school setting, and I will say I’m the beneficiary at St. Andrew’s of a school where we did not impose these restrictions. My predecessor was very slow to put Wi-Fi in our dorms. Students started out with flip phones and they weren’t very interesting so they didn’t carry them around the school, so what happened was there was a rule that flip phones should stay in the rooms. And then, just the rule never changed. But the rule never changed because of a really slow-moving process of discussion among the students of continuing to embrace this policy. So we have what I would say is a student-led phone culture. It’s really led by the kids and every year our seniors who do a lot of leadership in the school rearticulate to the younger students, whom they lead and they supervise in the dorms, why this matters and why this is so important at St. Andrew’s.
Santos: I agree completely and I think one of the ways that we educate students is to actually tell them about the kinds of things that Susan was talking about, right? There was a lot of really early work on persuasion that took place in the cigarette industry. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, you know, lots of kids smoked and there was a question of, how could we get teens to realize the danger of this? Some of the most effective educational campaigns actually told teens about what cigarette industries were doing. They basically said, “Hey, they put these chemicals in there to try to hook you and they want to get you early. This is their plan,” right? And I think the same kind of educational approach can be incredibly powerful with social media; when kids start to learn how these algorithms hook them in and how people are making money off their privacy and their identities and their preferences; just like adults, teens tend to get a little pissed about that, right? And so I think part of our digital citizenship education can be a deep dive into how these algorithms work, how companies are hooking your reward structures, how other people are trying to control you in these ways.
Laine Perfas: It makes me wonder in what ways students can be part of the solution and why they should be. I’m seeing a lot out there about regulations being created, but I’m not seeing as much about how students have been involved or not involved in creating those regulations.
Santos: As we think about best practices, I think it’s really important to make sure that whole communities are involved, but especially the students are involved, for a couple reasons. One is that survey after survey show that they care a lot about what these norms are. They’re worried, and they want some guardrails on the kind of technology use they have in all kinds of settings. And so I think getting them involved in the conversation is really important. But that’s also critical because the students themselves are the ones who know how they’re using these technologies, right? Like, they know which apps are active. They often know a lot of the threats that people are facing because they’ve seen some of the sort of digital drama and bullying and these things happening. And so I think whenever possible, getting students to the table to think about what these best practices are winds up being really critical. It’s also a fabulous way to get student buy-in. Because if you’re going to roll out a new policy, you definitely want it to be one that students feel like they had some say in and that they’re actively excited about. This is the technique that I’ve used in some of my own work, not just with cellphones at the college level, but also other new technologies that everyone’s worried about. I was teaching my seminar recently when Chat GPT emerged and I had to have a conversation with our students to ask, “Hey, what do we think our communal values are when it comes to using this technology? What’s an appropriate use case? What would you feel like was maybe inappropriate or made things unfair in terms of your participation in this class?” And we had a fabulous discussion where we co-created some norms about what was going on. That was so much more effective than if I just came down and say, “Hey, you can’t use this AI tool in this way,” right? Students would get around that.
Laine Perfas: One of the things I want to talk about is some of the pushback. And the tech industry makes sense. They’re looking out for their bottom line. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that they’re pushing back against some of these regulations. But one group that’s been surprising and was one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this in this podcast is actually parents have been pushing back a lot against these bans to the point where they’re actually a major player in some states and schools deciding not to institute restrictions. What is happening there? If we know that phones are so damaging and we know that social media is damaging, why are parents so resistant?
Linn: I think that’s part of a larger issue around being a parent today. And parents are marketed fear a lot. Fear is profitable. And parents are more fearful for their kids. They’re more anxious about them. They’re more worried about their safety. It’s like the person whose hypochondria was complicated by illness. Parents’ fears are complicated by school shootings, and it’s not like there are huge numbers of school shootings, but they’re in the media so much. And stranger kidnapping hasn’t changed in 25-30 years, but parents are more worried about it today. So the message is, “We live in a dangerous world, I have to be able to contact my child at all times.” And so I think that’s part of a larger concern and worry about parent-child relationships today. But my understanding is that one of the things that parents say, “I want to be able to contact my child if there’s an emergency.” But what the school security people are saying is that actually cellphones can contribute to the problem if there’s some kind of emergency and that really kids are safer without them in that situation.
Santos: I think, again, it’s helpful for parents if we get away from a focus on a ban completely and more, how can we more safely use these devices, which we know have benefits, but in a way that causes the least harm? And I know I mentioned Vivek Murthy before, the surgeon general, but he has this lovely analogy that I find quite powerful and also quite optimistic. He talks about how back in the ’60s and early ’70s, there were a lot of child deaths in cars, and folks kind of had the same responses we have for social media like, well, you know, it’s really dangerous and it caused all this harm. But we need our cars. What are we going to do? And Vivek said, no, what we decided was we needed seat belt laws, right? We needed to put in car seats for really young children. We put in the regulation to engage with this new technology we had, driving around in a way that was a little bit safer, in a way that protected kids. And I think this might be the best way to think about what we want to do with cellphones, is not necessarily to ban them completely, but to make sure we restrict them in the moments where they’re harming kids; when they’re harming kids’ education in the classroom, when they might be harming kids’ social interactions, on the playgrounds, and the dining halls, and so on. We might want to put boundary conditions, for example, on how much usage that we allow kids to have. Governments can publish best practices about what we should do.
Linn: The other thing is that for schools implementing safety regulations around phone use, I think that it’s going to be hard in the beginning, and then it’s going to get easier because for the parents coming into the school it will already be a school rule, so they’ll know. What’s going to be hard is for the students and the parents and the teachers and the administrators who are there now. That’s when it’s going to be difficult and then I think it’ll just be part of what schools do and schools have all sorts of rules about what kids can and can’t do. I think that ultimately this will just be another one of those, but it’s going to be bumpy in the beginning.
McGrath: The other thing that I always think about is parenting is this terrible conundrum. You’re given this little being who is the most precious thing in your life, and your job is to keep it safe and yet make sure that it doesn’t need you someday. So there’s this real cognitive dissonance in parenting. I’ve, as a head of a boarding school, the meeting I have on drop-off day with all the new parents who are leaving their kids at school for the first time and driving away until family weekend, six weeks later, and I have to say, all of our experience shows it would be really great if you don’t make a lot of contact in the first two weeks. My predecessors said that 40 or 50 years ago to parents when they were leaving the school because it was just still true. There’s just this incredible tool we have to be in constant touch with our kids. And so it is a conundrum, and I think we need to continually break down this notion that the phones are part of some kind of safety program for children. They are not. We haven’t mentioned Jon Haidt’s book that came out last spring, “The Anxious Generation,” but that’s certainly one of the reasons why this debate about phones in schools is kicking off again. And we can see in the data presented in that book all of the possible risks to health and safety and even life of young people in some cases. And so I think I constantly want to both acknowledge that conundrum that’s very real for parents as they’re preparing their children for independence, but of course we know it’s so important for young people, if they can, to have really healthy relationships with their families and have those familial connections.
And so, how do we balance that? And that is just, it’s a matter of practice and having common-sense restrictions in place, but also, when a child really has a need to be in touch with their parent, making that happen also, right? And I think it’s important to reassure parents that if they need to change their pickup time or if something happens that there is a way to do it and schools need to implement that way. So parents can get messages to kids through the office or through some central location or something. So it’s not interfering with what’s going on in the classroom or the playground or the cafeteria.
Laine Perfas: One of the things that I think can really ground this debate/conversation is remembering that the goal of some of these restrictions is to help students to connect with themselves, connect with each other, their teachers while they’re at school, and maybe lay a foundation for them into their futures. So knowing that, what questions should everyone involved in this conversation be asking themselves to figure out the policies that would be beneficial for them to adopt?
Santos: I think an important one is really just to ask how digital technologies, phones, but digital technologies broadly, fit into a school’s values. How they connect with learning, how they connect with social connection broadly, how they connect with safety. These are the kinds of important questions that I think all schools should be asking and I think, how can we train our students for the digital world that they face?
Linn: One of the things that’s really, I think, confusing for parents is that starting when kids are babies, parents are marketed all these devices and all these screen products that are claiming to be educational and beneficial to young children, when there’s no research showing that they are beneficial or helpful. I’ve had conversations with parents who say, “My child has to use an iPad because otherwise my child’s not going to be able to get a job if he doesn’t have or she doesn’t have tech skills.” What people aren’t being told is that the technology is going to change so much that giving a young person an iPad is not going to help them get a job. What’s going to help them is what they learn through interacting with other people and engaging with the world around them. That’s what’s really going to be beneficial.
McGrath: Yeah, and I think the questions to ask really are the basic ones. In the United States, educators have always talked about what is the best education to raise citizens for our democracy in the future. I think that’s still one of the questions, right? How are we going to put together an educational program in our school that best supports the development of students in every way; their social development, their intellectual development, their physical development, and how are we going to create the time to do that? How are we going to build an education that fosters independence and in students the ability to think for themselves?
Laine Perfas: Thank you for joining me for this really awesome conversation.
Santos: Thanks so much for having us on the show.
McGrath: Thanks for having us. It’s been really fun.
Linn: It’s my pleasure.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University. Copyright 2024.
Scruggs describes ‘super surreal moment’ when she made Olympics history
Nick Economides
Harvard Correspondent
3 min read
Harvard fencer reflects on path to silver and gold — including facing a childhood idol — and what keeps her balanced, focused
Lauren Scruggs returned to campus for her senior year after carving her name in the history books this summer at the Paris Olympics.
The foilist not only won gold with Team USA in the women’s team event but became the first American Black woman to score a fencing medal when she captured silver in the individual event.
“It was a super surreal moment, I couldn’t believe it was happening to me,” Scruggs said about winning the silver. “It was far beyond what I expected to happen to me that day.”
Scruggs’ victories helped fuel the most successful Games in Harvard’s history. Crimson student-athletes from the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany combined to win 13 medals, the most since the modern Olympics began in 1896. Harvard’s 13 medals led all Ivy League schools, and the Crimson also led the Ivies in gold medals with eight.
In the lead-up to the Summer Games, Scruggs balanced an internship with Bank of America with a rigorous training regimen. She said the office work allowed her to stay grounded.
“It gave me something to keep my mind away from fencing for a little bit,” Scruggs said. “If you’re solely focused on the sport, the lows hit harder. It helped me stay focused and have a distraction. I thrive when I have a healthy balance between fencing and my regular life.”
After winning two early rounds, Scruggs faced three-time world champion Arianna Errigo of Italy. The bout was a turning point for Scruggs, who pulled off a thrilling upset to advance to the semifinals.
“I knew it was going to be a challenging bout. My main goal was to leave it all out there.”
“I knew it was going to be a challenging bout. My main goal was to leave it all out there,” Scruggs said. “I looked up to her to help me develop my fencing style when I was growing up. It was a full-circle moment.”
Moving to the semi-finals, Scruggs defeated Canada’s Eleanor Harvey, securing a historic silver medal. The achievement in Paris was a landmark moment for USA Fencing, as she became the first Black female American fencer to win an individual medal at the Olympic games.
After a day of photo shoots and interviews with national and international media outlets, Scruggs turned her attention to the team competition. Scruggs, along with teammates Lee Kiefer, Jacqueline Dubrovich, and Maia Mei Weintraub, prevailed, bringing the U.S. its first-ever gold medal in a team fencing event.
“It was a culmination of the past four years and all the hard work we put in,” Scruggs said. “We were ready, we all felt good that day. I was shocked that I was able to get that last touch for the gold medal.”
Scruggs said the success marked an outstanding moment for fencing in America that she hopes will spread more awareness of the sport.
“I hope the accomplishments make more people take notice of the sport,” she said. “It’s cool that I was able to do all that just being myself.”
Using AI to repurpose existing drugs for treatment of rare diseases
Identifies possible therapies for thousands of diseases, including ones with no current treatments
Ekaterina Pesheva
HMS Communications
7 min read
There are more than 7,000 rare and undiagnosed diseases globally.
Although each condition occurs in a small number of individuals, collectively these diseases exert a staggering human and economic toll because they affect some 300 million people worldwide. Yet, with a mere 5 to 7 percent of these conditions having an FDA-approved drug, they remain largely untreated or undertreated.
Developing new medicines represents a daunting challenge, but a new artificial intelligence tool can propel the discovery of new therapies from existing medicines, offering hope for patients with rare and neglected conditions and for the clinicians who treat them.
The AI model, called TxGNN, is the first one developed specifically to identify drug candidates for rare diseases and conditions with no treatments.
It identified drug candidates from existing medicines for more than 17,000 diseases, many of them without any existing treatments. This represents the largest number of diseases that any single AI model can handle to date. The researchers note that the model could be applied to even more diseases beyond the 17,000 it worked on in the initial experiments.
The work, described Wednesday in Nature Medicine, was led by scientists at Harvard Medical School. The researchers have made the tool available for free and want to encourage clinician-scientists to use it in their search for new therapies, especially for conditions with no or with limited treatment options.
“With this tool we aim to identify new therapies across the disease spectrum but when it comes to rare, ultrarare, and neglected conditions, we foresee this model could help close, or at least narrow, a gap that creates serious health disparities,” said lead researcher Marinka Zitnik, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
“This is precisely where we see the promise of AI in reducing the global disease burden, in finding new uses for existing drugs, which is also a faster and more cost-effective way to develop therapies than designing new drugs from scratch,” added Zitnik, who is an associate faculty member at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University.
“When it comes to rare, ultrarare, and neglected conditions, we foresee this model could help close, or at least narrow, a gap that creates serious health disparities.”
Marinka Zitnik, Blavatnik Institute
The new tool has two central features — one that identifies treatment candidates along with possible side effects and another one that explains the rationale for the decision.
In total, the tool identified drug candidates from nearly 8,000 medicines (both FDA-approved medicines and experimental ones now in clinical trials) for 17,080 diseases, including conditions with no available treatments. It also predicted which drugs would have side effects and contraindications for specific conditions — something that the current drug discovery approach identifies mostly by trial and error during early clinical trials focused on safety.
Compared against the leading AI models for drug repurposing, the new tool was nearly 50 percent better, on average, at identifying drug candidates. It was also 35 percent more accurate in predicting what drugs would have contraindications.
Advantages of using already approved drugs
Repurposing existing drugs is an alluring way to develop new treatments because it relies on medicines that have been studied, have well-understood safety profiles, and have gone through the regulatory approval process.
Most medicines have multiple effects beyond the specific targets they were originally developed and approved for. But many of these effects remain undiscovered and understudied during initial testing, clinical trials, and review, only emerging after years of use by millions of people. Indeed, nearly 30 percent of FDA- approved drugs have acquired at least one additional indication for treatment following initial approval, and many have acquired tens of additional treatment indications over the years.
This approach to drug repurposing is haphazard at best. It relies on patient reports of unexpected beneficial side effects or on physicians’ intuition about whether to use a drug for a condition that it was not intended for, a practice known as off-label use.
“We’ve tended to rely on luck and serendipity rather than on strategy, which limits drug discovery to diseases for which drugs already exist,” Zitnik said.
The benefits of drug repurposing extend beyond diseases without treatments, Zitnik noted.
“Even for more common diseases with approved treatments, new drugs could offer alternatives with fewer side effects or replace drugs that are ineffective for certain patients,” she said.
What makes the new AI tool better than existing models
Most current AI models used for drug discovery are trained on a single disease or a handful of conditions. Rather than focusing on specific diseases, the new tool was trained in a manner that enables it to use existing data to make new predictions. It does so by identifying shared features across multiple diseases, such as shared genomic aberrations. For example, the AI model pinpoints shared disease mechanisms based on common genomic underpinnings, which allows it to extrapolate from a well-understood disease with known treatments to a poorly understood one with no treatments.
This capacity, the research team said, brings the AI tool closer to the type of a reasoning a human clinician might use to generate novel ideas if they had access to all the preexisting knowledge and raw data that the AI model does but that the human brain cannot possibly access or store.
The tool was trained on vast amounts of data, including DNA information, cell signaling, levels of gene activity, clinical notes, and more. The researchers tested and refined the model by asking it to perform various tasks. Finally, the tool’s performance was validated on 1.2 million patient records and asked to identify drug candidates for various diseases.
The researchers also asked the tool to predict what patient characteristics would render the identified drug candidates contraindicated for certain patient populations.
Another task involved asking the tool to identify existing small molecules that might effectively block the activity of certain proteins implicated in disease-causing pathways and processes.
In a test designed to gauge the model’s ability to reason as a human clinician might, the researchers prompted the model to find drugs for three rare conditions it had not seen as part of its training — a neurodevelopmental disorder, a connective-tissue disease, and a rare genetic condition that causes water imbalance.
The researchers then compared the model’s recommendations for drug therapy against current medical knowledge about how the suggested drugs work. In every example, the tool’s recommendations aligned with current medical knowledge.
Moreover, the model not only identified medicines for all three diseases but also provided the rationale behind its decision. This explainer feature allows for transparency and can increase physician confidence.
The researchers caution that any therapies identified by the model would require additional evaluation for dosing and timing of delivery. But, they add, with this unprecedented capacity, the new AI model would expedite drug repurposing in a manner not possible until now. The team is already collaborating with several rare disease foundations to help identify possible treatments.
Co-authors included Kexin Huang, Payal Chandak, Qianwen Wang, Shreyas Havaldar, Akhil Vaid, Jure Leskovec, Girish N. Nadkarni, Benjamin S. Glicksberg, and Nils Gehlenborg.
This work was supported by National Science Foundation CAREER award (grant 2339524), National Institutes of Health (grant R01-HD108794), U.S. Department of Defense (grant FA8702-15-D-0001), Amazon Faculty Research, Google Research Scholar Program, AstraZeneca Research, Roche Alliance with Distinguished Scientists, Sanofi iDEA-TECH Award, Pfizer Research, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, John and Virginia Kaneb Fellowship at HMS, Biswas Family Foundation Transformative Computational Biology Grant in partnership with the Milken Institute, HMS Dean’s Innovation Awards for the Use of Artificial Intelligence, Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, and Dr. Susanne E. Churchill Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics at HMS.
It’s about status, not hurt feelings, philosopher argues
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
The act of taking offense signals neither vulnerability nor sensitivity, according to Emily McTernan, an associate professor in political philosophy at University College London. Instead, she says, it’s an important tool for protecting status and enforcing social norms.
McTernan focused on this distinction in a talk titled “On Taking and Giving Offense” Thursday at the Barker Center. The event was sponsored by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
McTernan started her lecture with the story of a professor who made a joke at the World Conference for Science Journalists in South Korea. “Let me tell you my trouble with girls,” he began. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you. And when you criticize them, they cry.”
“Perhaps, unsurprisingly,” said McTernan, who published “On Taking Offence” last year, “his joke caused offense and hit social media with widespread condemnation.”
The reaction followed a familiar pattern, she added.
“There’s been a misconception of what free speech is. You have no right to a receptive audience. To take offense is not to stop conversation; it’s a move in the conversation.”
“Someone says something that offends, the offending remark goes viral, causing offense well beyond its original audience,” said McTernan. The culprit apologizes, explaining that the remark was thoughtless or misinterpreted. Others come to the offender’s defense, and so on.
In a world where these incidents seem increasingly common, McTernan posed the question: “What exactly is to take offense? What’s going on with these apologies and recriminations?”
Too often, she argued, the reaction of the offended person is dismissed as “hurt feelings.” In some cases, taking offense is seen as stifling free speech.
Both responses, she said, fall short of the truth. Instead, the offended party experiences “someone ignoring or mistaking [their] standing or dismissing and attacking it.”
This is a departure from what little philosophical work there is on taking offense, in which it is defined as a reaction of disgust or annoyance, McTernan said. Her approach has more in common with the ideas of sociologist Erving Goffman, who argued that status is formed in part through social interactions and that it can always change.
“This standing is up for negotiation,” McTernan said. “I present myself in a certain way,” and that is either accepted or rejected by the other people in the interaction. “If I attack, dismiss, or fail to recognize some aspect of yourself that you take to have value, that can be a threat to the way you want to represent yourself.”
This definition clarifies why we can take “such profound offense” at personal attacks, she said, particularly about “moral commitments, career, or religion.”
Describing herself as “not a fan” of public shaming, McTernan acknowledged that taking offense acts as a “social sanction.”
“It’s terribly effective at shaping what we can and cannot say.”
Still, she argued, taking offense is not censorship, even when it includes making your reaction public. “There’s been a misconception of what free speech is,” McTernan said. “You have no right to a receptive audience. To take offense is not to stop conversation; it’s a move in the conversation.”
There are exceptions and nuances, she noted. “There is a threat to free speech when institutions and employers weigh in. The risk of losing your job is a very strong social pressure.”
McTernan also examined apologies, including the ways a bad one can exacerbate harm. One such misstep is the apology that insists the effect was unintended. Because giving offense is an affront to standing, she said, trying to say that the affront was not intended only makes matters worse. It reveals the joker’s lack of understanding. It pushes blame onto the listener. A good apology, on the other hand, takes full responsibility for a joke’s insensitivity.
During the Q&A portion of the event, McTernan was asked if the act of taking offense is a way to claim social power.
“Absolutely,” she responded. “If you are very powerful it is very easy for you to signal offense and get uptake for it. The raised eyebrow of the eminent professor is going to do a lot of work, whereas the student might need to signal offense more virulently.”
She added: “The only thing I want to resist is the thought that if you’re not at the top of the pecking order you have no power. Because of the nature of our self-representation, the fragility of the ways we present each other, the vulnerabilities to nicks to our self-image, it gives everyone a bit of power to take offense and to have it be effective.”
Goodheart to step down as University secretary in May
Will continue to advise Garber and other campus leaders
6 min read
Marc Goodheart announced on Tuesday that he plans to conclude his service as vice president and secretary of the University following Commencement ceremonies in May.
Believed to be the longest-serving secretary of the governing boards in recent Harvard history, Goodheart has held the role since 1998, serving as chief administrative officer for both the Harvard Corporation and the University’s Board of Overseers. A member of senior staff in the president’s office since late 1991, Goodheart will continue to serve as a senior adviser to President Alan M. Garber and other University leaders after stepping away from his Loeb House position next spring. He is expected to assume a wide range of duties drawing on his extensive experience in areas relating to institutional policies, presidential priorities, and planning of major University events.
“I came to Harvard as a student in 1977, and I’ve considered myself a Harvard student ever since — perpetually learning about an institution whose ecosystem is as dynamic, whose people are as talented, and whose mission is as essential as any I know,” wrote Goodheart ’81, J.D. ’85, in a message to Harvard colleagues. “What has kept me here longer than I’d ever imagined is not simply the allure of the University’s mission, not simply the devotion and resilience of the people devoted to advancing it, not simply the University’s inexhaustible capacity to serve up novel and intriguing issues, but the recognition that there is always, inevitably, a gap between Harvard’s ambitious ideals and their fulfillment. It has been and remains a privilege to work with dedicated colleagues on ever-evolving efforts to understand and narrow that gap.
“I look forward to a productive final academic year supporting the work of Harvard’s boards,” he added, “helping assure a smooth transition, and planning ways to serve constructively in the time beyond.”
“Everyone who knows Marc recognizes that he always puts the interests of the institution first, seeking to preserve those aspects of Harvard that are its heart and its soul while exploring new avenues for excellence and growth.”
President Alan Garber
Garber praised Goodheart for his commitment to Harvard and its mission. “Everyone who knows Marc recognizes that he always puts the interests of the institution first, seeking to preserve those aspects of Harvard that are its heart and its soul while exploring new avenues for excellence and growth. Where there have been gaps between where we are and where we want to be, he has endeavored to narrow them in his customarily unassuming fashion, enriching deliberations with his matchless understanding of history and precedent. From helping to reform our governance structures to guiding efforts to make our community more inclusive — and countless contributions in between — Marc has made the University better.”
Goodheart, who was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review while a student at Harvard Law School, served as the original associate attorney in Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel in 1986-87 before going into private practice. He returned to Harvard in December 1991, dividing time between the OGC and the Office of the President, becoming assistant to the president on a full-time basis in 1992. He became secretary of the University in 1998, while remaining a member of president’s senior staff. Over nearly 33 years, he has served with Presidents Neil Rudenstine, Larry Summers, Derek Bok (during his interim year), Drew Faust, Larry Bacow, Claudine Gay, and Garber. He has also supported five senior fellows of the Corporation, 27 presidents of the Board of Overseers, and more than 175 members of the governing boards in all.
Harvard introduced some of the most consequential governance reforms in its history in 2010-11 while Goodheart served as secretary, including a rough doubling of the size of the Corporation and the launch of an array of new committees essential to the Corporation’s fiduciary role.
Joking that “I have reached a time in life when hardly a day goes by when my mail at home doesn’t include at least one advertisement for a Medicare plan,” Goodheart said he is looking forward “to days ahead when I can continue doing what I can to help [Harvard] navigate an exceptionally challenging time,” while also “looking forward to days ahead with more time to be the family member and friend I pride myself on trying to be.”
Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, thanked Goodheart for his service to the governing boards.
“Marc Goodheart’s integrity, selflessness, and deep devotion to Harvard and its enduring values are at the heart of all that he does on behalf of the institution and have made him an essential adviser to me, four other senior fellows, and scores of members of the governing boards over the years,” said Pritzker. “Throughout his 26 years of service as secretary — in times of challenge and of opportunity — he has supported the governing boards as a wise and trusted steward of the University’s mission, and I am delighted he will continue to support Harvard as a member of the Mass Hall team in the coming years.”
Vivian Hunt, president of the Board of Overseers, also praised Goodheart.
“With a steady and skillful hand, Marc Goodheart has helped all of us on the governing boards better serve an institution that we and he love,” she said. “His commitment over almost three decades as secretary demonstrates an extraordinary dedication to Harvard and we thank him sincerely for his service to the University and to the governing boards.”
Goodheart is a magna cum laude graduate of both the College — where he concentrated in physics, served as president of The Harvard Independent, and hosted a jazz show on WHRB — and the Law School. Early in his career, he worked briefly for both The Miami Herald and The American Lawyer, was a law clerk for Judge Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and spent four years at the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow.
Created and performed by Whitney White, “Macbeth in Stride”examined what it means to be an ambitious Black woman through the lens of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters, Lady Macbeth. Directed by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky, the groundbreaking world premiere relied upon a wide range of musical genres as a vehicle for exploration. Since 2011, “Macbeth in Stride” has been produced by theaters nationwide including Philadelphia Theater Company and Shakespeare Theatre Company and will perform at Yale Repertory Theater in December.
“The Tempest”is thought to be one of Shakespeare’s last plays and his farewell to the stage. A.R.T’s 2014 production featured a Dust Bowl-circus-inspired setting and stage magic developed by Teller (of the legendary duo Penn & Teller). From the simulated storm to spectacular illusions, A.R.T.’s production brought the magic and wizardry of the playto a whole new level. Co-produced with the Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Nevada, “The Tempest”opened in Las Vegas on April 1, 2014, then began at A.R.T. on May 10, 2014.
Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus kicked off her inaugural season at A.R.T. with the “Shakespeare Exploded” festival, which featured some of the A.R.T.’s most notable Shakespeare adaptations: “The Donkey Show,” an immersive disco experience inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that closed at A.R.T. in 2019 after over 850 performances to over 150,000 audience members, and “Sleep No More,” a unique immersive theatrical adventure that combined the worlds of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”with Hitchcock’s thrillers. “Best of Both Worlds”was an R&B infused adaptation of “The Winter’s Tale,” featuring a roster of Boston’s most celebrated gospel choirs.
An adaptation of a lost play thought to have been co-written by Shakespeare, “Cardenio”was a collaboration between renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles L. Mee. Performed only twice in Shakespeare’s lifetime and never published, the 17th-century romantic comedy was almost certainly based on a section of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote.” Greenblatt commissioned theater companies from around the world to create their own culturally specific adaptations by combining the Cervantes novel with the surviving fragments of the 17th-century play.
Originally considered among Shakespeare’s comedies, scholars later classified “The Winter’s Tale” as a late romance, one that is preoccupied with themes of redemption and forgiveness. A.R.T.’s production in 2000, which was staged by Macedonian director Slobodan Unkovski, distinguished the two worlds of the play, Sicily and Bohemia, through bold, colorful costume and set design.
Director Andrei Serban staged some of the A.R.T.’s most notable productions from its first decade. After an eight-year absence, Serban returned to A.R.T. to mount “The Taming of the Shrew” and “The Merchant of Venice” in back-to-back seasons. Serban’s production began with a drunken tinker who dreamt that the A.R.T. company was touring in a full-sized van that opened to become a playing area; his staging had Kate and Petruchio first meet in a boxing ring. Audiences raved about the production’s exuberant energy, invention, and eclectic costume design. For his production of “The Merchant of Venice,” one of Shakespeare’s most provocative and controversial plays, Serban’s frequent collaborator Elizabeth Swados composed a new score for the production.
Director Ron Daniels’ productions of“Henry IV Part 1,” “Henry IV Part 2,” and “Henry V” translated the action into a series of startling images featuring bright colors and bold costumes. The series, which regularly filled the theater with standing-room-only audiences, featured celebrated actor Bill Camp. Founding Director Robert Brustein adapted “Henry IV Part 1” and “Henry IV Part 2.”
In director Ron Daniels’ new interpretation of “Hamlet” to Cambridge, Mark Rylance, who later became the Founding Artistic Director of the Globe in London, starred as a distinctive, modern Hamlet who was clinically depressed. The production ran in repertory with a production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” in which Rylance also portrayed Konstantin.
Director Andrei Serban married the humor of Shakespeare’s popular comedy with darker elements of the play, leaning into its eroticism and featuring visual imagery that rejected conventions of time and place. Serban reimagined many aspects of the play, ignoring gendered boundaries and reconcontextualizing the traditionally happy ending. Celebrated performer Cherry Jones starred as Viola/Cesario.
A.R.T.’s inaugural production was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”Shakespeare’s most frequently staged play. The show incorporated music from “The Fairy Queen,” a semi-opera by Henry Purcell, and featured a production design that created a world of mystery, rather than romance. A.R.T. Founding Director, Robert Brustein, starred as Theseus in this production that was broadcast by Boston’s public television station, WGBH, in May and August of 1981. The production set the stage for a long history of producing and reimagining Shakespeare’s plays.
REFERENCE:
Plotkins, Marilyn J. The American Repertory Theatre Reference Book: The Brustein Years. Praeger, 2005.
Take our quiz based on new Netflix documentary featuring Harvard researcher
Have you ever wondered how your dog feels about you, sees the world, or is trying to communicate? A new Netflix documentary, “Inside the Mind of a Dog” — featuring Harvard evolutionary biologist Erin Hecht, along with canine experts from Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and others — sheds light on research that is starting to solve these mysteries. We asked Hecht, director of The Canine Brains Project, to weigh in on questions drawn from the documentary so readers can test their own knowledge.
Go deeper
You’ve taken the quiz and watched the documentary — how can you learn more? Hecht recommends the following books:
The Pulse Survey on Inclusion and Belonging, launching Tuesday will provide a snapshot of feelings of inclusion and belonging among members of the Harvard community.
The survey “is an important tool for assessing our ongoing efforts to build a culture of inclusion across the University that empowers individuals to realize their academic and professional goals,” President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. “Responses to the Pulse survey will inform recommendations and shape future initiatives related to inclusion and belonging, helping to ensure that our work in this important area is guided by the personal experiences and insights of members of our community.”
The survey should take a few minutes for participants to complete and is open to all members of the more than 50,000 people at the University, including all faculty, staff, academic personnel, postdocs, and students. The effort, which is led by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, stems from the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging’s report in 2018.
Designed to be held every few years, the Pulse survey enables the University to track the community’s climate of belonging over time. The survey was piloted in 2019, and the 2024 survey will provide important benchmark data for the tracking of progress in future Pulse surveys.
“Everyone in the University community is invited and encouraged to participate in the survey, which will help us find signals of how important fostering a community of belonging is for the University,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “Using the survey responses from all participants, we can make specific, data-informed decisions to improve the culture of belonging at Harvard moving forward.”
For example, data from the 2019 survey was instrumental in sharpening the University’s focus on building community to promote a sense of belonging, according to Charleston.
A core set of questions from the 2019 survey are also included in this year’s survey, a strategy that allows researchers to look at trends over time and identify which efforts have been most successful and what areas may need more attention.
“If you care about improving, then you care about measurements over time,” said Andrew Ho, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, faculty adviser for the Pulse survey, and a former member of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. “This isn’t a flash in the pan. It’s a sustained commitment across the University and over time, from President Faust through President Bacow, President Gay, and now President Garber. And it’s across all communities within Harvard.”
The survey is administered by the Office of Institutional Research & Analytics (OIRA) with guidance from Ho. According to Drew Allen, associate provost of OIRA, the Pulse survey uses the same kind of software that academic researchers at Harvard often use to study very sensitive topics. All responses will be confidential.
“We have a data-management protocol in place that ensures the confidentiality of all responses,” says Allen. “Only the members of our research team who are directly involved in administering the survey will have access to the raw data that are collected.”
According to Allen and Ho, reported results will not be able to be linked to an identifiable participant or to any small group due to sociodemographic information or office location. The de-identified data will be analyzed by OIRA and will be publicly shared in late spring of 2025, giving everyone in the Harvard community the opportunity to see the results.
“There’s a commitment to transparent reporting, so University leadership and all of us at Harvard will be able to see and use the results to improve belonging,” said Ho.
It may not be for the reasons you think, says evolutionary biologist, whose new book explores how our feline friends came to be
Cats meow at each other. So Jonathan Losos always viewed a cat meowing to him as a kind of compliment. It was as if he was being saluted as a peer.
Not so, it turns out. Rather, it’s all the better to manipulate you, my dear.
Evolutionary biologist Losos ’84, a former Harvard faculty member, entertained a feline-loving crowd at the Harvard Museum of Natural History last Saturday. Talking about his new book, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa,” the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis mixed research with stories about his own pets.
Losos pointed out this book, and the science behind it, is a bit of a departure for him. Despite a childhood love of cats, Losos became an eminent herpetologist, largely from a desire to study lizards, another childhood passion, and one that could be more easily observed in its natural state.
“I was also under the impression that there was no interesting research on domestic cats,” said Losos, who was nattily clad in a shirt adorned with black cats. “I was wrong.”
While researching a first-year seminar on cats (which he correctly predicted would be popular), he connected with a number of researchers and ongoing studies. One was on the meow.
The work proved his belief about meowing wrong — and more. While all species of small wild cats, such as cervals and ocelots, vocalize at each other, and some larger ones, such as cheetahs, do too, he shared research that shows how the signature sound of the “meow” has evolved.
Cornell University graduate student Nicholas Nicastro had recorded large cat vocalizations at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and compared them with the mews of ordinary house cats. The wild cats’ meow, Losos explained, “comes across as much more urgent and demanding. The domestic cat is much more pleasant to our ears, higher pitched. What that suggests is that during domestication cats evolved a difference in their meow that is more appealing to us — and lets them manipulate us more.”
“When cats live in high-density areas, they behave like lions.”
Jonathan Losos.
Credit: Lynn Werner-Marsden Photography
A similar change was observed in purrs. While all small species of wild cat also purr, domestic cats have distinct “contentment” and “solicitation” purrs. The solicitation purr, he noted, reaches higher pitches, similar to the cry of a human baby, which we innately relate to.
Losos also covered how cats communicate with each other at the event, co-sponsored by the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. A raised tail, for example, appears to signal that a cat is friendly and approachable. Studies using silhouettes of cats with tails raised and tails down appear to confirm this.
And while the studies only worked for a limited time — the cats quickly learned the silhouettes weren’t other cats — they did respond at first. If the silhouette had its tail up, “they stick up their own tails and approach. Tail down and the cats approach much less quickly, and they didn’t raise their own tails.”
While this is seen as a trait that evolved with the domestication of cats, it isn’t unprecedented: Lions, which live in social groups, also signal approachability and amiability with raised tails.
Lion social groups, or prides, consist of related females who will groom each other, hunt together, and even nurse each other’s cubs, he went on to explain. Domestic cats can also be highly social, especially with other felines with which they have been raised. “When cats live in high-density areas,” such as urban cat colonies, fishing villages, or farms, “they behave like lions.”
The one major difference? “Lions hunt collectively and can bring down much larger prey this way. Fortunately, domestic cats don’t do this.”
The evolutionary biologist then moved on to how our house cats came to be, tracing domestic cats from the earliest feline, proailurus lemanensis, some 30 million years ago, up through the separation of saber-toothed and conical-toothed cats, from which all our current cat species descend.
Losos summarized genetic research that traces domestic cats back to, most likely, North African wild cats, between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. This meshes with the beginnings of agriculture, and Losos outlined the common theory that wild cats were drawn to the rodents that fed on grain stores — and that humans welcomed these predators in.
“People would see the advantage of having these cats around and would put out a bowl of milk or let them into the hut where it was warm and dry,” he said. “The next thing you know, you have the domestic cat.”
Their dispersal around the world (to every continent except Antarctica) was aided by their new human friends, including, it seems, Vikings. DNA sequencing of a cat found at a burial site in the Viking village of Ralswiek, now in Northern Germany, has revealed a striking similarity to that of Egyptian cats.
Presumably, Vikings picked up and helped disseminate these domestic creatures as they sailed around Europe, Iceland, and possibly North America, while travelers along the sea routes to India and overland along the Silk Road to China did the same.
Still, Losos pointed out, there are currently only 75 species of domestic cat, while there are at least 200 of dogs. “Cats,” he concluded, “need to catch up.”
The lecture was sponsored by the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
Wartime artifacts verified by Harvard’s Unseen Legacies initiative were presented to the families of Vietnamese soldiers during a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi in May.
‘The first new information we’ve heard in 50 years’
Sarah Grucza
Ash Center Communications
7 min read
Unseen Legacies researchers are answering decades-old questions about the fates of Vietnamese soldiers
Nearly a half-century after the end of the Vietnam War, more than 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers remain unaccounted for. Finding answers about their fates is a race against the clock for researchers with the Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War Project.
As the U.S. and Vietnam normalized relations in the 1990s, the countries began to build a relationship around the legacy of the conflict. “The war remains an emotional and painful topic on both sides,” says Tony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School and director of the Rajawali Foundation Institute. “Yet, both countries have been able to turn tragedy into a pillar of trust over the years.”
Vietnam has assisted in the discovery and return of American remains for more than 50 years. The Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War Project, launched in 2021 with support from the U.S. Department of Defense, is part of the first bilateral effort to identify Vietnamese who were missing and killed in action.
The work of the project is made possible by a captured archive of personal effects taken by U.S. and allied forces from the National Liberation Front, the southern communist forces commonly referred to as Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese soldiers. Seized for their intelligence value, these documents — letters, journals, rosters, certificates, etc. — were collected until the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 1973. The archive was declassified in 1979 but remained largely untranslated and unorganized until the Unseen Legacies Project began its work.
“There’s a trove of information waiting to be discovered,” Hai Nguyen, director of the project, said. “Archives make it sound like we’re dealing with ancient history, but time is of the essence. In many cases, we start with captured documents from the war and then rely on further investigations, including insights from living veterans, to truly understand what happened.”
A talented writer who often thought of his daughter
Phan Kế Toại enlisted in the People’s Army of Vietnam in 1959 and journeyed to the south in 1967 — writing in his diary along the way. He often penned missives about his family, father, and brother. He worried that his young daughter wouldn’t remember him.
On January 1, 1970, a regiment of the Australian army found his diary alongside two dead bodies.
It wasn’t until this year that his writing would resurface when researchers found it in the archive. “We were immediately taken by the vivid and warm words,” recalls Giang Trinh, the Project’s lead researcher. “We were determined to get the diary and any new information back to his family.”
However, the diary proved a challenging case. Aside from the author’s name and his daughter’s name, there was no information about Phan Kế Toại’s family or previous address. The team found their first clue in a letter from a soldier in the same unit. They traced the letter back to the fellow soldier’s family, who in turn pointed them toward an enlistment district. It was there that the team finally found information about Phan Kế Toại’s daughter and wife — both still alive and living in Hanoi.
The inquiry from the Unseen Legacies Project was the first time Phan Kế Toại’s family had heard anything about the circumstances of his death. Today, the family is searching for his remains. They are starting at the location where his diary was found, his likely burial site — now a plum garden.
A foot soldier, waiting to be married
Bùi Văn Thụy carried photos of his family, friends, and fiancée with him on his journey with the People’s Army of Vietnam to the south.
It was in his notebook that the Unseen Legacies research team found information about his hometown. With the assistance of local authorities, the team was able to find his brother and his former fiancée, who is now 75. All these years later, she recalled the affection they had for one another: “We truly loved each other, sincerely, from high school.”
In the years following the war, the letters Bùi Văn Thụy wrote his fiancée and other memorabilia were lost or damaged. The return of his notebook and photos, handed over during a ceremony hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi in May, was an emotional moment for the family amid their ongoing search for Bùi Văn Thụy’s gravesite.
A medic marked missing
In 1965, 18-year-old Nguyễn Thị A (whose name is changed to protect her family’s privacy) enlisted in the NLF as a medic. Years later, when she was marked missing in action, there was little hope of determining her fate — that is until Unseen Legacies researchers showed up on her family’s doorstep this past spring.
Nguyễn Thị A wrote in a journal until her final hours — when a fellow soldier picked up the pen and jotted down the date of her death. The diary revealed Nguyễn Thị A’s hometown but little else. When the trail went cold, researchers reached out to a group of local medical division veterans. Two of these veterans, Ba Thanh and Ba Hải, helped the team find the family of Nguyễn Thị A. From there, additional information and another long car ride led to a veteran who served in the same unit and was there when Nguyễn Thị A died.
With verified details about her death, the missing-in-action case came to a close.
A lost diary returned
Many investigations unearth new information or lead to a fallen soldier’s family, but in some rare cases, the Unseen Legacies team reconnects veterans with their personal effects.
When Phan Xuân Diệu lost his diary in combat, he never expected to see it again. However, the hometown information he included in his notes was enough for researchers to track him down. He was reunited with his journal at the May U.S. Embassy ceremony.
The mission continues
To date, Unseen Legacies has developed and provided reports on thousands of fallen soldiers and more than 2,000 potential grave sites to the Department of Defense through the defense attaché office, Hanoi, which works with Vietnam’s National Steering Committee 515 — a group charged with identifying the remains of fallen soldiers. The project has also assisted in returning tens of documents from the archive to families with the support from the U.S. Embassy and DAO in Vietnam.
“We have developed a reliable protocol to gather, analyze, verify, and provide high-value information with a rigorous investigative process in every single report,” said Nguyen. “We know that this new information is often an important step toward healing for families.”
The Unseen Legacies Project is also dedicated to ensuring that the information it uncovers contributes to the history of the war for years to come. The team is creating an archive that will contain scores of new documents, first-hand accounts, and information from the captured documents and other battlefield records, alongside the project’s analysis.
“We take tremendous pride in the role this work plays in providing closure for families,” says Saich. “As a historian, I also know how important it is to expand access to these materials, especially as some stories have been long left out of the narrative of the war.
“We want to bring these hidden stories to light, both for the sake of families and for our collective understanding.”
From Frederick Douglass’ hair to Malcolm X’s tape recorder, Wendel White’s new book puts an abundance of artifacts on display
When Wendel A. White first encountered a lock of Frederick Douglass’ hair in an archive, the direction of his work took a radical shift. White had been concentrating on photographing landscapes as a way to explore Black history, but this discovery turned his attention to what he describes as “a remarkable reliquary of artifacts.” Venturing into archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies, he has sought to “excavate Black history through material culture.”
White photographed African American materials housed in private and public collections throughout the 13 original U.S. colonies and Washington, D.C., for his project “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies.” His subjects are both rare, singular objects — such as a twisted fragment of stained glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing — and everyday material such as diaries, documents, photographs, and souvenirs.
Some images are related to famous historical figures such as Malcolm X (a tape recorder he used), James Baldwin (his inkwell), Phillis Wheatley (her book of poems), and Zora Neale Hurston (manuscripts including “Their Eyes Were Watching God”).
Some are connected to unknown figures, such as the owner/maker of a shoe, perhaps an African American Civil War soldier. Others speak to slavery and empowerment. “These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States,” White explains.
As the 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, White’s work is on view at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology through April 13, 2025, in the exhibition “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies.” The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph, “Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies,” (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, Summer 2024), which includes text by Deborah Willis, Cheryl Finley, Leigh Raiford, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Chief Campus Curator Brenda Dione Tindal, and Peabody Museum Curator of Visual Anthropology Ilisa Barbash. Book contributors will be on hand for a book launch and conversation Sept. 26 and a related free ArtsThursdays event on the same evening.
White’s use of shallow focus refocuses the gaze we expect to have on objects, writes Barbash. “He artfully draws out those qualities he feels are particularly meaningful and emotionally impactful. And in compelling us to reckon with these insights, he reanimates these objects into vital components of our present.”
Two dolls that were part of the famous 1940s “Doll Test.”
One image that carries echoes from the past into our present is of two dolls, identical in every way except their skin color. Not just any dolls, these were part of the famous 1940s “Doll Test.” Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark asked African American children ages 3–7 which doll they preferred. When a majority of the children selected the white doll, the Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” gave the children a sense of inferiority and hurt their self-esteem. The Supreme Court cited the Clarks’ research in its groundbreaking desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education.
At Harvard, White selected a few items, including W.E.B. Du Bois’ Ph.D. thesis, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1871.” He also chose a printing plate with a portrait of civic leader and journalist Roscoe Conkling Simmons, and one of White’s favorite things, a chart created by Radcliffe anthropologist Caroline Bond Day. Her book was published by the Peabody Museum in 1932 and offers a glimpse of the little-known Black scholar’s extraordinary research into the genealogies of Black American families in the 1930s.
Reflecting on the emotional reactions his images may provoke, White says, “Sometimes the things that I select are not things that everybody wants to look at or think about in both the white community and the Black community.” He references Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste”: “When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm, to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril.”
Epidemiologist discusses research, shrinking gap between rates of male, female physicians, what can be done
A recent study by epidemiologist Eva Schernhammer found that women physicians face a 24 percent elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population.
It’s a sobering figure, but a significant improvement over what the adjunct professor of epidemiology at Harvard Chan School discovered two decades ago. Then female doctors had 76 percent higher odds. Schernhammer first embarked on the research after losing close colleagues.
It has been known for some time that suicide rates for male doctors were higher than the general public — and Schernhammer’s 2004 analysis found a 5 percent higher rate of risk. But the level for women was stunning then — and remain so now.
The Gazette spoke to Schernhammer about her research and what can be done to make further improvements. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The scale of the problem for women physicians seems obvious. Why wasn’t more known about it sooner?
It’s been known for quite long that physicians experienced higher rates of suicide than the general public. The fact that male physicians had a higher risk of suicide has long been noted in papers, but not systematically evaluated until the early 2000s.
There was a lot less data for female physicians. This is because women entered the field of medicine not that long ago. But today, they make up more than 50 percent of medical students in the U.S. When my meta-analysis was published in 2004, it got more attention because of the consolidated evidence. And back then, the suicide risk was so much higher for women than for the men. It led to a lot of thought on what could be contributing to this.
Eva Schernhammer.
Photo courtesy of Eva Schernhammer
What were some of the factors contributing to higher rates of suicide among female physicians?
Colleagues in the field have pointed to things like the double burden for women who work as physicians: balancing their work with the household. There’s stress, burnout at work; these things apply to both men and women, but perhaps because of the added pressure on women it had a higher effect.
Additionally, sexual harassment was a big topic 20 years ago because there emerged some recent data showing that three-quarters of all women experienced some form of harassment in their job from their male colleagues.
Then in general, things like mental health: It’s been known or observed — systematically or unsystematically — that physicians tend to be more critical about themselves, more prone to perfectionism, and thus perhaps not able to live up to those expectations. This can lead to constantly being frustrated with themselves. It’s been noted that there are higher rates of depression in certain jobs, in particular in the medical field.
“It’s been noted that there are higher rates of depression in certain jobs, in particular in the medical field.”
And finally, there is a really interesting case to be made regarding drug abuse, access to drugs, and being able to use those drugs more effectively. To me, it’s always been most compelling to look at the rate of suicide attempts compared to that of actual suicides.
Women physicians have a much higher completion rate than women in the general population who attempt suicide and tend to use different means if they commit suicide. Unlike men, female physicians are more likely to use poisoning, and they are much more knowledgeable about what exactly they need to do to effectively kill themselves that way.
Those are some of the explanations that have been put forward when looking at this gender discrepancy.
This current study is an update to the study that was done in 2004. How did it compare to your expectations?
Even back then, we were seeing that the suicide rates among the women were starting to trend down. So 20 years later, an obvious question was: Has this trend persisted? Would we now see lower rates among women?
With more than 50 percent of physicians now women, one could speculate that some of the shortcomings or problems they may have encountered back then have been alleviated to some extent by this influx of more female colleagues. Our primary hypothesis was to see these higher suicide rate ratios had come down a little bit. And that is what we found. The ratio has indeed decreased.
Were there any limitations to this study? One that was mentioned was the demographic of women in the study, who were predominantly from the U.S. and Europe.
The demographic one is important. If you think about India, we just heard more recently about how physicians are being attacked and harassed, particularly female physicians. Maybe some of the lessons we’ve learned in the U.S. and Europe — that as women get more equal rights, enter the medical profession, and these issues become more widely talked about — these suicide risks may be alleviated. Maybe there are lessons to be learned for other places that are still catching up and just now getting to a point where there will be better working conditions for women physicians.
I think it’s going to be important to have this data from other places in the world and being ready to accept that we may still see similarly high rates there, as we did 20 years ago in the U.S. and Europe, for example.
But in general, it would be great to have bigger numbers, to have bigger studies.
It’s helpful to do a comparison to other professions of similar socioeconomic status, which we attempted and could only do for the men, comparing male physicians to other male professions that are highly educated with high incomes. It was clear that the male physicians — even compared to these types of population groups — had higher rates of suicide.
So doing these types of studies for women would be desirable in the future, as well as exploring more of what else could be contributing to the higher risk, including future studies of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the added attention and ensuing suicide prevention measures in the past 20 years contributed to a decline in suicide rates, then keeping up these efforts and extending them in particular to the women would be beneficial.
“Improving strategies for doctors’ mental health is crucial as well as creating supportive environments, combating gender discrimination, and to include mental health in training.”
Improving strategies for doctors’ mental health is crucial as well as creating supportive environments, combating gender discrimination, and to include mental health in training. We want to make sure that physicians know that this is a topic they can speak up about and that there are prevention efforts and guards in place that can help them deal with any mental health issues they may have to reduce that burden.
Your most recent study showed that the gap between men and women physicians has been reduced, but that female physicians still have a 24 percent elevated risk of suicide. What has helped and how can we further reduce the gap?
This can only be speculation, but I think the fact that so many more women are now in the health profession is probably an important factor. Because if you think about the numbers that 75 percent of all women had experienced some form of harassment just 20 years ago, I do think that these numbers have come down.
I also think that to some extent, we have made progress on the sort of double burden in families, if that has been a contributing factor. This is probably a contentious topic, but it does seem there is a bit more workload sharing among couples today than a couple of decades ago, so women may feel a little less double burdened. Additionally, strategies to create supportive environments and to combat gender discrimination may have been put in place and helped.
I also think that work hour reductions for physicians have taken place, triggered by studies showing that if physicians don’t sleep enough, they make more medical errors. Studies by Chuck Czeisler from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School have helped shift the regulations around work hours.
All of these things I would suspect reduced the burden for these women. We always have a delay when you look at data from a couple of years ago, right? But I think we are probably getting closer to a point where the gap will continue to close if we keep up the efforts that are now in place in hospitals.
How do you feel we can best help our doctors?
Talking about your health or mental health in an environment where you feel free to share with your colleagues is important, but we also need to be able to seek help outside of your professional sphere.
“I think the more that is written about the topic, the more awareness is raised about it and the more people will think about it and feel it’s less of a stigma if they are experiencing it.”
I think the more that is written about the topic, the more awareness is raised about it and the more people will think about it and feel it’s less of a stigma if they are experiencing it. Whether it’s depression or a drug addiction issue, they can know that they’re not the only ones; there are many others who have struggled and that they can talk about this.
A story that that I have really kept close to my heart is one from after the publication of the 2004 meta-analysis. A few years after it was released, I received an email from a male physician in the United States who told me he was a resident in oncology. He felt burned out and was just hitting a wall but felt like he had to keep going.
He came across this study, and it turned his life around. He said he became aware that he can change his circumstances. He left the residency, he changed jobs, and he said he thinks that the decision saved his life. It was simply the recognition that he’s not the only one, and that this is something that’s not his fault that gave him hope.
In Harry Smith exhibit, Carpenter Center captures a life that defies categorization
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Artist’s eclectic, connected body of work explores his wide interests — and influence
Throughout his life, painter, filmmaker, folklorist, and musicologist Harry Smith sought to find universal patterns. Compiling a folk music anthology, collecting string figures from around the world, and conducting ethnographic research were some of the ways he attempted to identify common connections across people and cultures.
The result is an exceedingly eclectic body of work, produced and lost over the span of five decades: films, paintings, poetry, sound recordings, photographs, and collections of items, some of which are currently on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibition, titled “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” will be at the Carpenter Center through Dec. 1.
“He’s one of these figures who has touched many different parts of American underground and avant-garde culture. That impact has had a ripple effect into popular and mainstream culture,” said Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center.
The exhibit, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art last fall, traces Smith’s path from a Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest to a counterculture youth of psychoactive drugs and intellectualism in 1940s Berkeley, California, and dabbles with jazz and experimental cinema in San Francisco.
“I jokingly referred to him as the Forrest Gump of avant-garde culture. He was always around at all the right times and was connected to the right people.”
Dan Byers
Harry Smith on Second Avenue, ca. 1988.
Photo by Brian Graham
“There were a lot of different factors to balance when thinking about how people would experience the work,” Byers said. “Working with artist and co-curator Carol Bove, we had to come up with spaces and forms that could contain, on the same wall, psychedelic moving images alongside drawings, documentary photographs, collected objects, and the sound components.”
A polymath and radical nonconformist, Smith avidly collected a variety of objects including records, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, Seminole textiles, pop-up books, tarot cards, and audio recordings. He spent decades in New York, living in the Chelsea Hotel, and befriended underground culture-makers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.
“I jokingly referred to him as the Forrest Gump of avant-garde culture,” Byers said. “He was always around at all the right times and was connected to the right people. We would come across pictures of certain important artists in a gallery, and there’s Harry Smith with them.”
Algo Bueno [Jazz Painting], c. 1948-49, lightbox transparency from 35mm slide of lost original painting, illustration of Dizzy Gillespie and His Orchestra, Algo Bueno/Ool-Ya-Koo, B-side, RCA Victor, 1948, 78 rpm.
Courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson
Film No. 9 [depicts the visual plan of a sequence of what is now known as Film No. 7], c. 1950- 1951, projection of six sequential slides (monitor display).
Courtesy Estate of Jordan Belson
Film No. 11: Mirror Animations, c. 1957, 16mm film transferred to digital video, color, sound; 3:35 min.
Smith’s lifelong interest in research and collection began as a teenager growing up in Washington state, where he regularly rode his bike to visit the nearby Lummi and Swinomish reservations and document Indigenous songs, ceremonies, languages, and artistic traditions.
Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, said Smith’s engagement with native communities remains something of a “paradox,” as his later work on native communities wasn’t nearly as sensitive or committed as his teenage work, and centered his own voice rather than his subjects’.
“His young man’s pursuit seems so engaged, he had a kind of ethnographic sensibility that might have been ahead of its time,” Deloria said. “But the way that he dealt with Indian people later makes you rethink that entire story. Was he an extractive ethnographer in the ways that many folks in the 20th century had been, taking advantage of people in ways that ethnographers sometimes did? It’s hard to know how to make sense of it.”
Smith, who died in 1991 at the age of 68, was among the first to make abstract animated films, and would often apply layers of paint, stencils, and images to the film by hand. Among the Smith films on display at the Carpenter Center are the 66-minute “Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature” (1957-62) and the 35-minute “Film No. 16: Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream” (1967).
“At this point in the ’50s, abstract film was still really new and coming into its own. He was on the formative end of painting directly on film,” said Brittany Gravely, publicist at the Harvard Film Archive, and an experimental 16 mm filmmaker. “Later on, he was always thinking really big and ambitious for the possibilities of film: He thought about multiple screens, he thought about images, he would sometimes project frames around the film screen, which nobody was doing at the time.”
Smith frequently abandoned or destroyed his own work, meaning much of his art, films, and collections have been lost. At the Carpenter Center, two of Smith’s “lost” pieces, from a 1940s series where he painted a visual “transcription” of jazz music, are projected via a 35 mm slide of the original. The exhibition also includes a seating area where visitors can use headphones to listen to the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” a compilation of Depression-era music compiled by Smith and released by American Folkways in 1952.
He was interested in the way recorded music could help people understand connections between cultures, according to Byers, and approached his anthology like he would a collage art piece.
“This became the go-to anthology for people interested in folk music in the ’50s, and really spurred the folk revival, the Greenwich Village scene,” Byers said. “That folk revival, and the ‘Anthology’, then spurred the 1960s rock ’n’ roll scene, everyone from Bob Dylan to Jerry Garcia. That act of anthologizing, of creating a subjective narrative from collected songs, had a huge impact on American culture.”
“Fragments of a Faith Forgotten” is free and open to the public at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through Dec. 1. Co-curator Carol Bove will present an artist talk at the center on Sept. 26.
Consumers to see benefits of Fed rate cut, but how much and when are less clear
Mortgage rates are “more likely to continue to move down as the Fed continues to ease policy,” says economist Jason Furman.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Jason Furman looks at decision, considers what it means to economy, both Wall Street and Main Street
The Federal Reserve moved Wednesday to lower the cost of borrowing by cutting a key interest rate by a larger than expected half percentage point, the first reduction in four years. The move signals good news for those with credit card debt and car loans, home buyers, and stock market investors.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed was “encouraged” by the progress they’d seen on inflation and called the U.S. economy “strong overall,” adding to the signals from the central bank that there will be more cuts coming, totaling perhaps as much as another half point by the end of the year.
Powell said the current course can be maintained through “appropriate recalibration” of the Fed’s policy stance. Thus far, it has been able to stave off recession by striking a balance between slowing growth through interest rates to ease inflation while avoiding cooling the economy so much unemployment soars.
The Gazette spoke with economist Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Department of Economics at Harvard, about how these rate cuts will affect both Wall Street and Main Street. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Harvard file photo
The Fed just made its first rate cut in four years. Was this the right call at the right time?
The Fed made the right move. It’s a tiny bit bigger than I would have done or was expecting. But that’s a rounding error compared to what clearly is the direction that monetary policy needs to go in right now.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell noted that had they seen the July jobs figures at the last Fed meeting, they probably would have lowered rates then. Typically, the Fed starts cutting in 0.25-percentage point increments. Is the half-point cut, or 0.5 percentage points, an attempt to correct for that lost time?
I wrote an op-ed right after the July jobs report that began with “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell must be kicking himself for not cutting the federal-funds rate at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting.” The Fed is about risk management. Ex post they’re always going to get things wrong. The question is: Can you get the balance of risks about right, ex ante, and can you error correct as you go along?
This week’s move was about error-correcting for what was, in retrospect, a very small error six weeks ago. I think that’s a perfectly good argument. And importantly, this is sending a message that if the labor market deteriorates, the Fed will do more.
What’s important about making this message clear is that it will help ensure that the market will do a lot of the Fed’s work for it. For example, if the next jobs report is weak, interest rates will go down because the market knows the Fed will eventually lower those. So even before the Fed acts, the market will now be, basically, more aggressive in keeping the labor market and job growth on track. And that’s a good thing.
It’s what’s called a reaction function, because the world is uncertain. It’s bouncing around in ways you don’t anticipate, and you want people — market participants, businesses — to have contingency plans — “If such and such happens, here’s what we’ll do.” And today was a clear message that, if you see the unemployment rate go up, we’re going to cut rates a decent amount.
There appears to be strong Fed support for perhaps two additional cuts by the end of the year. Is that likely to happen?
Yes, every other meeting the Fed publishes a forecast of what the Federal Open Market Committee, the people that vote on the rates, expect them to be. And the median forecast that was published today was for two more rate cuts of 25 basis points each this year.
Moreover, there was broad agreement on this in that there were very few FOMC members who were signaling no further action with their so-called forecast dots. So that was the way the Fed sent the signal. Jay Powell made it sound like two more rate cuts, but again, they don’t know what the data will be like. Two scary inflation reports, and maybe they’ll call those rate cuts off. That’s why they move gradually, so they can call things off if they no longer make sense.
“This is sending a message that if the labor market deteriorates, the Fed will do more.”
What impact do you expect this may have on business?
Very little in the next couple months, but on a six- to 12-month time horizon, this will result in a little bit more job creation, a little bit more economic growth, and a tiny bit higher inflation than we otherwise would have had.
How will this affect mortgage interest rates? Will this do much for the nation’s housing affordability crisis we’re in?
We have seen in recent months mortgage rates coming down because the market was expecting this to happen. Mortgage rates, though, are still pretty high. They’re more likely to continue to move down as the Fed continues to ease policy. This will help housing affordability.
I don’t love that the Fed’s main tool really affects some parts of the economy, like housing, much more than other parts of the economy. I wish they had a tool that spread itself more easily across everything, but unfortunately, they don’t.
In recent months, consumers have been taking longer to pay down debt like credit-card balances. How soon can they expect to see some relief?
It’s hard to be sure because the rates that consumers pay aren’t just based on the Fed funds rate, but also on what it’s expected to be in the future as well as other factors like the amount of risk about repayment. And these interest rates have built in the changes that are expected in the future. It’s not just mortgages, car loans, credit-card interest rates — all of those are lower than their peak.
But for at least another year, they’re still going to be on the high side. There’s a huge amount of uncertainty. I would be very surprised if rates fell a lot in the next couple of months. And unfortunately, it’s unlikely that interest rates will go back to being anywhere near as low as they were in 2021, or even before COVID hit.
Analysis finds flaw in U.S. plan to cut vehicle emissions — and possible solution
College researchers say battery issue will hamper needed rise in EV production, but hybrids can help fill gap
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
A new analysis led by a group of College researchers finds the U.S. will fall short of its recently finalized target for reducing vehicle emissions by nearly 15 percent over the next decade because of unrealistic goals for increasing electric-vehicle production. But adding more hybrids to the mix could help in the clean-energy transition.
The study, published in Nature Communications, finds the U.S. won’t come close to its EV sales target by 2032, due mostly to bottlenecks in supply chains for crucial minerals like graphite and cobalt. Failing to correct these issues would amount to nearly 60 million extra tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next eight years.
Paper co-author and economics concentrator Megan Yeo ’25 said the team sought to break down the EPA’s stringent new emissions goals and assess whether they were realistic.
“First we asked, ‘How many EVs need to be sold to reach that target?’ After that, we looked at different scenarios,” said Yeo, who co-authored the paper with Harvard Law School senior research associate Ashley Nunes, along with first author Lucas Woodley ’23 and Chung Yi See ’22.
The researchers found that meeting the new standards would require replacing at least 10.21 million internal combustion engine vehicles with EVs between 2027 and 2032. But they estimated the U.S. and its allies would only be able to support the manufacture of about 5.09 million EVs during that period, falling short of the goal by about half.
Manufacturing EVs and their rechargeable batteries requires large amounts of minerals including cobalt, graphite, lithium, and nickel. The U.S. and its allies likely have ample reserves of the raw materials.
“Americans may have to ask, what do we value more — fewer emissions or energy security?”
The problem is production capacity — the ability to adequately mine and refine the materials. The challengeis particularly acute for graphite, which has not been mined domestically since the mid-20th century.
The team scoured for solutions, including rethinking emissions goals by producing more hybrid-electric vehicles. HEVs require fewer mineral resources but have reduced tailpipe emissions, offering a way to close the gap on emissions and expand the government’s focus beyond EVs.
“We suggest exploring HEVs as an alternative pathway,” Yeo said.
According to Nunes, another of the study’s takeaways is that the U.S. might be able to build enough electric cars if it leaned more heavily on China for mineral resources. But U.S. lawmakers are wary of this approach for national security reasons.
“Americans may have to ask, what do we value more — fewer emissions or energy security?” Nunes said.
Singapore native Yeo said she aspires to be a public-sector economist in her home country and that joining Nunes’ research group to work on the EV analysis opened her eyes to the rigors and constraints of evaluating public policy.
“Setting lower and upper bounds for different scenarios, and running through alternative possibilities, robustness checks, and assumptions, were all very valuable skills for me to learn,” Yeo said.
Working in the Nunes group, there’s “never a dull moment,” she continued, with multiple projects related to EVs and other transportation-sector climate goals in the works.
The paper’s other co-authors were Peter Cook and Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, Laurena Huh of MIT, and Daniel Palmer, a high school student at the Groton School who participated in Harvard’s precollege and secondary school programs.
To assess a smoker’s lung cancer risk, think years — not packs
Jeffrey Yang with patient Albertha Gethers, who was treated for lung cancer at Mass General Hospital.
Photos by Jodi Hilton; Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Far more cases get caught when screening guidelines consider duration of habit regardless of intensity, study finds — especially among Black patients
When deciding who to screen for America’s deadliest cancer, should a person who has smoked a pack a day for 20 years get priority over someone who has smoked fewer cigarettes over the same amount of time?
That’s the question tackled by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers in a recent study that showed that lung cancer screening guidelines set by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — requiring the equivalent of a pack a day for 20 years — miss a large proportion of cases and fail to close a screening gap between Black and white patients. That gap means lung cancer among Black patients is too often caught later in the disease’s course, leading to higher mortality.
The researchers, whose work was published earlier this year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest switching instead to a simple measure that would recommend annual screening for anyone who’s smoked for 20 years, regardless of how many cigarettes they smoke a day. Both guidelines also require the individuals be between ages 50 and 80 and either be current smokers or having quit within the last 15 years. The simplified guideline would widen the pool of those who qualify for lung cancer screening and, according to the study, both increase the proportion of cancer cases that are caught and virtually eliminate racial disparities in lung cancer screening eligibility.
“We found that it completely eliminated the racial disparity in the proportion of lung cancer patients who would have qualified among both people who currently smoke as well as people who formerly smoked,” said Alexandra Potter, the study’s first author, clinical research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital, and president of the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative.
Jeffrey Yang.
Alexandra Potter.
Smoking duration vs. intensity and risk
The 20 pack-year threshold can be difficult to use and inaccurate, said senior author Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and a thoracic surgeon at MGH. That’s because the equivalent of smoking a pack a day for 20 years could mean smoking half a pack daily for 40 years, two packs a day for 10, or any other permutation that results in the required combination of smoking intensity and duration. In addition, most people who smoke have smoked different amounts at different times of their lives which, decades later, can be difficult to recall. Plus, while it may make intuitive sense that someone who smokes more intensely has a higher risk of developing lung cancer, studies have not shown that the risk due to smoking intensity is equivalent to the risk from smoking duration, as the pack-year standard implies, the authors said.
White patients tend to smoke more each day
In the work, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers applied both the current screening guidelines and the proposed simplified guidelines to participants in two studies: the Southern Community Cohort Study, which included both Black and white subjects receiving care at community health centers in the U.S. Southeast, and the Black Women’s Health Study, whose study population was limited to Black women. Both included data on subjects’ health and smoking history.
Researchers first applied the current screening guideline and found that, of those who developed lung cancer in the Southern Community Cohort Study, just 58 percent of Black patients and 74 percent of white patients would have qualified for screening. In the Black Women’s Health Study, just 43 percent of those who developed lung cancer would have qualified for screening.
By contrast, applying the simplified 20-year smoking duration guideline would capture over 80 percent of both Black and white participants who developed lung cancer in the Southern Community Cohort Study, and 64 percent of lung cancer patients in the Black Women’s Health Study. That would not only significantly increase the percentage of lung cancer cases eligible for screening, it would virtually eliminate the racial disparity in eligibility.
That racial disparity, the authors said, largely stems from the fact that current guidelines include the pack-a-day measure of smoking intensity, which varies between Black and white individuals. White individuals smoke significantly more each day, lowering the bar for screening eligibility. That has been seen in previous studies and was apparent in Potter and Yang’s research as well. Research has identified several possible explanations for differences in smoking intensity and lung cancer risk, including differences in nicotine metabolism between Black and white people who smoke. However, there are also an array of social and cultural factors still unexplored, the authors said.
“We showed that the median number of cigarettes smoked among Black patients with lung cancer was almost half of that among white patients with lung cancer,” Potter said. “Even though they smoke similar durations, intensity was really the driving factor in the difference between them.”
Other screening barriers
The debate over who should get screened and when is just one part of lung cancer’s dismal landscape. Smoking is its leading cause, accounting for 85 percent of cases. It is one of the most aggressive cancers, Yang said, meaning it can spread rapidly if not caught early. It kills more people annually — in both the U.S. and the world — than colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined, and is expected to kill 125,070 Americans in 2024, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society.
Despite lung cancer’s deadly record, a recent study by the American Lung Association showed that more than 80 percent of those who qualify for screening don’t even know it is an option. Further, only between 5 percent and 19 percent of those who qualify actually get screened for lung cancer.
“It pales in comparison to breast cancer, colon cancer, and cervical cancer screening, where 70 to 80 percent get screened,” Yang said. “There’s a huge gap.”
80%
Of those who qualify for lung cancer screening don’t even know it’s an option
5-19%
Of those who qualify actually get screened for lung cancer
85%
Of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking
125,070
Americans are expected to die from lung cancer this year
In addition to lack of awareness, part of that gap may be due to additional requirements placed on those seeking a lung cancer screening, Potter said. Unlike a mammogram, which a patient can schedule themselves, lung cancer screening has to be scheduled in conjunction with a visit to a healthcare provider. While it’s not bad to have a provider involved, Potter said, it is an extra step and one required by many insurers before they’ll pay for the procedure.
“Out of lung, breast, colon, and cervical cancer, lung cancer is the only one where it’s required to have this formal documentation of a shared decision-making visit,” Potter said.
The screening itself is straightforward, noninvasive, and takes just minutes, Yang said. Patients can stay in their street clothes and lie on a table for a CT scan that takes a series of X-rays to create an image of the lungs, revealing any tumors that might be present.
Yang said a recent patient’s case highlights the situation. She smoked lightly — just three cigarettes a day — but for many years. The light intensity of her habit put her at just 8.4 pack-years, not enough to qualify for lung cancer screening. Fortunately, she was able to get screened through an ongoing clinical trial, called INSPIRE, that Potter and Yang are leading to investigate lung cancer screening in high-risk Black women. The scan showed three small, aggressive cancerous nodules that Yang was able to remove surgically.
“She’s doing very well right now, but she’s 69 and without the screening this would certainly have come back in her 70s as stage IV lung cancer with a very, very different outcome,” Yang said. “We’re hoping that people take a good look at pack-years and whether this is really the best measure overall and the best criterion for Black cancer screening eligibility.”
Writer Simon Rich sketches life in satiric, post-climate-change dystopia through a great-grandfather’s reminiscences
long read
“History Report” is excerpted from the collection “Glory Days” by Simon Rich ’07. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
I interviewed my great-grandfather Simon because he is the oldest person in my family who is still alive. He was born in a country called America, on Earth. He said he used to be a writer. I asked him if he wrote “Spider-Man,” and he said no, he wrote other things that have all been lost.
My great-grandfather was one of the only men to escape from Earth. The rest of the people who got seats on the Escape Pod were women and children. My great-grandfather says they let him on because “they needed one man to row the spaceship.” I’m not sure what he means, because there are no oars on a spaceship, but that is what he said.
My great-grandfather told me how scary it was when Earth became too hot to live on. The skies burned with fire day and night, and you couldn’t walk across the street without collapsing. I asked him if he had had any kind of warning about climate change and he said yes, there’d been articles, movies, and books about how it was going to happen. I asked him if he tried to stop it from happening and he said yes, of course. I asked him how and he said that he had done something called recycling, which is where you throw your garbage into different-colored boxes. I asked my mom what he was talking about, and she explained that when people become as old as my great-grandfather, their brains start to break down and it is almost like they turn back into babies.
Since my great-grandfather is going to die soon, and he is one of the only survivors of Earth, I decided to ask him what his favorite memory of the planet was. I thought he might tell me about the end of World War IV or going to see “Spider-Man,” but instead he told me about the first date he went on with his wife, my great-grandmother Kathleen. They met in college, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. Some people drank so much there that they died.
My great-grandfather said that when he was in college, online dating hadn’t been invented yet. Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person before doing anything else. This meant that when my great-grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked. At this point my mother, who was recording our interview, told my great-grandfather that he was being inappropriate because this was a project for school, and he apologized but said that the naked stuff was “crucial to the story” and that he was going to keep bringing it up whenever it was relevant.
My great-grandfather explained that not only had they not seen each other naked, he wasn’t sure if my great-grandmother wanted that to happen. Sometimes, in those days, when someone agreed to go out on a date with you, they were still undecided about the naked thing and wanted to learn more personal information about you before making up their mind. Since this was before social media, the only way to get this personal information was by asking people questions to their face, like as if their actual living, breathing face was their social media profile. Sometimes this would get embarrassing. Like you might say, “What do your parents do?” And they would say, “My parents are dead.” And then you would have to say something like, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that because I have no information about you. We are strangers.” And sometimes the other person would forgive you, but sometimes they would not. Also, sometimes the person you’d asked out on a date would not even know it was a date because they assumed that you were gay, or they found you so unattractive that it had not even occurred to them that you might be pursuing them romantically — like that notion was so sick to them that it had truly not even crossed their mind. And sometimes they would convey this information to you in the middle of dinner — that they considered you a friend and nothing more — and to make the situation less humiliating, you would have to pretend that you felt the same way, and keep on smiling all night, even though you’d just learned that this person you hoped you might see naked was so repulsed by you that even though you had invited them to a Spanish restaurant, it had legitimately never entered their mind that you were hoping for intimacy, because that would be as insane as being asked out by, like, a dog or a potato.
The point, my great-grandfather said, is that he had no idea what my great-grandmother thought about him. He had no idea what she thought about anything. He had zero information about her, other than what she looked like wearing clothes, and also how it sounded when she laughed, which she had done a couple of times on their long, slow walk through campus, with the cool fall breeze whipping through the scattered leaves.
My great-grandfather said that all dates began with the same custom. The two people on the date would take turns verbally listing all the TV shows they liked. If they both liked the same show, they’d exchange memes from it. But here’s the thing: GIFs did not exist yet. So instead of texting the other person a funny moment from the show, you would say out loud, “Do you remember the part when …,” and then you would perform the meme yourself, using your face and body to imitate what an actor had said and done. Exchanging memes in person was much scarier than doing it by text, because when you text someone a meme and they don’t respond, you can tell yourself that maybe they liked it but just didn’t have time to text you back. But when you performed a meme with your body and the other person didn’t like it, you would be able to tell, because instead of laughing they would just kind of sadly look away and say, “Yeah, I remember that part.” And you would have to just keep on walking to the restaurant.
Luckily, though, my great-grandfather’s meme performances went over well, or at least well enough to keep the conversation going. And while he still had no idea whether they would ever see each other naked, he knew it was at least technically still possible.
My great-grandfather had invited my great-grandmother to a Spanish restaurant because it was the only restaurant he knew that served wine to people under 21. But when they arrived, it was too crowded to get a table. They needed to find some other place to eat, but neither of them had internet access, so their only option was to physically search for food, by walking around and looking in random directions — like, truly the same process used by animals. Things grew tense. The sun had set, and my great-grandfather was fearful that they would not be able to find alcohol. But after a few stressful minutes, they followed the scent of fried food around a corner and found a Chinese place that served beer, and they were so proud of themselves that they spontaneously high-fived, and that was the first time that they touched.
My great-grandfather told me they stayed at the restaurant so long that by the end they were the only customers left. Because they were strangers, they asked each other very basic questions, like “Who are you? Where did you come from? What kind of a person are you?” They ended up having a lot of things in common, which was exciting, because that didn’t usually happen on a first date. Often the other person would dislike things you liked, or love things that you hated, or things would seem to be going pretty well, and the person would seem really nice, but then out of the blue they would say, “What is your relationship with Jesus Christ?”
My great-grandfather said that the main thing he talked to my great-grandmother about was how nervous they both were about the future. I asked if he meant climate change, and he admitted that the imminent climate holocaust hadn’t come up much, and instead they’d mostly talked about their careers. It turned out they both had the same dream: to write stories down onto pieces of paper. In fact, they were both already trying to do that. Every day, they would each type out stories on computers and then print them with ink onto pieces of white paper. Their goal was to get better at making these paper stories, in the hopes that someday, they might be able to persuade someone to reprint their paper stories onto multiple pieces of paper, and then sell those pieces of paper for pieces of money, which were also made of paper. At this point, my mother whispered to me that it was time for my great-grandfather to take a nap, and she gave him some medicine that made him sleep for about four hours. When he woke up, though, he was still insisting all this paper stuff was real, and that it was their actual shared ambition to write stories down on paper and then sell the paper for more paper. And my mother smiled and rubbed his hand and said she believed him, but while she was doing that she buzzed for the doctor, and he brought in this huge syringe that was almost like a gun, because it was made out of metal and it had this trigger on the bottom, and the doctor explained that he was going to shoot this thing into my great-grandfather’s brain, to make him less confused. And my great-grandfather laughed weirdly and said that he had been joking about “all that paper stuff,” and that really what he and his wife had talked about on their first date was climate change, because that’s what any sane person from that era would have prioritized: being a climate warrior. And the doctor looked into my great-grandfather’s eyes with his finger on the trigger, and said, “Are you sure?” And my great-grandfather swallowed and said, “Yep!” And so the doctor left, but on his way out, he told my mom that he would stay nearby in case my great-grandfather got confused again, in which case he would come back and give him that gunshot right in the middle of his brain.
My great-grandfather was quiet for a while, almost like he was afraid to keep going with his story. But I pressed him for more information, and he said the main thing he had wanted me to know before was not what he and my great-grandmother talked about; it was how they talked, because even though they were basically still strangers who had never even seen each other naked, they somehow believed in one another from the start.
My great-grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round discs into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interests in becoming naked without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my great-grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First you asked the other person if they had “seen ‘Arrested Development,’” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably did want to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it did not mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”
That’s why there was a third part of the custom. After walking back to your dorm room and putting one of the discs into the disc-playing machine, you would sit side by side on a small couch. Your eyes would be facing the screen, but your attention would be focused entirely on each other. As “Arrested Development” played, you would physically move closer to the other person, inch by inch, without making any sudden movements. The idea was that if you both moved incrementally toward each other, eventually your hands would touch. If the other person pulled their hand away or laughed and said, “Sorry!,” that meant they had really, truly come to watch “Arrested Development.” But if they did not pull their hand away from yours, that meant it was time to start kissing, which is what my great-grandparents did, even though they had never exchanged even the most rudimentary of nudes, and at this point my mother told my great-grandfather to stop telling the story, and he had to admit that the next part was genuinely inappropriate.
My great-grandfather said that their marriage wasn’t perfect. Sometimes they argued, and in the 2050s they both had full-fledged affairs with sex robots. But they ultimately forgave each other, because nobody’s perfect, and also by the 2050s sex robots had become extremely advanced as well as incredibly persuasive — like if you refused to have sex with them, they would start making really high-level philosophical arguments about “why it wasn’t wrong,” using logic that was essentially bulletproof, while their genitals lit up and spun and stuff, and eventually it got to the point where the UN had to regulate the Sex Robot Industry, because they needed people to leave their apartments again so we could go back to being a society.
The point is, my great-grandparents rekindled their romance in the 2060s, and they even ended up renewing their vows while riding on the Escape Pod to New Earth, surrounded by their daughters and their grandchildren. And my great-grandfather asked my mom if she could remember the ceremony, and she said she was only four at the time, but she did vaguely recall how weird it was to see him on the spaceship when it was supposed to be just for women and children, and my great-grandfather said that they needed to bring one man to “help the women lift their bags into the overhead compartments,” and I reminded him that earlier he’d said he’d been on the ship to row an oar, and there was a long pause, and then he said that he was tired and had to go to sleep. And he closed his eyes, but it didn’t really look like he was sleeping, because every few seconds he would open his eyes to check if we were still there, and when he saw we were he would quickly close his eyes again.
And it was around this time that my great-grandmother rolled up in her wheelchair. And my great-grandfather stopped pretending to be asleep, and he sat up and smiled, and she smiled back, and then he lowered his voice and said, “Do you want to watch ‘Arrested Development’?” And my mom reminded my great-grandfather that “Arrested Development” had been lost, along with everything else on Earth, because of his generation’s crimes against humanity. But my great-grandfather ignored her and motioned for his wife to wheel next to him. And he flipped through random channels, while their hands inched slowly toward each other.
And that’s when I finally figured out what Earth was really like.
It was kind of like “Arrested Development.”
It was something people talked about, and praised, and maybe even tried to save, but the whole time, what everybody secretly, actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. That’s where all of mankind’s effort went, the sweat and the toil of billions, not to saving the world but to the frantic, desperate quest for love. And that’s why Earth is gone, because it was nothing more than a conversation starter. It wasn’t what we really, truly cared about. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other.
And when my mom read my first draft of this, she said that I shouldn’t end it this way, because it’s glib and defeatist and seems to absolve my great-grandfather of his political inaction, but it’s not like anybody’s going to read this stupid essay anyway, and even if they do it’ll eventually be lost like everything else besides “Spider-Man,” so I’m just going to stop it right here, because I want to go out and the night’s still young.
How to make social media, online life less of 'dumpster fire'
Applied Social Media Lab Director Jonathan Bellack.
Photos by Lorin Granger
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Event discusses ways to reclaim digital networks, make better use of AI
Popular social media platforms were once a place to connect with old and new friends, post life updates, and share photos of your kids. But they have become fraught with misinformation, an algorithm-delivered onslaught of content aimed at fueling discord, all in service to business models that prioritize drawing eyeballs, said experts on digital life at a discussion last Thursday on how to improve discourse and spaces online.
But that’s not how they started.
“I think it’s important to remember why people were originally going to a lot of these services, these online environments. They were looking for connection and were looking for community,” said danah boyd, founder of research nonprofit Data & Society. “It was self-identified geeks, freaks, and queers — which I identify as all three — that were very, very happily finding their people in these online environments, and they were investing in those relationships.”
boyd, who is also a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University, was part of a keynote panel at an afternoon-long series of discussions, titled “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires.” boyd’s panel was moderated by Berkman Klein Center Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School.
“I’ve been thinking a little bit about what I call the three laws of digital governance,” said Zittrain, who is also a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and a professor of computer science at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “One, we don’t know what we want. Two, we don’t trust anybody to give it to us. Three, we want it now. And the optional fourth is can AI scale it.” The crowd chuckled. He asked the panel how they felt these rules might be helping or hurting public discourse.
Jonathan Zittrain (from left), danah boyd, Deb Roy, and Gordon Pennycook.
Deb Roy, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, said that when thinking about all of these technologies, it’s important to think about their intended goals.
Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist from 2013-2017. During that time, he was surprised by the lack of clarity within the company on its larger vision. The decision by social networks to follow a broadcast media model for monetization ended up leading to many unanticipated challenges.
“The point of this must be to build an audience and to have a modern-day version of broadcast reach. It’s not clear that’s the primary kind of social network we were seeking when we talked about connection and community,” Roy said of the vague goals they pursued.
His team at MIT has been experimenting with a new social network that puts dialogue — both in person and virtual — at the center of its platform. It is currently being tested voluntarily by students and is slowly being rolled out to faculty.
It goes back to connection, boyd says.
boyd, who focuses some of her research on youth and the current mental health crisis, said that when young people turn to social networks or interventions for help, what they’re seeking is human interaction.
Jonathan Zittrain and danah boyd.
Before the pandemic, crisis workers would focus on connecting struggling youth with the “noncustodial adults” in thesir lives, she said. These are the teachers, pastors, coaches, and mentors that don’t have direct power over their lives in the way parents do, and can offer a critical level of support. But coming out of the pandemic, they found that the number of youths who had even one of these types of relationships had plummeted.
Could connecting them with an AI chatbot help? Probably not, she suggested.
“When somebody’s in crisis, what they’re grateful for is that a human has spent time listening to them,” boyd said. “Somebody, even a stranger, is willing to dedicate time. And that will never be replaced.”
“When somebody’s in crisis, what they’re grateful for is that a human has spent time listening to them. Somebody, even a stranger, is willing to dedicate time. And that will never be replaced.”
danah boyd
But there may be other ways AI can lend a hand. Gordon Pennycook, associate professor and Himan Brown Faculty Fellow at Cornell University, recently published a study in Science that showed the value in using AI tools to address conspiracy theories.
Pennycook’s team used DebunkBot, an AI tool, to have short conversations with people about conspiracy theories they embraced. The bot presented participants with counterarguments using evidence-based research. The team found that nearly a quarter of participants no longer held those beliefs by the end of the conversation, which typically lasted only eight minutes.
“Even for this group of people who everyone thinks is down the rabbit hole — you can never change their mind — you see effects. Evidence matters,” he said of the findings. “It’s benefiting people … After the conversation, people trusted the AI more. Most people have really enjoyed the conversation, and they learn a lot from us.”
The event also featured other discussions around anonymous discourse on the online communication platform Nymspace and the role of technology in participatory democracy.
Toward the end of the keynote conversation, the panelists discussed the blurring of private and public spaces and the unique challenges this creates online.
Roy mentioned the book “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, which looks at patterns that correlate with human flourishing. One pattern is the intimacy gradient, which looks at architecture and considers the experience of moving from more private spaces to more public ones, such as the differences that might exist between a bedroom and an entryway.
“What we’ve done with a lot of the design of social media [is] imagine your child in their bedroom, and they open the door and just step into Times Square. There is no gradient,” Roy said. “How do we bring that kind of thinking and those principles into the spaces that we all together can create?”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson discusses new memoir, ‘unlikely path’ from South Florida to Harvard to nation’s highest court
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at Sanders Theatre last week.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Ketanji Brown Jackson was plagued by homesickness and imposter syndrome as a College first-year in the late 1980s.
“Could I really cut it?” the Supreme Court Justice recalled thinking during a sold-out event at Sanders Theatre last Thursday marking the publication this month of “Lovely One,” which traces her “unlikely journey” from South Florida to the nation’s highest court.
That self-doubt began to evaporate with the help of an experience she had in that very venue: Taking Michael J. Sandel’s near legendary offering on classical theories of ethics and justice applied to issues of the moment. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, has taught a version of the course for more than four decades.
“Doing well in that class was one of the things that helped me to see that maybe I could cut it here,” said Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96. “I loved that class, and it really confirmed for me that law and philosophy were things I was interested in.”
At the book talk, Jackson read a short excerpt and discussed her motivations in writing it with Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the event moderator and Harvard Radcliffe Institute Dean. “The key takeaway,” Jackson said, “is the good fortune of the moment of my birth. … I was born in 1970, five or six years after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation.”
Jackson, 54, set to work on the book soon after her contentious confirmation hearings in March 2022. “I was really, really grateful to get through that experience successfully,” she said. “I felt as though I wanted to take the time to pay tribute to the people and circumstances that were most responsible for that accomplishment.”
At the top of the list are her parents, Ellery and Johnny Brown, both first-generation college graduates who grew up in segregated Florida. Jackson credited her mother, a middle-school educator, with teaching her to read at an early age. Her father, a high-school history teacher who enrolled at University of Miami Law School when Jackson was 3, inspired her interest in pursuing a legal career.
The Browns showered their daughter, a star student, with emotional support and enrichments. “My parents were very intentional about wanting me to participate and do all the things they didn’t get to do,” said Jackson, who listed swimming lessons and theater among her many extracurriculars.
In fact, it was the Miami Palmetto Senior High School speech and debate team that put Harvard on her radar. Jackson remembered raising money — “we sold a lot of candy” — to fund a trip to the annual national tournament on the University’s campus. “It was only because of that that I thought, ‘Oh, this looks like a pretty decent school,’” Jackson said to peals of laughter.
“I’m the first Black woman to get appointed to the Supreme Court. But I’m not the first Black woman who could do this job.”
An audience of about 1,000 people responded warmly throughout the hourlong event, hosted by the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Attendees included the justice’s Boston-based in-laws as well as at least one former roommate from her time living in Cabot House. Seated near the center of the theater was her husband of 28 years, Patrick G. Jackson ’91, a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.
The mood turned giddy as Jackson shared the story of their romance. She remembered Patrick, who counts among his ancestors King Edward I of England and four Mayflower passengers, sitting behind her in a history class. They became the sort of friends who awkwardly flirt. “Over time, I started to like him, but I felt like he probably didn’t like me,” Jackson said. “I had not had a serious boyfriend.”
The justice pantomimed the moment Patrick finally made his move — with a yawn and a stretch of the arm as they watched a Blockbuster movie rental at his parents’ place.
She recalled jumping to her feet. “I just don’t want to be hurt,” she protested.
Patrick stood and took her hands. “Ketanji,” he told her, “I will never hurt you. I love you.”
Also discussed was less ebullient material from the new memoir, including the time a 7- or 8-year-old Jackson found a handwritten note from her maternal grandmother. “She didn’t have a lot of schooling,” Jackson said. “She grew up in Georgia in the ’20s and ’30s.”
Jackson’s mother was “crestfallen” to find her daughter amused by the note’s misspellings. “She said, ‘I thought we were raising you better than this,’” Jackson recalled. “The memory of that [moment] has replayed throughout my life when I think about all the advantages I have been blessed to receive and how there are people who don’t have similar opportunities.”
Another formative chapter occurred during Jackson’s junior year at Harvard College, when a Confederate flag was displayed by a fellow Cabot House resident. Jackson participated in protests with the Black Students Association, as she recounts in the book. But what she focused on Thursday was the way racism functions as a distraction.
“What we needed to do was make sure we were still going to class, we were still doing our work, we were still doing well,” said Jackson, who credited this wisdom to a famous quote by the late “Beloved” author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
Jackson briefly touched on “the mixed bag” of her parenting journey, in particular the challenge of reconciling her parents’ hard-driving “you got this, kid” model with the needs of her eldest daughter, who is on the autism spectrum. “I try to be as transparent as I can in the book about that,” she said.
Brown-Nagin, who also serves as the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts Sciences, asked about key mentors and role models. Jackson gushed about her experience clerking for retired U.S. District Judge for the Massachusetts District Patti B. Saris ’73, J.D. ’76. “She was my first real professional mentor, and we’re still very good friends,” Jackson said.
She was equally effusive about the late Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a U.S. federal judge and the subject of Brown-Nagin’s “Civil Rights Queen” (2023). Jackson learned of Motley while in middle school. It turns out, the trailblazing judges share a birthday, born on the same date 49 years apart.
Motley had been an “unbelievable” litigator, Jackson explained, winning nine of 10 cases argued at the Supreme Court before her appointment in 1966 to a U.S. District Court in New York. But ascending to the country’s highest bench simply wasn’t a possibility back then.
“I’m the first Black woman to get appointed to the Supreme Court,” Jackson said near the end of the event. “But I’m not the first Black woman who could do this job.”
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Difficulty controlling 2D materials has slowed discovery in hot field of physics
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
A discovery six years ago took the condensed-matter physics world by storm: Ultra-thin carbon stacked in two slightly askew layers became a superconductor, and changing the twist angle between layers could toggle their electrical properties. The landmark 2018 paper describing “magic-angle graphene superlattices” launched a new field called “twistronics,” and the first author was then-MIT graduate student and recent Harvard Junior Fellow Yuan Cao.
Together with Harvard physicists Amir Yacoby, Eric Mazur, and others, Cao and colleagues have built on that foundational work, smoothing a path for more twistronics science by inventing an easier way to twist and study many types of materials.
A new paper in Nature describes the team’s fingernail-sized machine that can twist thin materials at will, replacing the need to fabricate twisted devices one by one. Thin, 2D materials with properties that can be studied and manipulated easily have immense implications for higher-performance transistors, optical devices such as solar cells, and quantum computers, among other things.
“This development makes twisting as easy as controlling the electron density of 2D materials,” said Yacoby, Harvard professor of physics and applied physics. “Controlling density has been the primary knob for discovering new phases of matter in low-dimensional matter, and now, we can control both density and twist angle, opening endless possibilities for discovery.”
Cao first made twisted bilayer graphene as a graduate student in the lab of MIT’s Pablo Jarillo-Herrero. Exciting as it was, the achievement was tempered by challenges with replicating the actual twisting.
At the time, each twisted device was hard to produce, and as a result, unique and time-consuming, Cao explained. To do science with these devices, they needed tens or even hundreds of them. They wondered if they could make “one device to twist them all,” Cao said — a micromachine that could twist two layers of material at will, eliminating the need for hundreds of unique samples. They call their new device a MEMS (micro-electromechanical system)-based generic actuation platform for 2D materials, or MEGA2D for short.
The Yacoby and Mazur labs collaborated on the design of this new tool kit, which is generalizable to graphene and other materials.
“By having this new ‘knob’ via our MEGA2D technology, we envision that many underlying puzzles in twisted graphene and other materials could be resolved in a breeze,” said Cao, now an assistant professor at University of California Berkeley. “It will certainly also bring other new discoveries along the way.”
In the paper, the researchers demonstrated the utility of their device with two pieces of hexagonal boron nitride, a close relative of graphene. They were able to study the bilayer device’s optical properties, finding evidence of quasiparticles with coveted topological properties.
The ease of their new system opens several scientific roadways, for example, employing hexagonal boron nitride twistronics to produce light sources that can be used for low-loss optical communication.
“We hope that our approach will be adopted by many other researchers in this prosperous field, and all can benefit from these new capabilities,” Cao said.
The paper’s first author is nanoscience and optics expert Haoning Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Mazur’s lab and a Harvard Quantum Initiative fellow, who noted that developing the MEGA2D technology was a long process of trial and error.
“We didn’t know much about how to control the interfaces of 2D materials in real time, and the existing methods just weren’t cutting it,” she said. “After spending countless hours in the cleanroom and refining the MEMS design — despite many failed attempts — we finally found the working solution after about a year of experiments.” All nanofabrication took place at Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems, where staff provided invaluable technical support, Tang added.
“The nanofabrication of a device combining MEMS technology with a bilayer structure is a veritable tour de force,” said Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics. “Being able to tune the nonlinear response of the resulting device opens the door to a whole new class of devices in optics and photonics.”
Federal funding for the research was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation.
Popularity of diet drugs fuels ‘dumpster fire’ of risky knock-offs, questionable supplements, food products, experts warn
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
A flood of dietary supplements, imitation compounds, and highly processed foods with questionable health value are being pushed at American consumers by companies hoping to piggyback on the widespread popularity of the newest generation of anti-obesity medications, according to Harvard experts on diet, nutrition, and obesity.
“The diet culture-driven frenzy around Ozempic basically poured gasoline on the dumpster fire of predatory industries profiting off of weight stigma and bias,” said S. Bryn Austin, professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “It’s just been devastating.”
The blame goes far and wide, Austin said, starting with drug makers who charge $900-$1,300 for a month’s worth of treatment, five times their cost to manufacture. Those high prices are driving some patients to cheaper compounding pharmacies, which create similar drugs using different formulas that are not FDA approved. As a result, patients are not always certain what they’re getting, with calls to poison-control center about such medications surging 15-fold since 2019, Austin said.
In addition, the frenzy around weight loss fed by these drugs has spawned a blizzard of unsubstantiated, social media-driven claims about the ability of supplements and other compounds to achieve weight loss goals at a fraction of the cost of prescribed medication.
“Using laxatives for weight loss is dangerous, and it can be deadly.”
S. Bryn Austin
Among them are what has been referred to as “nature’s Ozempic,” the plant extract berberine, which has not been shown to help people lose weight, and “budget Ozempic” — another name for laxatives — which Austin called “most dastardly of them all.”
“There is a shortage of laxatives because people are buying this,” said Austin, who is also the S. Jean Means Endowed Chair in Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. “But using laxatives for weight loss is dangerous, and it can be deadly.”
The new class of diet medications themselves have been widely hailed as the most effective ever for weight loss and have effectively opened a new front in the nation’s obesity epidemic.
The drugs are GLP-1 receptor agonists — semaglutide or tirzepatide — that mimic natural hormones that make you feel full after meals. The most well-known, Ozempic, was created to fight Type 2 diabetes, but it didn’t take long for people to notice weight loss as a side effect. Manufacturer Novo Nordisk reformulated the drug into Wegovy, for obesity treatment.
Experts said the Wild West atmosphere around these drugs and their imitators is enabled by a national landscape of stigma and bias against people with obesity. Though the condition is increasingly viewed as a disease by the medical establishment, Americans are nonetheless obsessed with weight and body image.
“Obesity is a disease that you wear. If someone carries more adipose, we assume that they’re lazy.”
Fatima Cody Stanford
In most of the country, people can be fired from their jobs because of their size without legal repercussions on the employer, according to the experts, who gathered for the event, “Anti-obesity medications: Risks, benefits, and alternatives,” sponsored by The Studio at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Thursday.
“Obesity is a disease that you wear. If someone carries more adipose, we assume that they’re lazy,” said Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert and associate professor of medicine at HMS and Massachusetts General Hospital. “If someone’s leaner, we assume that they eat virtuously. Maybe they ate a salad today. Maybe they got up and got on that Peloton bike. Maybe they did a workout today; maybe they went for a swim. We don’t really know, but those judgments set up the most accepted form of bias in today’s society.”
Austin and Uma Naidoo, director of nutritional and lifestyle psychiatry at MGH and instructor at HMS, said some of the blame for the obesity epidemic lies with the easy availability and low prices for ultraprocessed products churned out by the food industry. And though some have speculated that the new anti-obesity medications could be a threat to a business model built around making foods ubiquitous and irresistible, the industries have pivoted and embraced the new environment, the two said.
What that means, Austin said, is the industry has already repositioned existing products as beneficial to those on GLP-1 drugs. They’ve also developed new ultra-processed snack foods targeting people on GLP-1s and those who’ve just come off the drugs.
The strategy is all part and parcel of an approach that sees every new problem on America’s food landscape as a new opportunity to market, Austin said.
“Every problem can be solved with a commodity solution. These commodity solutions create additional problems to which there is a new commodity solution, but for the consumer, this is a house of mirrors,” Austin said.
“The food industry is so savvy. There are clever ways of not really informing the consumer of what they’re eating.”
Uma Naidoo
Nutritional labeling is often designed to be misleading, Naidoo added. Companies add just enough whole grain to be able to include that marker of dietary health in the label, even of otherwise unhealthy foods.
Sugar is a key ingredient in many foods — even those that aren’t sweet — because it can trigger cravings. Fast food companies add sugar to French fries, she said, because even levels too low to taste can trigger compulsive eating.
There are 262 different names for sugar in processed foods, including “brown rice syrup,” which benefits from an association with the whole-grain benefits of brown rice but which Naidoo said is basically just sugar.
“The food industry is so savvy,” Naidoo said. “There are clever ways of not really informing the consumer of what they’re eating.”
Unhappy suitor wants $70,000 engagement gift back. Now court must decide whether 1950s legal standard has outlived relevance.
When is a ring a gift — and when is it a historical hot potato? That’s the question currently before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as it considers a lawsuit in which a man, Bruce Johnson, is suing his ex-fiancée, Caroline Settino, to reclaim the $70,000 Tiffany engagement ring he gave her in 2017.
The engagement fell apart when he accused her of involvement with another man, an accusation a Plymouth Superior Court judge ruled to be false.
However, because of a 1959 court case, DeCicco v. Barker, which ruled that the giver of an engagement ring is entitled to have it returned if the engagement is “terminated without the fault of the donor,” the case is raising all sorts of legal issues.
Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School, has written about such disputes (in “Rules of Engagement”). The legal scholar shared her insights into the history — and the possible future — of the “engagement ring” law. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
How did we get into such a tangled mess?
Way back when, 150 or 100 years ago, there were these torts called “heart-balm torts” that covered breach of promise to marry, alienation of affections, criminal conversation [sex with a married woman], and seduction. Basically, the assumption was that if you got engaged, you were probably engaged in sexual activity, and the “breach of promise to marry” claim compensated a woman for her presumably lost virginity when a man broke an engagement. But, even after states abolished the breach-of-promise tort, the ring was something the woman could rely on.
So an engagement ring was compensation for a woman?
It’s a good reminder that people used to think very differently about marriage and the roles of women and men. Marriage was basically a woman’s only path toward financial security, and so there were some concerns about protecting women who were denied that wrongfully. It’s a leftover from a time when our whole economic system was different, our whole social system was different.
But the 1959 ruling says that a ring should be returned if the engagement is “terminated without the fault of the donor.” What happened?
Basically, reformers became convinced that women were abusing these torts to extort money from men who hadn’t actually promised to marry them. So a bunch of states abolished the heart-balm torts, so women couldn’t sue men for damages from a broken engagement, and then men started suing women to get back engagement gifts.
Courts initially allowed those claims when they saw the donees — women — as gold-diggers, so they said that engagement rings should be returned when women weren’t justified in breaking an engagement.
Courts initially allowed those claims when they saw the donees — women — as gold-diggers, so they said that engagement rings should be returned when women weren’t justified in breaking an engagement.
Then in 1975, you see no-fault divorce in Massachusetts. If ending a marriage is not a matter of one party or the other doing something wrong, it’s hard to say that breaking an engagement can involve “fault.”
But Massachusetts is one of the states that has older cases relying on the idea of fault in breaking an engagement. And it’s the combination of those things that leads to this weird little leftover rule just for the engagement ring.
Is the giving of an engagement ring a contract?
Basically, contracts have to have “consideration” — something of value — on both sides. Where there’s a contract, there are two parties, each promising something to each other: “I mow your lawn; you give me 20 bucks.”
But the way courts thought about it, when heart-balm torts were abolished, the legislature was saying that, for purposes of legal analysis, a promise to marry was not a thing of value, so when the heart-balm torts were eliminated, in most states, engagement couldn’t be a contract.
Instead, courts turned to the concept of gifts and gift law. An engagement ring could still be what they called a conditional gift, but many states made up a special rule for it.
What is an example of a conditional gift?
If you have someone who says to their kid, “I’ll give you a car, if you go to law school,” you can’t change your mind about that and get the car back as long as the donee remains willing to perform. It’s just a gift.
With an engagement ring, many states adopted the idea that the ring is a conditional gift conditioned on marriage actually happening, regardless of willingness to perform.
With an engagement ring, many states adopted the idea that the ring is a conditional gift conditioned on marriage actually happening, regardless of willingness to perform.
So the no-fault rule for the engagement ring that many states made up was it doesn’t matter who broke the engagement. It doesn’t matter if the donee was willing to perform. She still has to give back the ring.
What happens next?
The question is whether Massachusetts should keep this fault-based rule of law or do something else. Most states have decided that it’s not wrong to break off an engagement with someone.
Most courts that got rid of the fault rule nonetheless adopted a rule that the ring always goes back. And the problem with that is it’s basically based on some pretty sexist background assumptions about women.
So the question is: What should the modern judicial system do? And there are really two possibilities for a no-fault rule. One is it always goes back, and one is it never goes back. And they will probably be debating whether they should continue the fault rule or replace it with their choice of no-fault rule.
State courts are supposed to develop the common law in light of evolving social and economic realities. So I think it’s unlikely that they will embrace a rule based on sexism, but they could. It seems more likely to me that they will do something no-fault.
High doses of Adderall may increase psychosis risk
Among those who take prescription amphetamines, 81% of cases of psychosis or mania could have been eliminated if they were not on the high dose, findings suggest
Mass General Brigham Communications
3 min read
Patients taking a high dose of a prescription amphetamine face more than a five-fold increased risk for developing psychosis or mania, according to research out of McLean Hospital, a Harvard affiliate.
Often prescribed to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, the risk was highest in those taking 30 mg or more of dextroamphetamine (which corresponds to 40 mg of Adderall), according to the study. Findings were published Thursday in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Previous studies have linked stimulants to psychosis and mania risk; however, information had been lacking on whether dosing impacted risk.
“Stimulant medications don’t have an upper dose limit on their labels, and our results show that it is clear that dose is a factor in psychosis risk and should be a chief consideration when prescribing stimulants,” said lead study author Lauren Moran, a pharmacoepidemiology researcher at McLean Hospital. “This is a rare but serious side effect that should be monitored by both patients and their doctors whenever these medications are prescribed.”
Moran said the study was born out of her past clinical observations as an inpatient psychiatrist. She and her McLean colleagues would regularly see patients coming in experiencing first episodes of psychosis, and their medical records would reveal they were prescribed high doses of stimulants by their doctors.
Researchers reviewed electronic health records of Mass General Brigham patient encounters between 2005 and 2019, focusing on adults aged 16 to 35, the typical age of onset for psychosis and schizophrenia. All patients were admitted to McLean Hospital following referrals from other hospitals in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. The researchers identified 1,374 cases of individuals presenting with first-episode psychosis or mania, compared to 2,748 control patients with a psychiatric hospitalization for other conditions like depression or anxiety. They conducted a comparison analysis of stimulant use over the preceding month and accounted for other factors, including substance use, in order to isolate the effects of stimulants.
They found the attributable risk percentage among those exposed to any prescription amphetamine was nearly 63 percent and for high dose amphetamine was 81 percent. These findings suggest that among people who take prescription amphetamine, 81 percent of cases of psychosis or mania could have been eliminated if they were not on the high dose. While a significant dose-related risk increase was seen in patients taking high doses of amphetamine, no significant risk increase was seen with methylphenidate (Ritalin) use, which is consistent with previous research, including a 2019 study led by Moran.
While the study does not prove causality, the researchers note there is a plausible biological mechanism in neurobiological changes that include a release of higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine from amphetamines, that parallel dopaminergic changes observed in psychosis.
Limitations of the study include inconsistencies with how electronic health records are kept. Additionally, with the research taking place in a psychiatric hospital in the Boston area that sees many patients with psychosis, it may make these findings less generalizable to other parts of the country.
Moran said the findings need not create alarm but should lead to extra caution when these medications are prescribed, especially for those who have risk factors for psychosis and mania.
“There’s limited evidence that prescription amphetamines are more effective in high doses,” said Moran. “Physicians should consider other medications our study found to be less risky, especially if a patient is at high risk for psychosis or mania.”
This work was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), R01 MH122427.
Breakthrough technique may help speed understanding, treatment of MD, ALS
Microscopy image of a skeletal muscle organoid. The green cells are in vitro-derived satellite cells.
Courtesy of Feodor Price
Alice McCarthy
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
3D organoid system can generate millions of adult skeletal-muscle stem cells
Harvard researchers have pioneered a groundbreaking method for generating large numbers of adult skeletal-muscle satellite cells, also known as muscle stem cells, in vitro.
The development could help speed the understanding and treatment of a range of skeletal muscular disorders, including muscular dystrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The new 3D organoid culture technique for the satellite cells, detailed in Nature Biotechnology, also provides a powerful tool for studying muscle biology.
“People will be able to do all these engraftment and regeneration experiments because suddenly, you have millions of cells,” said co-author and Harvard research scientist Feodor Price. “Go play with them, study them, look at your favorite genes and pathways in your labs.”
Price worked with Lee Rubin, professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and co-chair of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Nervous System Disease Program, to pioneer the lab-derived satellite cells that closely resemble native adult stem cells and are responsible for skeletal muscle growth and regeneration.
When transplanted into mouse muscle, the cells were able to engraft, repopulate the stem cell niche, persist long-term, and regenerate muscle after repeated injury — all key functions of native satellite cells.
Lee Rubin and Feodor Price.
Photo by Jon Ratner
Their unique approach overcomes the challenge of maintaining satellite cells’ regenerative capabilities when cultured outside the body with traditional methods. “Once you take them out of the body, they basically stop being a stem cell,” Price explained.
Price elaborated that when the muscle stem cells are cultured with the goal of increasing their numbers, they proliferate rapidly but then spontaneously differentiate into myoblasts (muscle progenitor cells), losing their original functional capacity. This leads to ineffective muscle repair and maintenance when the cells are transplanted back into the body.
The team’s breakthrough in maintaining the satellite cells’ regenerative capabilities came from the innovative use of 3D organoid culture techniques. By placing mouse myoblasts into spinner flasks, the researchers could generate organoids containing differentiated muscle fibers and a population of cells expressing the key satellite-cell marker Pax7.
The presence of this important transcription factor and the organization of the structure within the organoid were indicators of their method’s success.
“We are confident that we have successfully recreated the satellite cell niche,” Price said. “And because of that, we were able to coax cells within that organoid to dedifferentiate back to the satellite cell state. In essence, we have created satellite cells in vitro, a significant achievement that holds great promise for the field of regenerative medicine and muscle biology.”
Extensive in vitro and in vivo characterization demonstrated that these stem cells closely resemble bona fide satellite cells, including their small size, quiescence, and expression patterns of key genes and epigenetic marks.
They are, however, not identical to native cells. RNA and DNA analysis revealed that the lab-generated cells have an intermediate transcriptional and epigenetic profile between satellite cells and myoblasts.
Most importantly, though, when transplanted into mouse muscle, the cells were able to engraft, repopulate the stem cell niche, persist long-term, and regenerate muscle after repeated injury — all key functions of native satellite cells.
The researchers were also able to generate the satellite cells from human myoblasts, including highly passaged commercial cell lines. This has important implications for the development of cell therapies, as working with human tissue is difficult, and large numbers of functional satellite-like cells can now be produced in vitro.
This research was supported by the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and the strategic alliance between Harvard University and National Resilience established by Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) to advance the research toward commercialization opportunities.
Building on these advancements, the research team laid the groundwork for a collaborative project with other Harvard labs to model the entire neuromuscular circuit, with potential applications for conditions like spinal muscular atrophy, ALS, and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.
“Our lab has spent years working on the ‘neural’ side of neuromuscular diseases,” Rubin said. “We are now looking forward to a time when we can generate an entirely new circuit extending from the spinal cord to highly functional muscle.”
Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative announces advisory council and memorial co-chairs
University looks to build on initial steps to engage community, develop enduring partnerships
7 min read
Two years into implementation of recommendations issued by a presidential committee, the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative is welcoming a new council to advise on the next phase of work and two new co-chairs to guide the planning for a memorial honoring those whose labor advanced the founding, growth, and evolution of the University.
Both groups will help the initiative balance two big, intersecting goals: strengthening engagement — within the University, with the local community, and with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) — while continuing to make steady progress on implementation.
“Engaging in reparative work requires a substantial, sustained effort,” said President Alan M. Garber. “Over the last two years, across the University and in conjunction with community and HBCU partners, we have laid a strong foundation. Now, as we enter this next phase, we will proceed with curiosity and humility, confident in what we have learned and eager to learn more so that our ongoing work has the greatest impact. As we foster new ideas and partnerships both inside and outside of Harvard, we will keep our mission at the heart of our efforts, advancing the cause of justice through the pursuit of knowledge. I am deeply grateful to everyone who has joined us in this work.”
Envisioning the next phase of reparative work
The advisory council will build on the efforts of the presidential committee, whose April 2022 report outlined how Harvard could reckon with its historic ties to slavery, and the implementation committee, which created a road map for putting those recommendations into practice. Many of the members of the new advisory council were on the implementation committee and have been engaged in advancing Harvard’s commitment to enacting the recommendations.
Members of the advisory council include:
Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Henry Louis Gates Jr., director, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies, Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University
Evelynn Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science; professor of African and African American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University
M. Lee Pelton, president and CEO, the Boston Foundation
In the past two years, H&LS has made notable progress on the initial phase of work related to the seven recommendation areas. This includes, most recently, welcoming the inaugural class of Du Bois Scholars as part of the Harvard College Summer Undergraduate Research Village, awarding more than $2 million in grants to local Boston and Cambridge organizations for initiatives aimed at addressing systemic inequities stemming from the legacy of slavery, engaging new HBCU presidents through the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s annual seminar for new college and university presidents, and this fall, along with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, welcoming the first visiting faculty as part of a new partnership with HBCUs across the country.
Going forward, the new council members will engage with H&LS and the University on opportunities to build on this early stage work across the recommendation areas. This will include developing strategies to advance enduring partnerships with HBCUs; continuing to support the work to identify direct descendants of those individuals enslaved by Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff; fostering access to educational opportunities and educational excellence for descendant communities; honoring, engaging, and supporting Native communities; building lasting partnerships with community leaders and organizations in Boston and Cambridge; and supporting the work of the Memorial Committee.
“Members of the advisory council have personally been deeply invested for many years in advancing the work of addressing the legacy of slavery and will advise on ways we can continue to engage and collaborate with a broad set of stakeholders inside and outside the University,” said Sara Bleich, vice provost for special projects and the leader of the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative. “Their insights, perspectives, and experience will help us envision our next chapter of this work in ways that fulfill the commitment behind the H&LS recommendations.”
Engaging the community to create a memorial to enslaved people who labored on campus
One project that will move forward in the coming years is the creation of a campus memorial to those individuals whose labor helped enable the growth of Harvard. Earlier this month, Brenda Tindal, Faculty of Arts and Sciences chief campus curator and senior adviser on academic community engagement, and Eric Höweler, director of the Master of Architecture I program and a professor of architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, stepped into the roles of co-chairs to help guide development of a process for creating the memorial.
Tindal and Höweler succeed Tracy K. Smith and Dan Byers as co-chairs of the memorial committee. In May, Smith and Byers stepped down as co-chairs and advised H&LS to pace itself in pursuing community engagement.
Pointing to her past work as part of the curatorial team for the International African American Museum, Tindal noted that building community “is a generative and rewarding facet of placemaking and cultural work, but it is also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
“It’s important to acknowledge that the communities we need to engage with are not monolithic,” Tindal continued. “We need to build trust with the University community, descendant communities, and those with deep affinities and connections to the stories we want to shepherd as part of this process.”
Höweler, who was part of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, pointed to the critical work that happens before you put pen to paper to craft the concept for a memorial.
“When we joined this work [at UVA] as a design team, there was seven years of work already done by students and faculty,” said Höweler. “We were able to steer the work toward a design that could bring people together. There’s a certain amount of groundwork that needs to be done first.”
Byers, the former co-chair, will remain on the committee as its work moves forward. Other members of the memorial committee include artists, and experts in Native American studies, African and African American Studies, law, and racial justice.
Horace Ballard, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Curator of American Art, Harvard Art Museums
Vince Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Tania Bruguera, senior lecturer in Media & Performance, Theater, Dance & Media affiliate of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Guy-Uriel Charles, Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law, faculty director, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, Harvard Law School
Jordan Clark, associate director and acting executive director, Harvard University Native American Program, Tribal Affiliation: Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah
Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Stephen Gray, associate professor of urban design and director, Master of Architecture in Urban Design Program, Graduate School of Design
Jerome Offord Jr., associate University librarian and chief diversity officer, Harvard Library
Karthik Pandian, associate professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Terry Tempest Williams, writer-in-residence, Harvard Divinity School
Höweler and Tindal said their early priorities for the start of the semester include engaging the committee in thinking about the next phase of its work, which will focus on community outreach and might include site visits with the goal of gaining instruction and inspiration for the Harvard memorial.
“A memorial honoring the lives of enslaved people who labored on our campus will add a new dimension to Harvard’s vast memorial ecology, and it will be a site of pilgrimage for a global network of visitors,” said Tindal. “We must enact an engagement effort that adequately prepares our campus and considers a broad spectrum of voices and insights within and beyond our University community. This process is deeply important and will take time.”
Victoria Zambrano ’27 (clockwise from bottom left), JaKayla C. Harris ’27, Ida Chen ’27, and Kodi Kim ’27 working together during “Introductory Electromagnetism Physics.”
Students sample classes across campus, offering them a taste of what lies ahead
Marking the start of the fall semester, thousands of students set off for their first class last week.
“I was immediately amazed to see the diversity of students coming from many different U.S. territories and countries,” Amber Henry, assistant professor in African and African American Studies, said. “I’m excited to have people with so much experience in countries outside of the United States in the class, bringing that richness of experience as we’re thinking about what travel and tourism might look like, and its alternatives, both in places in the Americas and also some of continental Africa.”
Henry is teaching “The Politics of Paradise: Tourism in Latin America & the Caribbean,” a lecture course in the Barker Center that discusses how different experiences of power are tied to tourism, the notion of paradise, and how the concept of paradise has been mobilized in search of the “ideal place.” For the first day, Henry’s students were asked to bring an item that presents the most generic tourist representation of a place.
“It was a wonderful opportunity to think about what types of experiences people are invited to have when they visit a place as a tourist location, and how those experiences might diverge from a kind of deeper, more intimate history that might be gleaned from someone who has a longer experience living there,” she said.
Across campus, students in Louis Deslauriers’ “Introductory Electromagnetism Physics” class were treated to dynamic physics experiments. “You always get lots of clapping,” joked Deslauriers, director of Science Teaching and Learning in FAS and senior preceptor in physics, about the flashy demonstrations which deal with electricity and magnetism.
The core course for physics concentrators largely welcomes first-years and sophomores and covers several topics, including electric currents, Maxwell’s equations, magnetic fields in materials, and some notions in kinetic theory. The goal, Deslauriers notes, is to master this introductory knowledge.
“I make them a promise, that by the end of the course, they’re going to feel powerful,” he said. “By powerful, I mean that when you objectively have a better understanding of the world around you, there’s a power that comes from that.”
Senior preceptor in physics Louis Deslauriers offers students demonstrations during “Introductory Electromagnetism Physics.”
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
A student works on an iPad during a physics class taught in the Science Center Hall A.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Spencer Lee-Lenfield, postdoc and incoming assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature (left), teaches “Exploring Translation Studies: History, Theories, the State of the Art.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Lee-Lenfield gathers with students in a Barker Center classroom.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Graduate student Claire Koeppen.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Graduate student Camellia Pham.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Graduate student Yam Traiber.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A student takes notes during class.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Graduate student Luis S. Pabón Rico.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Jessie Cox teaches “Music to Re-imagine the World: From Afrofuturism to Experimental Music across Planet Earth.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A detail of the chalkboard in the Music Building.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Gabriela Vasquez Rosado ’26.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Amber Henry, assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies, teaches “The Politics of Paradise: Tourism in Latin America & the Caribbean.”
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Ayah Khan ’25 (left) and Adrian Munoz Krans ’25 laugh during class in the Barker Center.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Joshua Greene, professor in the Department of Psychology, teaches “Free Will, Responsibility, and Law” in William James Hall.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Andrew Danielson, assistant professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, (standing) teaches “First Civilizations: History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Danielson’s class is held in the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
A slide displays “Ancient Records” during the class presentation.
Cass Sunstein suggests universities look to First Amendment as they struggle to craft rules in wake of disruptive protests
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
In the aftermath of student protests that shook campuses last spring, universities across the nation are wrestling with questions about how and when speech should be regulated. Educational institutions could turn to the First Amendment for guidance, said Cass Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, during a Tuesday talk at Harvard Law School.
Universities should strive to keep a balanced approach to free speech while protecting their educational mission.
Cass Sunstein
The First Amendment, adopted in 1791, establishes that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The amendment, with its prohibition on “abridging” freedoms, might seem absolute. But, Sunstein notes, that is not the case. The legal doctrine that has developed over the decades provides a set of guiding principles that include permissible restrictions, which can help universities fulfill their educational mission while balancing free speech.
“The First Amendment provides something like a diagnosis of problems,” said Sunstein in a dialogue with Professor of Law Benjamin Eidelson about Sunstein’s new book, “Campus Free Speech.” The book offers a case-study framework for resolving dilemmas around speech.
First Amendment principles offer clear guidance when it comes to regulating actions that are considered “true threats,” Sunstein said, such as students who threaten to commit violence against their classmates or destroy buildings or are part of a criminal conspiracy.
In addition, some regulation can be appropriate if it’s essential to an institution’s core mission. Such limits have been allowed for religious and military schools, for instance.
He also noted that private universities are not legally bound by the First Amendment the way public universities and public officials are. Still, he said, free speech is essential to the learning enterprise and universities, as centers of learning, should commit to preserving it.
Allowable restrictions can be based on content of speech, such as when universities ask professors not to discuss certain topics in class. They can be content-neutral, as when they don’t allow loud music in dorms after midnight, or they can be based on viewpoint, such as when professors are hired for their political views for the sake of intellectual diversity.
But universities should strive to keep a balanced approach to free speech while protecting their educational mission, said Sunstein.
“The idea of the educational mission being a permission slip for universities to regulate speech seems to me both essential and rightly evocative of the phrase ‘That way lies madness,’” said Sunstein. “Suppose there is a faculty member who thinks America is rotten to the core, there may be students who think, ‘America is the opposite of rotten to the core’ and ‘How can I learn from someone who despises my nation?’ The idea that leading to discomfort or feeling of something like exclusion as a basis for regulating speech is like the heckler’s veto, and that is not consistent with the kind of pluralism educational institutions prize.”
Besides serving as a manual or diagnostic tool, free-speech principles can also serve as a source of inspiration. Sunstein said that while writing his book he was inspired by the writings of some Supreme Court justices. He said he was particularly moved by the words of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who wrote the landmark ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. The 1943 decision established that the First Amendment protects students from being compelled to salute the American flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.
“Justice Jackson wrote, ‘Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard,’” said Sunstein. “There are lots of graveyards. They’re all quiet. And that’s not what we need at the greatest arsenal for democracy that is America’s educational institutions.”
He said the nation’s colleges and universities could also learn from the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote a famous defense of free speech in Abrams v. United States in 1919.
“First Amendment principles as developed over a very long period by judges of very diverse predilections have, broadly speaking, to be celebrated and honored rather than deplored,” said Sunstein. “Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, ‘We protect speech, the speech we hate and that we believe to be fraught with death.’ That’s quite a sentence for a Supreme Court justice to write, and it’s a good sentence.”
Cohort is first to be impacted by Supreme Court’s admissions ruling
4 min read
Harvard College has released data related to the racial and ethnic makeup of the Class of 2028, the first class whose admission was impacted by the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down the ability of colleges and universities to consider race and ethnicity as one factor among many in the admissions process.
Of students who identified their race, 14 percent identified as African American or Black, a decrease from 18 percent in Class of 2027 data. Thirty-seven percent of students identified as Asian American, representing no change from the year prior. Sixteen percent of students identified as Hispanic or Latino, up from 14 percent the previous year. One percent of students identified as Native American, a decrease of 1 percent from the previous year. Fewer than 1 percent identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, reflecting no change.
“We have worked very hard for many decades to ensure that students from every background come to Harvard and make a difference to their fellow classmates, the nation, and the world. We will continue to fulfill our mission, even as we continue to follow the law with great care,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid.
The demographics, accessible only after the admissions process was completed, provide a first understanding of the impact of the Supreme Court ruling on the composition of the undergraduate student body at Harvard. The University defended race-conscious admissions for nine years — first in U.S. District Court and then before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, both of which ruled in Harvard’s favor. The Supreme Court, in vacating those rulings, set aside 40 years of legal precedent.
“We know the value of diversity in creating a wide range of perspectives that advance learning,” said Fitzsimmons. “Our community is strongest when we bring together students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. And our community excels when those with varied perspectives come together — inside and outside of the classroom — around a common challenge by seeing it through another’s perspective.”
Eight percent of students in the Class of 2028 did not disclose race or ethnicity, compared with 4 percent last year. International students make up 16 percent of the class, an increase from 15.2 percent last year. First-generation students represent 20.1 percent of the class; 20.6 percent of students qualified for federal Pell grants. The class has 19 veterans. Thirteen transfer students also enrolled this fall, including two veterans.
With the goal of building a diverse pipeline of potential applicants and lowering barriers to a Harvard College education, the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid has continued to enhance efforts in recruitment and financial aid. Last summer, it reorganized the supplemental essay portion of the application with a consistent set of short essay questions for all applicants to reflect on their personal experiences, and it has increased recruitment travel programs and outreach to school counselors and community-based organizations. The new STORY (Small Town Outreach, Recruitment, and Yield) consortium of public and private university admissions officers traveled to several rural communities in the South and Midwest last fall.
“We have always been committed to finding exceptional talent across many communities and recruitment remains an important tool in building a robust and diverse applicant pool,” said Director of Admissions Joy St. John.
Efforts to increase financial aid have also continued, including the establishment of a launch grant that gives students receiving full financial support $2,000 in the fall of their junior year to help with costs associated with the transition to post-Harvard life. In March 2023, Harvard College raised the threshold for full financial aid for students whose families’ annual income was below $85,000. Nearly 25 percent of students in the Class of 2028 attend Harvard with no parent contribution, and the average parent contribution for the 55 percent of the student body receiving aid is $15,000. No loans are required, and all students can graduate debt-free.
If we think about food through an evolutionary lens, our ancestors lived in environments where food was scarce, and therefore energy-dense foods that were high in calories, fat, and sugar were valuable for survival. But in those times, the food that was available might have been fruits, berries, nuts, seeds; foods that were nutrient-dense, not energy-dense. What has happened in modern times is that previously healthy whole foods have been largely replaced by ultra-processed foods, which are high in pure sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, salt, and the wrong types of fats.
The reasons that our bodies crave these foods is because they are loaded with ingredients that tap into the pleasure centers in our brain.
The reasons that our bodies crave these foods is because they are loaded with ingredients that tap into the pleasure centers in our brain, the so-called dopamine reward pathway, which is the same pathway that street drugs like cocaine tap into. When we consume ultra-processed foods that are highly palatable, such as highly sugary foods or sodas and so on, the dopamine, which is the feel-good neurotransmitter, makes you feel better in the short term, and it reinforces that loop of you wanting to eat it again. People focus on the short-term effect and dismiss the long-term consequence: Junk food damages the gut microbiome and harms your mental health. It causes inflammation, lowers your mood, and increases your anxiety.
The problem is compounded when people feel stressed and anxious, and they reach out for a bag of candy or a bag of chips. The stress precipitates habit circuits in the brain.
When we crave junk foods, along with the anticipatory release of dopamine in the brain, our stomach is producing ghrelin, known as the hunger hormone, which makes us seek out that calorie-dense junk food. And after we satisfy our craving, dopamine is released again, which creates this positive reinforcement loop. There is another neurotransmitter at play, serotonin, also called the happiness hormone. Some of the foods that we crave are loaded with carbohydrates, which can increase serotonin. In the short term, these foods can make us feel slightly better, but it’s a temporary mood boost followed by a letdown that makes us feel depressed and anxious. Another neurochemical in action is the hormone leptin, which signals our body that we should stop eating. But ultra-processed foods can interfere with the signaling, especially if people consume ultra-processed foods all the time because the hormone simply stops working. People can develop something called leptin resistance, which can lead to overeating.
In the short term, these foods can make us feel slightly better, but it’s a temporary mood boost followed by a letdown that makes us feel depressed and anxious.
Fast-food companies spend millions of dollars in research and development to make these foods hyper palatable. Because let’s face it, when people have cravings, they don’t crave broccoli or a healthy salad; they usually crave candy, ice cream, cake, and the like. Companies invest a lot in artificial flavors, food colorings, dyes, and preservatives to enhance the foods’ taste and the appearance. They engineer food by focusing on the smell, the crunch factor, the texture, the taste, and the colorful look and appeal.
Food companies are not going to stop doing what they do. It’s up to the consumers to make those decisions. One of the first steps is eat the orange instead of the store-bought orange juice, which has the fiber removed and often sugars added to it. When you eat whole food, you’re increasing fiber in your diet, which is not only filling, but it also reduces and lowers your cravings. Another easy step is making sure that you’re adequately hydrated. The hunger and thirst centers often get confused in the brain. I often say to people that when they’re craving junk food, they should drink a glass of water.
Raise corporate tax rates! No, cut them! Maybe take a look first?
New study scrutinizes what did, did not work as disputed 2017 law becomes partisan football in election year
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Congress is spoiling for a tax battle in 2025.
Key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire. Most urgent to many voters are sunsetting provisions aimed at households, including the more generous Child Tax Credit. But renewing the law’s deep cuts to corporate taxes are also up for debate. Republicans and Democrats have seized on the issues in campaign speeches, with Kamala Harris endorsing a higher top corporate rate to pay for other initiatives and Donald Trump arguing that lowering rates further will foster growth.
In a new analysis of the TCJA, published last month in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Harvard macroeconomist Gabriel Chodorow-Reich charts the real-world impacts of the 2017 law’s various corporate tax cuts. His paper, co-written with Princeton’s Owen M. Zidar and the University of Chicago’s Eric Zwick, M.A. ’12, Ph.D. ’14, describes modest increases in wages and business investments, with some expired and expiring provisions proving most cost-effective. But these gains were hardly large enough to offset the big hit to tax revenue.
Chodorow-Reich hopes the findings challenge partisan narratives and inspire smarter solutions. “People may look at what happened with corporate income and say, ‘Hey, look! Tax cuts pay for themselves through higher investment!’” Chodorow-Reich said. “But that’s just not what we see in the data. Others may want to raise corporate taxes, because they think taxes have no effect on corporate policy. But that’s not what we see in the data, either.”
Reform was desperately needed by the time Congress passed the TCJA in December 2017. Back then, the U.S. government’s last landmark tax legislation was more than 30 years old.
“People may look at what happened with corporate income and say, ‘Hey, look! Tax cuts pay for themselves through higher investment!’ But that’s just not what we see in the data.”
Gabriel Chodorow-Reich
Corporate income tax revenue and investment around the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
The world experienced radical changes over that period, but the corporate tax code saw only tweaks in the ’90s and early ’00s. “If you were an economist who worked on corporate taxation around the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and you did a Rip Van Winkle — falling asleep for 30 years — the tax code would look pretty familiar to you in 2016,” Chodorow-Reich said.
Less familiar would be the state of the U.S. economy, which was far more global than in the 1980s. International competition had moved governments large and small to rethink their tax codes. “In 1986, the U.S. corporate tax rate fell right in the middle for rich countries,” explained Chodorow-Reich, who worked for the Council of Economic Advisers before earning his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. “By 2016, the U.S. was at the top with France. All the other countries had cut.”
There was bipartisan recognition that something needed to change, Chodorow-Reich recalled. The TCJA, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Trump, permanently slashed the corporate statutory rate — or percentage of profits, before write-offs, legally due in taxes — to 21 from 35 percent. It was projected to reduce federal corporate tax revenue by a whopping $100 billion to $150 billion per year for the next 10 years.
To avoid a huge budget shortfall, other measures were set to phase out. That included cuts geared to low- and middle-income households, all expiring at the end of 2025. But also included were popular changes aimed at encouraging business innovation, which started winding down in 2022.
Some of the key provisions of the TCJA allowed firms to immediately write off the full cost of new capital investments and research. A bill to restore some of these breaks as well as the expanded Child Tax Credit recently failed in the Senate, as Republicans held out hope for controlling the chamber (and any legislative updates) in the new year.
The Journal of Economic Perspectives devoted much of its summer issue to assessing the TCJA, with Chodorow et al. focusing on its corporate provisions. Reviewing a range of evidence — from studies of individual corporate tax returns to an original macroeconomic analysis outlined in a companion paper — led them to conclude that capital investments had, in fact, increased under the law by about 11 percent .
“That means we learned something,” offered Chodorow-Reich, citing a recent poll that found economists split on whether the law actually drove business investments. “Firms definitely do respond to corporate tax policy.”
The biggest gains came from expired and expiring provisions concerning expensing. According to Chodorow-Reich, reviews of corporate tax returns show that these measures performed better at driving investment than old-fashioned rate cuts. After all, cuts to statutory rates reward new and old capital alike, while expensing provisions are more targeted at growth. Should lawmakers go looking for new revenue next year, he noted, “a good tradeoff” would entail raising statutory rates while restoring expensing provisions.
In theory, all that new investment can benefit taxpayers directly by driving up wages. “Firms would need more workers in order to use the additional capital they just put into place,” Chodorow-Reich said. “And if every firm wants to hire more, they wind up bidding up the price of labor.”
How much the law increases wages is, however, a matter of dispute. Ahead of the plan’s passage, the Council of Economic Advisers had predicted the reforms would drive an annual wage increase of $4,000 to $9,000 per full-time employee. Citing other research and their own analyses, Chodorow-Reich and his co-authors landed closer to $750 per year in 2017 dollars.
“You can have a glass half-full or half-empty view on whether that’s a little or a lot,” Chodorow-Reich said. “But it is certainly well less than what some of the TCJA’s proponents suggested.”
What happened to the federal government’s corporate tax revenue under the law? It took an immediate dive of 40 percent when the TCJA was implemented. But then this revenue source rallied starting in 2020. In fact, corporate tax revenue climbed much higher than imagined, as business profits soared beyond all predictions.
In an interview, Chodorow-Reich said more research is needed to understand why corporate profits took off amid the pandemic. Possibilities range from supply chain maneuvers and so-called “greedflation” to the fact that the former tax haven of Ireland abandoned its ultra-low corporate rates in 2020. That compelled U.S. multinationals, including Google’s parent company Alphabet, to start booking more profits in the U.S. amid the TCJA’s lower tax rates.
Dusting off a microscopic portion of Harvard’s Glass Flowers collection
“The Blaschkas at the Microscope: Lessons in Botany” in the Glass Flowers gallery features models crafted by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka that illustrate life cycles of spore-forming plants and fungi. A section through the stem, spore-bearing container, and leaf of the spike-moss, Selaginella sp., magnified 500X.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Bethany Carland-Adams
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture Communications
3 min read
New release shows minute details of lives of spore-forming plants and fungi
Models created more than 100 years ago may leave some viewers wondering which is more miraculous, the original or the replica?
Since April, “The Blaschkas at the Microscope: Lessons in Botany” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History has showcased a series of models produced between 1889 and 1893 by father-and-son of Czech glass artists Leopold (1822-1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939). Between 1886 and 1936, the Blaschkas produced, exclusively for Harvard, 4,300 exquisite glass models representing 780 plant species, tropical and temperate, in various stages of health and disease.
The current exhibit, exploring microscopic details of the life cycles of spore-forming plants and fungi, puts on display models produced between 1889 and 1893 that have not been seen in nearly a quarter century. It also explains how mosses survive prolonged periods of dehydration, and how ferns have survived to become one of the oldest plant groups on Earth, and explores pathogens that threaten the survival of all organisms.
“This special exhibition illustrates and explains these complex life cycles to visitors through the glass models, carefully written text, and accompanying diagrams,” said Jennifer Brown, collection manager of the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, Harvard University Herbaria. “The models also show another aspect of the Blaschkas’ artistry. The extreme magnifications rendered in glass-on-glass plates are incredible.”
Objects in the introductory case include the Hart’s Tongue Fern and a magnifier of the sort the Blaschkas would have used.
Collection Manager Jennifer Brown is pictured in the Glass Flowers gallery.
The Blaschkas used their own observations, dissections, botanical textbooks, magnifying lenses, and microscopes to create accurate models of the reproductive cycles of ferns, mosses, liverworts, and pathogenic fungi. Their enlargements of microscopic structures are critical to understanding plant and fungal reproduction.
The exhibition was curated by Michaela Schmull, director of collections, Harvard University Herbaria, and Donald H. Pfister, Asa Gray Research Professor of Systematic Botany and curator of the Farlow Library and Herbarium, Harvard University Herbaria, Emeritus. Scott Fulton, conservator of the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, was responsible for making sure the models look their best after being in storage for almost 25 years.
The exhibit runs through February 2026.
Magnified models of male reproductive structures of the male fern, Dryopteris filix-mas.
A life-size fern leaf and several magnified details of the Dryopteris filix-mas.
The female egg-producing organ of the male fern in its fertilized stage, magnified 1000X
Capsule of the umbrella liverwort, Marchantia polymorpha, emitting spores and sterile threads (left, magnified 50X). The capsules develop on the undersides of the umbrella-like structures of the female liverwort (right, magnified 12X).A section through the developed megaspore of the spike-moss Selaginella sp., with the growing embryo, magnified 650X.
Magnified detail models of the moss Funaria hygrometrica, showing the structures that release spores.
Magnified detail models of the life cycle of the stem rust Puccinia graminis.
Damage to upper GI lining linked to future risk of Parkinson’s disease, says new study
Jacqueline Mitchell
BIDMC Communications
4 min read
The risk of developing Parkinson’s disease was 76 percent higher among those with damage to the lining of their upper gastrointestinal tract than among those without, according to a study led by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The study sheds light on the way Parkinson’s may develop and suggests that increased vigilance among those with upper GI mucosal damage may be warranted. Damage is typically identified as ulcerations caused by the H. pylori bacterium, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and/or use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) such as ibuprofen. The findings are published in JAMA Network Open.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that, at least in a subset of individuals, Parkinson’s disease originates in the gut before affecting the central nervous system,” said corresponding author Trisha S. Pasricha, a neurogastroenterologist and director of Clinical Research at the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at BIDMC. “People often think about the ways the brain influences the gut, but the gut can exert enormous influence on the brain in ways we are still only beginning to understand.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that, at least in a subset of individuals, Parkinson’s disease originates in the gut before affecting the central nervous system.”
Trisha S. Pasricha
“Many people who get Parkinson’s disease experience GI symptoms like constipation and nausea for years — even decades — prior to developing motor symptoms like difficulty walking or tremors. Our lab has been trying to better illuminate this ‘gut-first’ pathway of Parkinson’s disease because it can open new avenues for early intervention and treatment strategies.”
Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, affects an estimated 8.5 million people worldwide — a figure that has more than doubled over the past three decades. To explore this “gut-first hypothesis,” Pasricha and colleagues performed a retrospective cohort study using patient data from an electronic database encompassing a representation of urban academic centers as well as outpatient clinics and community hospitals in the Greater Boston area.
Between 2000 and 2005, investigators identified a cohort of patients with no history of Parkinson’s disease who underwent an upper endoscopy — a procedure to image and diagnose problems in the esophagus, stomach, and first portion of the small intestine, which together make up the upper GI tract. Patients with injuries to the lining of the upper GI tract, called mucosal damage, were matched in a 1:3 ratio with patients without mucosal damage. All patients were followed through July 2023.
Of 2,338 patients with mucosal damage, 2.2 percent were later diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, while of the 8,955 patients without mucosal damage, 0.5 percent went on to develop Parkinson’s.
After adjusting for confounders, the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease was 76 percent higher among those with a history of mucosal damage than among those without. On average, Parkinson’s disease was diagnosed 14.2 years after mucosal damage was detected on an upper endoscopy.
“NSAID use is so widespread — from back pain to headaches — and with peptic ulcers globally affecting upwards of 8 million people, understanding the path from mucosal damage to Parkinson’s disease pathology may prove crucial to early recognition of risk as well as potential intervention,” said Pasricha, who is also an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
This work was conducted with support from the UM1TR004408 award through Harvard Catalyst: The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center, Parenthesis, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (National Institutes of Health) and financial contributions from Harvard University and its affiliated academic health care centers. Kulkarni is supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging, (R01AG066768 and R21AG072107). Pasricha is funded by the American Gastroenterological Association Research Foundation’s Research Scholar Award. (AGA2022-13-03). Pasricha reported receiving grants from the American Gastroenterological Association during the conduct of the study. No other disclosures were reported.
EVs fight warming but are costly. So why aren’t we driving $10,000 Chinese imports?
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Experts say tension between trade, green-tech policies hampers climate change advances; more targeted response needed
Lowering auto emissions has long been a key goal in the battle against climate change. The most recent steps taken by the Biden administration include new rules earlier this year intended to force automakers to slash carbon emissions from gasoline-powered models and ramp up sales of electric vehicles, or EVs.
But on Friday the White House also finalized a 100 percent tariff on EVs from China, which has a big supply of lower-price models that U.S. officials worry could flood the market. It is of particular concern because EVs available here tend to be pricier. So while cheaper imports could boost EV use and cut emissions, they also pose a competitive threat to U.S. automakers, one the administration describes as unfair.
The climate change battle is many-faceted. The push-pull of policy dilemmas like this one offer a lesson in how global and domestic economics and politics (particularly in an election year) further complicate the task of dealing with a warming planet, according to University experts on EVs and international trade. And there may be more targeted, effective responses than those being employed.
“There is an inherent tension between trade policy — and sometimes social policy — and the goal of accelerating the deployment of clean technology,” said Henry Lee, the Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources Program. “By excluding China’s clean energy options, you are going to slow down U.S. efforts to decarbonize its economy and increase the cost. And it might be worth it, for domestic industrial policy. But every trade economist is going to tell you that this is a dumb thing to do if you care about climate.”
And puzzling to many U.S. consumers who wonder why electric vehicles in China can be bought for under $10,000 while the U.S. has only one sub-$30,000 offering, the Nissan Leaf, at about $29,000 with a range of just 149 miles, and a slew of feature-laden vehicles priced for well-off American drivers.
Electric vehicle prices in the United States versus China.
Illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
U.S. automakers, meanwhile, are keeping a wary eye on low-cost Chinese models like the BYD Seagull, small but well fitted out by one of China’s leading automakers. The car, which retails in China for about $11,500 and has a 250-mile range, has impressed reviewers and prompted dire warnings that U.S. automakers had better sit up and take notice before it is too late.
Raising access to inexpensive electric vehicles would appeal to less-well-off buyers and make EVs more attractive to a broad array of U.S. consumers. From a climate change standpoint, that’s important because thetransportation sector is the nation’s largest single source of planet-warming greenhouse gases, accounting for about 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to a 2022 report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The Biden administration recognized the sector’s importance in addressing climate change in 2021 when it set a national goal that zero emission vehicles make up 50 percent of new vehicle sales by 2030.
Robert Lawrence, HKS’ Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment, said the failure to adopt measures that address climate change directly, such as a national cap-and-trade scheme for carbon dioxide emissions or a national carbon tax, have forced those designing national climate policy to reach for other tools less suited to driving rapid change in the climate crisis.
Lawrence cited Jan Tinbergen, the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, saying that a government with multiple policy objectives — such as quickly reducing CO2 emissions, supporting the national auto industry, and fostering the growth of a domestic green technology industry — must deploy multiple tools to achieve those goals.
“If you want to hit a bullseye, you need an arrow. And if you only have one arrow and want to hit two bullseyes, well, you’d want the targets to be aligned,” Lawrence said. “The United States — meaning the Biden administration — is seeking to achieve multiple objectives with its industrial policies, but they are inherently at tension with one another. If our priority is climate change — because it’s an ‘existential crisis’ — then we would be better off obtaining the necessary inputs, the hardware we need, in the cheapest way possible.”
U.S. political concerns are a significant complication, however. Since the Obama administration, the government hasencouraged domestic automakers to invest in EV technology and manufacturing, so there would be a political price to pay if inexpensive foreign vehicles were allowed to undercut them, Lee said.
In fact, harm to those companies and workers would have electoral repercussions severe enough that, on the nation’s deeply divided political landscape, they could tip the result toward an administration hostile to efforts to address climate change, Lee said.
In the meantime, U.S. consumers ask why foreign automakers can turn out EVs at a fraction of the price offered by U.S. sellers. A February review by Car and Driver of the 2024 U.S. electric vehicle fleet covered 57 models with one, the Leaf, under $30,000, and three more under $40,000. The list had 26 models over $70,000 and eight over $100,000.
Lee and Elaine Buckberg, senior fellow at Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and former chief economist at General Motors, said the wide disparity between U.S.- and Chinese-made EV prices is due in part to factors inherent in the two nations’ markets, like significantly lower labor costs, low Chinese real estate prices, and a reduced cost in processing raw materials due to lower environmental standards.
Chinese carmakers — many of which are partly government owned — also benefit from generous subsidies and tax breaks.
Further, Buckberg pointed out the Chinese “use case” is different. Many models sold there wouldn’t be attractive to U.S. buyers because Chinese drivers tend to take shorter trips at slower speeds than their U.S. counterparts. That means inexpensive vehicles with less power and shorter range are attractive there but might have trouble finding buyers here.
“Many models sold there wouldn’t be attractive to U.S. buyers because Chinese drivers tend to take shorter trips at slower speeds than their U.S. counterparts.”
Elaine Buckberg
There’s also the price war. While China’s national government sets policy goals to encourage the development of battery electric vehicles, execution of those goals has been left to the provinces and regional governments, many of which have a stake in their local automakers.
The result is more than 100 Chinese automakers trying to outcompete each other, creating a manufacturing glut as they try to grab market share. It also means a surplus of vehicles that can be sold internationally at a discount.
Buckberg said some models by leading Chinese manufacturers like BYD, Nio, and XPeng Motors have the potential to do well in the U.S., though they face the hurdles of not having a dealer network for sales and repairs as well as the stiff tariff.
Some of those cars, in fact, are already finding buyers in Europe, where surging imports of Chinese EVs led to a European Union investigation of unfair government subsidies and the imposition of tariffs of up to 36.3 percent on the cars.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., growth in demand for electric vehicles has cooled recently. Second-quarter sales a year ago were up 50 percent over the first quarter. This year, that figure is 11 percent. While sales growth remains positive, Lee said there are significant factors still holding back many U.S. buyers.
After price, he said, range is the major concern. Americans love vehicles with a 400- to 500-mile range, but longer range means a bigger battery, which increases cost.
That leads to another concern: the availability of charging stations, Lee said. Drivers want to be able to pile the kids in the car and make that twice-yearly visit to distant family without worrying about being stranded on the side of the road or waiting in long lines for a highway charging station.
The news is not all bad, however. Charging infrastructure continues to be built and, though sales have cooled, many more models have hit the U.S. market, diversifying offerings to consumers, according to Buckberg, who leads a Harvard-MIT collaboration on EV-charging infrastructure based at the Salata Institute. Just a few years ago, Tesla held more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for electric vehicle sales; now that is around 50 percent, she said, a sign of the market maturing.
“Now you’re having a lot more mainstream offerings. You’re having Fords and Chevys and Kias and more EV entries that are in different shapes and sizes to meet consumers where they are in the market,” Buckberg said. “If they want a truck, they still want a truck. If they want an SUV with five seats, they still want an SUV with five seats, even if they’re open to it being an EV.”
The theory behind protective tariffs and subsidies — tax credits of up to $7,500 are available for EV purchases — is to allow the domestic industry time to develop so it can better compete. But Lawrence said he’d rather see government support go to research and development so that U.S. companies are behind the next great idea and don’t need government support to compete.
And if tariffs are deemed necessary, Lawrence said they should be tailored to their goals — encouraging the transition to a green economy while protecting critical industry. From a climate-change standpoint, the existing tariffs — 100 percent on EVs, 50 percent on solar panels, and 25 percent on steel — are too blunt as tools.
“We’re only going to really fight climate change effectively when it’s cheaper to use renewable technologies than it is to use fossil fuel-based technologies.”
Robert Lawrence
Instead, he said, you might design tariffs to keep out Chinese EVs to protect the U.S. auto industry, retain the steel tariff but exempt steel that is used to build windmills, lowering the cost of wind power, and let in inexpensive solar panels — $15 each compared with $35 to $40 from U.S. manufacturers — to drive solar energy growth across the U.S. That would be at minimal risk to the economy because of the small size of the U.S. solar industry and the availability of alternate fuels for electricity production if China suddenly stops selling.
“We’re doing none of that right. We’re instead adopting a highly protectionist stance that’s all intertwined with this idea that we need to have a manufacturing renaissance,” Lawrence said. “We’re only going to really fight climate change effectively when it’s cheaper to use renewable technologies than it is to use fossil fuel-based technologies. That’s really the only viable answer. You may believe in climate change, you may not. But if I can show you that you’ll save money by putting solar panels on your roof, you’ll do it.”
Professor tailored AI tutor to physics course. Engagement doubled.
Preliminary findings inspire other large Harvard classes to test approach this fall
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Think of a typical college physics course: brisk notetaking, homework struggles, studying for tough exams. Now imagine access to a tutor who answers questions at any hour, never tires, and never judges. Might you learn more? Maybe even twice as much?
That’s the unexpected takeaway from a Harvard study examining learning outcomes for students in a large, popular physics course who worked with a custom-designed artificial intelligence chatbot last fall. When compared with a more typical “active learning” classroom setting in which students learn as a group from a human instructor, the AI-supported version proved to be surprisingly more effective.
The study was led by lecturer Gregory Kestin and senior lecturer Kelly Miller, who analyzed learning outcomes of 194 students enrolled last fall in Kestin’s Physical Sciences 2 course, which is physics for life sciences majors. The final results are pending publication. Prior to the study, the team drew on their teaching and content expertise to craft instructions for the AI tutor to follow for each lesson so it would behave like a seasoned instructor.
“We went into the study extremely curious about whether our AI tutor could be as effective as in-person instructors,” Kestin, who also serves as associate director of science education, said. “And I certainly didn’t expect students to find the AI-powered lesson more engaging.”
But that’s exactly what happened: Not only did the AI tutor seem to help students learn more material, the students also self-reported significantly more engagement and motivation to learn when working with AI.
A comparison of mean post-test performance between students taught with the active lecture and students taught with the AI tutor. Dotted line represents students’ mean baseline knowledge before the lesson (i.e. the pre-test scores of both groups).
Source: “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” Gregory Kestin, Kelly Miller, Anna Klales, Timothy Milbourne, Gregorio Ponti
“It was shocking, and super exciting,” Miller said, considering that PS2 is already “very, very well taught.”
“They’ve been doing this for a long time, and there have been many iterations of this specific research-based pedagogy. It’s a very tight operation,” Miller added.
The experiment shows the advantage of using AI tutoring as students’ first substantial introduction to challenging material, the researchers wrote in their paper. If AI can be used to effectively teach introductory material to students outside of class, this would allow “precious class time” to be spent developing “higher-order skills, such as advanced problem-solving, project-based learning, and group work,” they continued.
Though excited by AI’s potential to revolutionize education, Kestin and Miller are cognizant of potential misuses.
“While AI has the potential to supercharge learning, it could also undermine learning if we’re not careful,” Kestin said. “AI tutors shouldn’t ‘think’ for students, but rather help them build critical thinking skills. AI tutors shouldn’t replace in-person instruction, but help all students better prepare for it — and possibly in a more engaging way than ever before.”
The Institutional Review Board-approved study took place in fall 2023. Nearly 200 students consented to be enrolled in the study, which involved two groups, each of whom experienced two lessons in consecutive weeks. During the first week, Group 1 participated in an instructor-guided active learning classroom lesson, while Group 2 engaged with an AI-supported lesson at home that followed a parallel, research-informed design; conditions were reversed the following week.
The researchers believe that students’ ability to get personalized feedback and self-pace with the AI tutor are advantages compared with in-class learning.
The study authors compared learning gains from each type of lesson using pretests and posttests to measure content mastery. They also asked the students how engaged they felt with each type of instruction, how much they enjoyed each type, how motivated they were, and how they would assess their “growth mindset.”
Learning gains for students in the AI-tutored group were about double those for students in the in-class group, according to the preliminary study analysis. The researchers believe that students’ ability to get personalized feedback and self-pace with the AI tutor are advantages compared with in-class learning.
In various in-class settings, “Students who have a very strong background in the material may be less engaged, and they’re sometimes bored,” Miller said. “And students who don’t have the background sometimes struggle to keep up. So the fact that this [AI tutor] can be supportive of that difference is probably the biggest thing.” This is especially valuable when students are first being introduced to concepts and problems on topics that only some students have seen before, the researchers said.
Miller stressed that the AI tutor was customized with research-based prompt engineering and “scaffolding” to ensure the lessons were accurate and well-structured.
Kestin began creating the website that hosts the PS2 tutor the previous summer, shortly after ChatGPT made its global debut. The framework is built on the GPT application programming interface, and it is structured so that conversations, including the AI tutor’s personality and quality of feedback, are pre-vetted. So rather than defaulting to ChatGPT behavior, the custom tutor provides users with information guided by content-rich prompts that have been refined and placed into the framework.
The customized AI tutor system students used during the experiment.
Once the framework was built, it was easy to start customizing it for other courses and subject matters, Kestin said, which is why several colleagues are already trying it out.
Mathematics instructor Eva Politou will introduce a version of Kestin’s AI tutor to Math 21a (Multivariable Calculus) this fall in the workshop portion of the course, which is typically taught by undergraduate course assistants. Every week, students will be able to generate questions about a specific topic and search for answers with the AI tutor acting as a guide.
“The primary goal of the AI tutor is to promote an inquiry-based studying method,” Politou explained. “We want students to practice generating questions, critically approaching real-life scenarios, and becoming active agents of their own understanding and learning.”
Inspired by Kestin and Miller’s results, the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is collaborating with Harvard University Information Technology to pilot similar AI chatbots in a handful of large introductory courses this fall. They are also developing resources to enable any instructor to integrate tutor bots into their courses.
The study was co-authored by Anna Klales, Timothy Milbourne (PS2 co-instructor), and Gregorio Ponti, all of whom teach in the Department of Physics.
“Today, we think of climate science as different from air pollution, but in the ’60s, they were very much intertwined,” says co-author Colleen Lanier-Christensen.
Did lawmakers know role of fossil fuels in climate change during Clean Air Act era?
New study suggests they did, offering insight into key issue in landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling on EPA
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
How much was known at mid-20th century about the dangers of human-caused climate change? A lot more than the most Americans think.
With a new paper in the Ecology Law Quarterly, Naomi Oreskes and a team of science historians detail more than a century of research connecting carbon dioxide emissions with global temperature rise. The findings illuminate what Congress knew, and what it intended, when targeting “air pollution” with the 1970 Clean Air Act, questions that arose during a landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling limiting the power of federal agencies to enforce the law.
“We found a universe of scientific work that got lost, forgotten, or buried,” said Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science.
Oreskes hopes it will serve as a definitive account ofwhat was understood by the 1950s and ’60s about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. At 124 pages, the paper surfaces everything from government reports on “inadvertent weather modification” to long-dead lawmakers pondering the future of electric vehicles. It establishes that the era’s experts saw CO2 as one of many environmental threats to regulate.
“We found a universe of scientific work that got lost, forgotten, or buried.”
Naomi Oreskes
“Today, we think of climate science as different from air pollution,” offered co-author Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow in the History of Science. “But in the ’60s, they were very much intertwined.”
Oreskes started investigating the topic about 10 years ago, originally at the behest of environmental law expert Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. But the project became all the more urgent with the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision, which restricted the agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, a significant contributor to global warming.
The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, relied on “a practical understanding of legislative intent” to find that authors of the 1970 law would have been more direct had they meant to allow CO2 regulations like the EPA’s 2015 Clean Power Plan.
“The Supreme Court was basically posing a historical question,” Lanier-Christensen said. “But then none of the justices actually looked historically at what Congress intended in passing the Clean Air Act.”
Irish physicist John Tyndall was the first to describe the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases circa 1859. By the late 19th century, the Swedish Nobel laureate chemist Svante Arrhenius had connected atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to the burning of fossil fuels. In 1896, he estimated that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations would warm the planet by 1.5 to 4.5oC.
In the 1930s, British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar started compiling data on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. A paper published in 1940 linked rising CO2 levels to amounts of coal and oil known to have been burned already. From there, the impact of CO2 on climate was called “The Callendar effect” for several years.
American scientists picked up the problem in the 1950s, with physicist Gilbert Plass ’41 affirming that rising temperatures were connected to human activity. The New York Times covered his research in a 1953 article headlined “How Industry May Change Climate.”
By the early 1960s, Callendar was complaining that “everyone likes to ‘have a go’” at the issue. That included a growing community of scientists working in the U.S. government. Central among them was Alvin Weinberg, director of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1961, Weinberg spoke to “the deterioration of our atmosphere by the accumulation of CO2” at a University of Tennessee science fair.
“This wasn’t some super technical conference,” emphasized Oreskes, whose books include “The Big Myth” (2023) and the best-selling “Merchants of Doubt” (2010). “He saw it was as an issue ordinary Americans needed to know about.”
And as the decade progressed, an increasing number of ordinary Americans did know. A 1958 documentary by “It’s A Wonderful Life” filmmaker Frank Capra, viewed by millions of U.S. schoolchildren by the mid-’60s, warned that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization.”
Also influential was a February 1969 appearance on “The Merv Griffin Show” by poet Allen Ginsberg. He rattled viewers by claiming that “the current rate of air pollution brought about by the proliferation of automobiles and ‘their excrement’” could cause “the rapid buildup of heat on earth.”
In response, one troubled constituent wrote to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson from Washington. The powerful lawmaker (who twice vied to become the Democratic nominee for president) forwarded the letter to physicist Lee DuBridge, science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon. DuBridge’s reply to Jackson featured a detailed explanation of increasing CO2 levels and “the greenhouse effect.” By year’s end, DuBridge would revisit these points on the NBCtelevision show “Meet the Press.”
Excavating this history sent the paper’s co-authors to a dozen archives. “What makes this challenging is that we’re looking pre-1970, which was before the Environmental Protection Agency existed,” Lanier-Christensen explained. “All functions related to environment were spread across the federal government.”
“You could really see how closely Senator Muskie and his office were following these issues — from a [1967] report from the secretary of commerce called ‘The Automobile and Air Pollution’ to direct correspondence with scientists,” Lanier-Christensen observed.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and much of this history has been forgotten, the researchers say. They argue that the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong with West Virginia v. EPA and note the error also appeared in its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which initially granted the EPA authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant covered under the 1970 Clean Air Act.
This was regarded by the court as the unanticipated consequence of an intentionally broad law, with the late Justice John Paul Stevens writing: “When Congress enacted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.”
“When I read that line, I nearly had a heart attack,” Oreskes recalled. “It was just so incredibly wrong.”
As she tells it, the researchers’ near book-length paper proves without question that CO2 was understood before 1970 as a pollutant as well as a threat to global climate. After all, Muskie introduced the Clean Air Act on the floor of the Senate by warning that unchecked air pollution would continue to “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.”
But the paper still tells “only the first half of the story,” Oreskes said. A second publication, still in the works, will focus entirely on testimonies to Congress before the legislation was passed, further bolstering the co-authors’ argument that lawmakers had every intention of regulating CO2.
“I don’t expect the justices to read these papers and change their minds,” Oreskes said. “But what they can do is to empower lawyers arguing these cases as they push back against faulty claims.”
New AI tool can diagnose cancer, guide treatment, predict patient survival
Video: Wirestock/Creatas Video+/Getty Images Plus
Ekaterina Pesheva
9 min read
Model uses features of a tumor’s microenvironment across 19 different cancer types
Scientists at Harvard Medical School have designed a versatile, ChatGPT-like AI model capable of performing an array of diagnostic tasks across multiple forms of cancers.
The new AI system, described Wednesday in Nature, goes a step beyond many current AI approaches to cancer diagnosis, the researchers said.
Current AI systems are typically trained to perform specific tasks — such as detecting cancer presence or predicting a tumor’s genetic profile — and they tend to work only in a handful of cancer types. By contrast, the new model can perform a wide array of tasks and was tested on 19 cancer types, giving it a flexibility like that of large language models such as ChatGPT.
While other foundation AI models for medical diagnosis based on pathology images have emerged recently, this is believed to be the first to predict patient outcomes and validate them across several international patient groups.
“Our ambition was to create a nimble, versatile ChatGPT-like AI platform that can perform a broad range of cancer evaluation tasks,” said study senior author Kun-Hsing Yu, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. “Our model turned out to be very useful across multiple tasks related to cancer detection, prognosis, and treatment response across multiple cancers.”
Training and performance
The team’s latest work builds on Yu’s previous research in AI systems for the evaluation of colon cancerand brain tumors. These earlier studies demonstrated the feasibility of the approach within specific cancer types and specific tasks.
The new model, called CHIEF (Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation), was trained on 15 million unlabeled images chunked into sections of interest. The tool was then trained further on 60,000 whole-slide images of tissues including lung, breast, prostate, colorectal, stomach, esophageal, kidney, brain, liver, thyroid, pancreatic, cervical, uterine, ovarian, testicular, skin, soft tissue, adrenal gland, and bladder. Training the model to look both at specific sections of an image and the whole image allowed it to relate specific changes in one region to the overall context. This approach, the researchers said, enabled CHIEF to interpret an image more holistically by considering a broader context, instead of just focusing on a particular region.
CHIEF achieved nearly 94 percent accuracy in cancer detection and significantly outperformed current AI approaches across 15 datasets containing 11 cancer types.
Following training, the team tested CHIEF’s performance on more than 19,400 whole-slide images from 32 independent datasets collected from 24 hospitals and patient cohorts across the globe.
The AI model, which works by reading digital slides of tumor tissues, detects cancer cells and predicts a tumor’s molecular profile based on cellular features seen on the image with superior accuracy to most current AI systems. It can forecast patient survival across multiple cancer types and accurately pinpoint features in the tissue that surrounds a tumor — also known as the tumor microenvironment — that are related to a patient’s response to standard treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy. Finally, the team said, the tool appears capable of generating novel insights — it identified specific tumor characteristics previously not known to be linked to patient survival.
The findings, the research team said, add to growing evidence that AI-powered approaches can enhance clinicians’ ability to evaluate cancers efficiently and accurately, including the identification of patients who might not respond well to standard cancer therapies.
“If validated further and deployed widely, our approach, and approaches similar to ours, could identify early on cancer patients who may benefit from experimental treatments targeting certain molecular variations, a capability that is not uniformly available across the world,” Yu said.
Overall, CHIEF outperformed other state-of-the-art AI methods by up to 36 percent on the following tasks: cancer cell detection, tumor origin identification, predicting patient outcomes, and identifying the presence of genes and DNA patterns related to treatment response.Because of its versatile training, CHIEF performed equally well no matter how the tumor cells were obtained — whether via biopsy or through surgical excision. And it was just as accurate, regardless of the technique used to digitize the cancer cell samples. This adaptability, the researchers said, renders CHIEF usable across different clinical settings and represents an important step beyond current models that tend to perform well only when reading tissues obtained through specific techniques.
Cancer detection
CHIEF achieved nearly 94 percent accuracy in cancer detection and significantly outperformed current AI approaches across 15 datasets containing 11 cancer types. In five biopsy datasets collected from independent cohorts, CHIEF achieved 96 percent accuracy across multiple cancer types including esophagus, stomach, colon, and prostate. When the researchers tested CHIEF on previously unseen slides from surgically removed tumors of the colon, lung, breast, endometrium, and cervix, the model performed with more than 90 percent accuracy.
Predicting tumors’ molecular profiles
A tumor’s genetic makeup holds critical clues to determine its future behavior and optimal treatments. To get this information, oncologists order DNA sequencing of tumor samples, but such detailed genomic profiling of cancer tissues is not done routinely nor uniformly across the world due to the cost and time involved in sending samples to specialized DNA sequencing labs. Even in well-resourced regions, the process could take several weeks. It’s a gap that AI could fill, Yu said.
Quickly identifying cellular patterns on an image suggestive of specific genomic aberrations could offer a quick and cost-effective alternative to genomic sequencing, the researchers said.
CHIEF outperformed current AI methods for predicting genomic variations in a tumor by looking at the microscopic slides. This new AI approach successfully identified features associated with several important genes related to cancer growth and suppression, and it predicted key genetic mutations related to how well a tumor might respond to various standard therapies. CHIEF also detected specific DNA patterns related to how well a colon tumor might respond to a form of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade. When looking at whole-tissue images, CHIEF identified mutations in 54 commonly mutated cancer genes with an overall accuracy of more than 70 percent, outperforming the current state-of-the-art AI method for genomic cancer prediction. Its accuracy was greater for specific genes in specific cancer types.
The team also tested CHIEF on its ability to predict mutations linked with response to FDA-approved targeted therapies across 18 genes spanning 15 anatomic sites. CHIEF attained high accuracy in multiple cancer types, including 96 percent in detecting a mutation in a gene called EZH2 common in a blood cancer called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. It achieved 89 percent for BRAF gene mutation in thyroid cancer, and 91 percent for NTRK1 gene mutation in head and neck cancers.
“Our ambition was to create a nimble, versatile ChatGPT-like AI platform that can perform a broad range of cancer evaluation tasks.”
Kun-Hsing Yu
Predicting patient survival
CHIEF successfully predicted patient survival based on tumor histopathology images obtained at the time of initial diagnosis. In all cancer types and all patient groups under study, CHIEF distinguished patients with longer-term survival from those with shorter-term survival. CHIEF outperformed other models by 8 percent. And in patients with more advanced cancers, CHIEF outperformed other AI models by 10 percent. In all, CHIEF’s ability to predict high versus low death risk was tested and confirmed across patient samples from 17 different institutions.
Extracting novel insights about tumor behavior
The model identified tell-tale patterns on images related to tumor aggressiveness and patient survival. To visualize these areas of interest, CHIEF generated heat maps on an image. When human pathologists analyzed these AI-derived hot spots, they saw intriguing signals reflecting interactions between cancer cells and surrounding tissues. One such feature was the presence of greater numbers of immune cells in areas of the tumor in longer-term survivors, compared with shorter-term survivors. That finding, Yu noted, makes sense because a greater presence of immune cells may indicate the immune system has been activated to attack the tumor.
When looking at the tumors of shorter-term survivors, CHIEF identified regions of interest marked by the abnormal size ratios between various cell components, more atypical features on the nuclei of cells, weak connections between cells, and less presence of connective tissue in the area surrounding the tumor. These tumors also had a greater presence of dying cells around them.
For example, in breast tumors, CHIEF pinpointed as an area of interest the presence of necrosis — or cell death — inside the tissues. On the flip side, breast cancers with higher survival rates were more likely to have preserved cellular architecture resembling heathy tissues. The visual features and zones of interest related to survival varied by cancer type, the team noted.
Next steps
The researchers said they plan to refine CHIEF’s performance and augment its capabilities by:
Conducting additional training on images of tissues from rare diseases and non-cancerous conditions
Including samples from pre-malignant tissues before cells become fully cancerous
Exposing the model to more molecular data to enhance its ability to identify cancers with different levels of aggressiveness
Training the model to also predict the benefits and adverse effects of novel cancer treatments in addition to standard treatments
Authorship: Co-authors included Xiyue Wang, Junhan Zhao, Eliana Marostica, Wei Yuan, Jietian Jin, Jiayu Zhang, Ruijiang Li, Hongping Tang, Kanran Wang, Yu Li, Fang Wang, Yulong Peng, Junyou Zhu, Jing Zhang, Christopher R. Jackson, Jun Zhang, Deborah Dillon, Nancy U. Lin, Lynette Sholl, Thomas Denize, David Meredith, Keith L. Ligon, Sabina Signoretti, Shuji Ogino, Jeffrey A. Golden, MacLean P. Nasrallah, Xiao Han, Sen Yang.
Disclosures: Yu is an inventor of U.S. patent 16/179,101 assigned to Harvard University and served as a consultant for Takeda, Curatio DL, and the Postgraduate Institute for Medicine. Jun Zhang and Han were employees of Tencent AI Lab. The work was in part supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant R35GM142879, the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Cancer Research Program Career Development Award HT9425-23-1-0523, the Google Research Scholar Award, the Harvard Medical School Dean’s Innovation Award, and the Blavatnik Center for Computational Biomedicine Award.
Garber says key to greater unity is to learn from one another, make all feel part of community at Morning Prayers ceremony
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Harvard President Alan Garber.
Photo by Grace DuVal
University President Alan Garber urged the campus community to seek opportunities for unity in a time of divisiveness on Tuesday at the first Morning Prayers ceremony of the new academic year at Memorial Church’s Appleton Chapel.
Garber opened his address with words of advice from the Talmudic compendium Pirkei Avot, or “Ethics of the Fathers,” traditionally read on the Sabbath. “Find yourself a teacher,” he said. “Win yourself a friend, and be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt.”
Garber, who took the helm of the University at a time of unrest over the war in Gaza, echoed themes he touched on during Monday’s Convocation, urging members of the community to seek common ground, treat one another with empathy and respect, and learn from the rich diversity of views on campus.
He explained that finding a teacher means seeking out people “whose experiences, skills and perspectives are different from your own, and whose knowledge and wisdom often exceed yours,” and “winning yourself a friend” requires offering “companionship, empathy, concern, support, and trustworthiness.”
“We’re all too adept at recognizing the flaws of our antagonists and even of our friends,” Garber said. “It’s tempting to interpret the actions of others in the worst possible light. It is better for all of us to do the opposite.”
Garber shook his head at recent headlines saying the nation’s colleges and universities have no choice but to brace for continuing disruption and unrest. He called it a “dismal notion” at an institution like Harvard, which is “pushing the limits of understanding, pursuing genuine excellence in every domain, and making ourselves, our University, and the world better.”
These impediments can be avoided. “This is not a time to brace ourselves,” he said. “This is a time to embrace once another.
“We can do so by always keeping that third precept in mind. Be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt. By reserving judgment, we make it possible for others to know that they are part of this community and that this community cares for them.”
Garber said the key was “to bring to day-to-day interactions the same commitment to inquiry and discovery that we bring to our intellectual pursuits. If and when tensions among us rise, I hope that we will approach each other not only as fellow human beings, but as potential teachers and friends.”
Morning Prayers have been held at Harvard since its founding in 1636. The service is each weekday from 8:30 to 8:45 a.m. during the academic term.
Blood test can warn women of risk decades before heart attack, stroke
Findings support universal screening of three biomarkers, not just cholesterol
BWH Communications
5 min read
Three biomarkers in blood can better predict the risk of major cardiovascular events in women decades earlier than previous tests, giving them more time to address their risk with lifestyle changes and therapeutics, according to research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard affiliate.
In a landmark study of 27,939 initially healthy American women, the researchers used a single measure of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), or “bad cholesterol”; high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), a marker of vascular inflammation; and lipoprotein(a), a genetically determined lipid fraction, to predict risk over a 30-year follow-up period.
The findings were presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in London and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Waiting until women are in their 60s and 70s to initiate heart attack and stroke prevention is a prescription for failure.”
Julie Buring, principal investigator of the Women’s Health Study
A wake-up call for women
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the U.S., with 44 percent living with some form of heart disease. In 2021, it was responsible for the deaths of 310,661 women — or about 1 in every 5 female deaths — yet only about half of U.S. women recognize that heart disease is their No. 1 killer, according to the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To assess each marker as well as the combined effect of elevated levels of two or all three, the research team divided participants into five quintiles, ranging from those with the highest to the lowest levels of the markers. Researchers found that, compared to women with the lowest levels of individual markers:
Women with the highest levels of hsCRP had a 70 percent greater risk of a major cardiovascular event;
Women with the highest levels of LDL-C had a 36 percent greater risk;
Women with the highest levels of Lp(a) had a 33 percent greater risk.
While hsCRP was the strongest of the three biomarkers, all were very important. More markers meant greater risk; women who had elevated levels of all three markers were 2.6 times likelier to have a major adverse cardiovascular event. This association was even stronger for stroke — women with the most elevated levels were 3.7 times likelier to have a stroke over the next 30 years.
“These data should be a wake-up call for women,” said co-author Julie Buring, principal investigator of the Women’s Health Study and an epidemiologist in the Brigham’s Division of Preventive Medicine. “Waiting until women are in their 60s and 70s to initiate heart attack and stroke prevention is a prescription for failure.”
At the time the participants were enrolled in the cohort, their mean age was 54.7 years; 25 percent had hypertension, 12 percent were current smokers, 2.5 percent had diabetes, and 14.4 percent had a parental history of myocardial infarction before 65 years of age. Nearly all were white, with good access to healthcare and medical information.
Reducing risk
Each of the three risk factors is modifiable with a combination of lifestyle changes and drug therapy. Multiple randomized trials have demonstrated that lowering cholesterol and lowering inflammation both significantly reduce risks of heart attack and stroke. Further, several new drugs that markedly reduce Lp(a) as well as second-generation anti-inflammatory agents are being tested to see if they too can lower rates of clinical events.
The new data strongly support earlier and more aggressive use of targeted preventive interventions, particularly among women for whom cardiovascular disease remains underdiagnosed and undertreated.
“Doctors cannot treat what they don’t measure,” said lead author Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at BWH. “To provide the best care for our patients, we need universal screening for inflammation, cholesterol, and lipoprotein(a), and we need it now.
“While we still need to focus on lifestyle essentials like diet, exercise, and smoking cessation, the future of prevention is clearly going to include combination therapies that target inflammation and Lp(a) in addition to cholesterol,” he added.
The research team analyzed data from the Women’s Health Study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health through research grants to preventive cardiology investigators in the Division of Preventive Medicine at the Brigham. The trial began in 1993 and has followed female health professionals aged 45 years and older ever since. Participants had their hsCRP, LDL-C, and Lp(a) levels tested in a blood sample obtained when they enrolled in the study. The primary endpoint was a first major adverse cardiovascular event — heart attack, coronary revascularization, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes.
Disclosures: Ridker has received research grant support to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and/or served as a consultant to entities developing preventive strategies and treatments that target inflammation, cholesterol, and lipoprotein(a), including Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Pfizer, Agepha, and Kowa. Full disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.
Supported by grants (HL043851, HL080467, and HL099355) from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and grants (CA047988 and CA182913) from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.
How to make the most of your first year at Harvard
Shop classes, avoid echo chambers, embrace the Red Line — and other faculty tips for new students
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
For the more than 1,650 first-year students who moved in last week, College has already started amid excitement and occasional jitters. We asked faculty to share advice with members of the Class of 2028 on how to make the most of their first year. Here is what they had to say, in their own words.
Harvard file photo
‘Just about everyone feels overwhelmed, or lonely, or stupid, or unprepared for College at some point’
My first recommendation for new students is to take at least one risk academically. I don’t mean a course that seems like it’s going to be “hard” so much as something off the beaten track for Harvard first-years. There’s a lot of passed-down knowledge about what to do: take a freshman seminar, Ec 10, a big gen ed, expos, and maybe Math 1. Hundreds — literally — of your classmates will choose four out of those five options in the fall. And you might think that if everyone does it, it can’t be the wrong thing to do. Fair enough. But I would still say: Consider doing something else. Consider taking a class in a discipline that didn’t even exist in your high school but that you’re curious about. Maybe anthropology.
My second recommendation is to go to office hours, but I figure everyone says that, so I probably don’t have to elaborate.
As for as things to avoid — I guess I would say suffering in silence. It’s easy — especially at Harvard — to assume that everyone else is having a great time, that everyone else thinks classes are easy and has a ton of friends and is just having the best time ever and so if you are struggling with anything, it’s because you don’t actually belong at Harvard. But I would bet that, whether you know it or not, just about everyone feels overwhelmed, or lonely, or stupid, or unprepared for College at some point. Whatever you’re struggling with, there’s someone who wants to help you with it. There are tutors, and teaching fellows, and faculty; there are counselors, and proctors, and peer advisers, and coaches. Somewhere in that group of people is at least one person who deserves your trust and will help you. Reach out!
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Dig deep when picking classes. Don’t overpack schedule.
Jie Li Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
In my last year of high school, I came across a memorable quotation from Arthur Miller at my public library. He recalled his university experience as “the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs, and my ignorance.” I took this as my motto for what I wanted to get out of College as well. College is a space to meet kindred spirits, but this doesn’t necessarily mean spending time exclusively with people like you. Rather than the comfort of any echo chamber, you learn much more from people from different backgrounds. Be an empathetic listener and refrain from making quick judgments.
Don’t be afraid to take risks and venture out of your comfort zone in your choices of classes and extracurriculars. Apart from continuing what you excel at, follow your curiosity and try something new. Browse through lists of courses by department rather than only search for keywords you are already familiar with. Before classes began in my freshman year at Harvard, my roommate and I spent hours reading through a thick printed course catalog and sharing our discoveries of interesting classes and fields unavailable to us in high school. Had I only relied on algorithms to choose classes, I may not have ended up studying anthropology or film studies. Take some small classes. You will get to know your professor and classmates much better, feel more invested in the class, and thus participate more actively. Don’t overpack your schedule. Drop a class or extracurricular commitment if you no longer have time for fun, friends, meals, exercise, or sleep.
Harvard file photo
Attend events on campus and across the Charles. Explore library treasures.
Joseph Blatt Senior Lecturer in Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
My daughter Talia graduated from the College last year; I graduated so long ago that I no longer divulge the year. But despite the time lapse, we find that our advice for first-years is quite similar. Our joint recommendations:
Your academic experience will be far richer if you make the effort to get to know some of your professors. Take advantage of office hours — they are often shockingly underattended — and don’t be shy about engaging in conversations that go beyond the boundaries of the course. You can even invite them to dinner, and Classroom to Table will pay!
Think of Harvard as your fifth course (or sixth for the overzealous). The torrent of talks, performances, and other events that flow across campus every week will offer some of the most powerful learning you’ll experience here — along with the chance to meet new people, exercise your body and mind, and indulge in an unbelievable amount of free food.
Explore Harvard’s more than 60 libraries, where you will find treasures not available on screen: wonderfully obscure books, an amazing historical map collection, precious manuscripts, famous people’s recipes … along with brilliant reference librarians who are unfailingly eager to help.
The Red Line, with all its faults, is your ticket to downtown Boston. Don’t miss the Freedom Trail, art museums, music venues, and cuisines from around the world. And that way, when people ask, “Where do you go to college?” and you respond “er … Boston,” you’ll be closer to telling the truth.
This is starting to sound too much like “Let’s Go,” so we leave you with two thoughts focused on your studies: Pay attention to how you learn and choose courses and classrooms that make you happy; and don’t compare yourself to your peers — be pleased for their success, not threatened by it.
Photo by Jon Ratner
Ask for help. Study abroad.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga Professor of the History of Science, Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico, Department of the History of Science
I would definitely tell first-year students to think of asking for help as a necessary part of being successful at Harvard and beyond. Time and again, I see that the most successful Harvard students are the ones who not only reached out for help (either with writing, math, mental health, for instance), but knew who or where to ask. First-years need to explore the support network that is offered to them and use it. It is there for them.
Also, they must all do a study abroad while they are students.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Try everything. Share projects. Requirements can wait.
Stephanie Burt Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English, Department of English
Starting with academics, and moving into the rest of your life:
DO: Take classes that look interesting, especially if they’re small. Your first year can let you explore your actual interests, even if they’re not connected to your planned concentration, grad school, or career. You might even change those plans to reflect a talent, or a power, or a strong interest you didn’t know you had!
DO: Shop. We’ve got an add-drop period for a reason. Listen to the professor and see if you vibe with that teaching style. Speak with the professor if you like! And talk to non-first-years who’ve taken courses with that professor before.
DON’T: Try to get all your requirements out of the way early. You can take the requirements that don’t matter to you (for most people those are gen eds) junior or senior year when your other classes are big-deal, high-effort courses in your concentration. There’s no reason to take more than one gen ed in a term: Especially curious or ambitious first-years might take none.
DO: Study the past. Don’t confine yourself to the present as you choose courses in the arts and humanities. A lot of fascinating people died a long time ago. Some of them made some cool stuff.
DO: Try everything, including stuff you didn’t think you were good at. Many of us got to Harvard by choosing, in high school, mostly to do stuff we considered ourselves very good at. You got into Harvard. You have room to experiment. Comp or do something you never thought you could do.
DON’T: Stay on campus all day every day. The musical, literary, theatrical, gamer-nerd, ethno-cultural, culinary, recreational, and technical offerings of the Greater Boston area far exceed what you can find on campus, even though campus has a lot to offer. You may find your favorite new band at the Middle East (the rock club in Central Square, not the geographic region). You could find your new best friend at MIT.
DO: Look for people like you. Intense Dungeons and Dragons players, fashion plates, curling obsessives — Harvard’s big enough that you can probably find at least a few peers.
DON’T: Assume people unlike you won’t hang out with you. Some of the friends you make this year will have backgrounds much like yours. Some very much won’t.
DON’T: Spend all your time studying. Honestly, Harvard students probably spend less time on average studying — especially if you exclude future doctors — than students at some other super-elite colleges, and that’s a feature, not a bug, for Harvard: You’ve got time to meet students who share your ambitions, and take part in massive shared projects, and build what you want to build, and discover what you want to discover, both with, and far away from, classrooms and grades and professors like me.
Welcome, Class of 2028. Don’t get too comfortable.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Garber to students at Convocation: ‘You will learn more from difficult moments of tension than from easy moments of understanding.’
Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday welcomed the Class of 2028 with a prediction: You won’t always get along. This reality, he said, is an inevitable part of joining a community that strives for excellence through the embrace of pluralism.
“We stand for growing in knowledge and wisdom — not only through intellectual and extracurricular pursuits but through everyday interactions, through disagreement and argument, through conflict and reconciliation,” Garber ’76 told students during Convocation, the annual welcome of College first-years, at Tercentenary Theatre. “You will learn at least as much from each other as you will learn from anyone else at Harvard — and you will learn more from difficult moments of tension than from easy moments of understanding. Be prepared to defend your point of view. Be prepared to articulate points of view that are different from your own. Be prepared, most of all, to change your mind.”
An economist, physician, and expert on health policy, Garber was named Harvard’s 31st president last month after serving as interim leader since January. In his first Convocation address, he made a forceful case for viewpoint diversity as one of the University’s core aims — and strengths.
“We stand for seeking, supporting, and sustaining excellence from as broad and as diverse a pool of talent as possible,” he said. “That is the beauty of the University. It attracts and supports interesting and ambitious individuals with different experiences and perspectives, individuals who challenge one another by virtue of being together in community. We acknowledge and celebrate that beauty — and the beauty of pluralism — with our willingness to encounter beliefs that are not our own, to be curious and respectful, to be genuinely attentive despite our tendency to be pulled in a million directions at once.”
Garber also reminded students to respect the opinions of others and to welcome and acknowledge one another as part of the community. Last year, the University, like many schools across the nation, was shaken by conflict and protests around the Israel-Hamas war.
“Being in this environment — in this community — means having rights and responsibilities,” Garber said. “Those gathered here have the right to express themselves freely — to dissent and protest. But they also have the responsibility to act with each of you — and the meaning of this occasion — in mind. We are convened to welcome you. Each of you should leave this gathering knowing that you’re acknowledged and accepted by our community.”
In his closing remarks, Garber encouraged first-years to learn from one another and to invest in building lifelong friendships.
“I still keep in touch with people I met during my first week on campus,” he said. “Much has changed since I moved into Claverly Hall in 1973, but there is one characteristic of Harvard people that has always stood out to me — and stands the test of time. We stand for excellence. We embrace ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or.’
“What do I mean by that?” he continued. “Here, you will often encounter individuals who don’t accept the notion that they can only do one thing really well. You can be both a mathematician and a competitive cyclist, both a folklorist and a committed journalist, both an engineer and a graceful dancer. Combinations and permutations too numerous to mention often lead to improbable and truly stunning successes — and testaments to what can be accomplished in a single lifetime.”
Other Harvard leaders joined Garber in welcoming the Class of 2028.
The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the Divinity School and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, delivered an invocation. Danoff Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana offered the College Address, and Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, delivered the Academic Address. Thomas Dunne, dean of students at Harvard College, and Harvard Undergraduate Association co-presidents Ashley Adirika ’26 and Jonathan Haileselassie ’26 also took part in the ceremony.
Large-scale study finds Wegovy reduces risk of heart attack, stroke
BWH Communications
3 min read
A trial study has found that injections of the weight-loss drug Wegovy reduced the risk of deaths from COVID-19 by about a third while also significantly reducing risk of death from cardiovascular disease or any other cause. The trial was led by Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It was funded by Novo Nordisk, makers of Wegovy (the brand name of semaglutide).
From October 2018 through March 2023, researchers studied the effect of once-weekly Wegovy shots versus placebo on mortality in more than 17,000 participants with heart disease and overweight or obesity. The study showed that patients on Wegovy were about 15 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 23 percent less likely from other reasons as compared to those who took a placebo. Overall death rates in the group taking Wegovy were 19 percent lower compared to placebo.
“The trial started before COVID-19, and we never anticipated a global respiratory pandemic,” said corresponding author Benjamin M. Scirica, director of quality initiatives at BWH’s Cardiovascular Division and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“It is rare for a cardio-metabolic drug to modify non-cardiovascular outcomes,” Scirica added. “The fact that semaglutide reduced non-cardiovascular death, and in particular COVID-19-related deaths, was surprising. It opens up new avenues for exploring how this class of drugs may benefit patients.”
In the study, people taking Wegovy were just as likely to get COVID-19, but they had fewer serious illnesses or deaths related to COVID-19. The researchers do not know if the benefit of Wegovy is due to weight loss or other effects, but suggest that extra weight may be the greatest contributor to lower life expectancy. This result is from just one observation, albeit in a large, multinational study, so the findings need to be replicated. Further studies will explore potential mechanisms of action, and other studies of drugs in this class should provide additional data.
Results were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Disclosures: Benjamin Scirica reports institutional research grants to Brigham and Women’s Hospital from Better Therapeutics, Merck, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer; consulting fees from Allergan, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Better Therapeutics, Elsevier Practice Update Cardiology, Esperion, Hanmi, Lexicon, and Novo Nordisk; and equity in health [at] Scale, and Doximity.
Novo Nordisk funded this study and was responsible for the study design in collaboration with the academic steering committee. They contributed to data collection, analysis, and interpretation and participated in the preparation and review of the manuscript in collaboration with the authors.
Political conspiracy theories have long found receptive audiences in the U.S., often on the fringes of society. Among the best-known today is QAnon, a set of fabricated claims that a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles controls American politics and media. At its center is an anonymous oracle known as “Q.”
Since 2021, QAnon belief among Americans jumped from 14 percent to 23 percent, while the percentage of skeptics declined from 40 percent to 29 percent, according to a national survey published last fall by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
A new book, “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” delves into the private lives of some believers, chronicling the painful emotional and financial toll this elaborate conspiracy has taken on ordinary people.
Author Jesselyn Cook, a tech reporter who joins Harvard this fall as a 2024-2025 Nieman Fellow, spoke to the Gazette about why so many have fallen under the spell of QAnon and why the Big Tech platforms are only partly to blame. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did QAnon go mainstream and what was so compelling about it that you became interested in the human toll it took?
October 2017 was the first post from Q on the online forum 4chan. Very few people knew it existed back then. This was around the time Pizzagate [a false conspiracy theory about a pedophile ring run by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria] was starting to blow up with the 2016 election.
The platforms that it migrated onto didn’t do much. They allowed it to spread and grow. By the time Facebook and then Twitter and YouTube took action, most people already knew the name QAnon.
I had been lurking on some of these online forums for a while, watching QAnon in these dark corners of the internet, feeling like it was a little maddening to see it unfold, and no one really talking about it.
But then, in 2020, it became something we couldn’t ignore anymore. I think it was a lot of things coming together all at once. COVID put a lot of people in a really vulnerable place. There were these huge information voids that QAnon influencers rushed to fill quite effectively. They tried to answer questions with a lot of misleading and weaponized false information and took advantage of people’s fear. We’re very aware of what it’s done to our democracy and to our public health, but we don’t really see what’s going on behind closed doors with families.
“When people get to the QAnon level, it’s not just something they believe, it becomes part of who they are.”
You call QAnon not just a conspiracy theory, but “a movement.” Why?
You don’t hear today the word QAnon as much. “Q,” the figure at the center of the movement, is no longer posting, but the ideas have really been normalized and seeped into our culture.
The polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute suggests that around one in five Americans believes that our financial, media, and government worlds are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, which is the core of the belief system.
The reason I call it a movement more than just a theory is because every conspiracy theory out there can be stitched into QAnon. It’s so much more than just this idea of “the cabal” and Donald Trump and “the storm” [a foretold conflict in which Trump defeats the cabal].
It’s now antivaxx conspiracy theories; you’ll see some flat Earth stuff in there; and every little idea that there’s corruption going on gets woven into it. People have devoted their lives to this; they really do feel like digital soldiers in a movement. And so, to call it just a theory feels like it’s really not representative of the big picture.
The book focuses on five very different QAnon believers, but you interviewed hundreds of people in your reporting. Did you find any common psychological and sociological factors among believers or their families?
I did. I think there’s this misconception that the people who are susceptible to QAnon-type falsehoods have a low IQ or they’re mentally unstable. But what I found in talking to so many people is that they’re not fulfilled in their lives. They’re not doing well; they’re not happy. There’s some unmet need they have, and conspiracy theories fill that. Whether it’s purpose or meaning, they want something hopeful to latch onto and QAnon makes all these grand promises.
“To be a conspiracy theorist really demands a victim mentality because you’re convinced that there’s some grand entity, some evil, shadowy network working against your interests.”
Also, something that all these characters, maybe with one exception, have in common is a sense of powerlessness. To be a conspiracy theorist really demands a victim mentality because you’re convinced that there’s some grand entity, some evil, shadowy network working against your interests. For a lot of people, they come by this mentality naturally because they have been victims of oppression and abuse, maybe for generations or centuries. A lot of minorities and marginalized groups, in particular, can be vulnerable because they have very legitimate reasons not to trust the people in power and to be very skeptical and suspicious of our public institutions.
On the other end of the spectrum, the more privileged people can be conditioned to feel powerless. With one mother in the book, it was on Fox News where she’s told again and again “Your rights are being trampled all over, the powers that be are going to take away everything you care about.”
When you’re conditioned to feel like a victim of the establishment, it’s much easier to fall for anti-establishment conspiracy theories. So, there are a lot of different pathways into this, but it really comes down to feeling unfulfilled, feeling disenfranchised, feeling powerless — for valid reasons or otherwise.
There is a perception that believers have been hoodwinked, and if only presented with facts, they’d snap out of it. You found that’s not the case. Why not?
I think a lot of the loved ones I spoke to have been very frustrated by that. Because logically, it makes sense. If someone is spewing fiction, you bring them facts, and that should help. But what I found through my reporting is that this isn’t about the truth. The truth is almost beside the point when you get to the QAnon level of conspiracy theory espousal.
If someone is drawn to QAnon because it makes them feel important, it makes them feel like they belong, it makes them feel like they matter, gives them a sense of hope, that’s where you need to start. What is really going on here? What’s drawing them to this movement in the first place? You need to understand, how can we help you restore purpose outside of QAnon? How can we find a hobby or a volunteer effort or a job that’s going to give you that sense of fulfillment and sense of purpose? In the success stories that I’ve seen, that’s where it started. I think [believers] know on some level that what they’re holding onto isn’t true, but it feels good, so they’re clinging on regardless. That’s why facts just aren’t going to chip away in the way that you might think they should.
“There are a lot of different pathways into this, but it really comes down to feeling unfulfilled, feeling disenfranchised, feeling powerless — for valid reasons or otherwise.”
You say we’re looking at this as a social media problem, when it’s really “a wellness crisis” because believers are drawn to these conspiracy theories as a coping mechanism for unresolved trauma. What led you to that conclusion?
I definitely went into writing this book with the impression that this was just a tech problem. I’ve been a tech reporter for many years, and I looked at social media as the sole cause of this crisis. Some people would go on Facebook and be sucked into rabbit holes and others wouldn’t. It came down to this underlying vulnerability that I hadn’t given as much thought to. It’s clear right now is a difficult time. Many people just aren’t doing well. COVID was a big factor, loved ones and jobs and opportunities were lost, the world we came back to was, in many ways, worse than the one we left behind. Conspiracy theories can serve as a crutch [and] can act in a similar way to drugs and gambling.
I don’t want to say that social media isn’t a factor because, of course, it is. Social media has dumped gasoline on this problem and made it harder to get out and maybe easier to fall in. But the people who do go down the rabbit hole, in almost every case that I reported on, they were vulnerable in some way in the first place. And so, if we can shift our approach by looking at it also as a wellness crisis and intervene in that way, I think we’ll see people being less susceptible. If people have better coping mechanisms and if they’re doing better in general, they’re not going to be as susceptible even in this treacherous online landscape.
What are some successful strategies people have used to pull family members out?
The expert recommended strategies I saw to be effective, and that many people recommended to me, were Socratic questioning and motivational interviewing.
Motivational interviewing is putting aside the true and false and saying, “Let’s step back and look at the big picture. What is this doing to your life?” In so many cases, people who get really deep into something like QAnon cause immense destruction to a lot of things they hold dear — demolishing relationships, jeopardizing their careers, losing a lot of money, and compromising their dignity. You’re not getting caught up in trying to fact-check or trying to change minds. You’re trying to give a little more perspective and do it with compassion. Same with the Socratic questioning method.
It’s hard because when people get to the QAnon level, it’s not just something they believe, it becomes part of who they are. And when people latch onto these ideas so tightly, anything that contradicts their conspiracy theories feels like an attack, and so they get very defensive.
For the loved ones who are trying to shake some sense into them, they can become the target of hostility and cruelty and personal attacks, and it can wear you down. Sometimes, stepping away is the best thing you can do for yourself, which is hard.
Billions worldwide deficient in essential micronutrients
Maya Brownstein
Harvard Chan School Communications
4 min read
Inadequate levels carry risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, blindness
More than half of the global population consumes inadequate levels of several micronutrients essential to health, including calcium, iron, and vitamins C and E, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, UC Santa Barbara, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). It is the first study to provide global estimates of inadequate consumption of 15 micronutrients critical to human health.
The study was published Thursday in The Lancet Global Health.
Micronutrient deficiencies are one of the most common forms of malnutrition globally, and each deficiency carries its own health consequences, from adverse pregnancy outcomes to blindness to increased susceptibility to infectious diseases. Previous research has estimated the amounts of micronutrients available to and consumed by people; this study evaluates whether these intakes meet requirements recommended for human health and looks at the inadequacies specifically facing males and females across their lifespans.
“These results are alarming.”
Ty Beal, GAIN
“Our study is a big step forward,” said co-lead author Chris Free, research professor at UCSB. “Not only because it is the first to estimate inadequate micronutrient intakes for 34 age-sex groups in nearly every country, but also because it makes these methods and results easily accessible to researchers and practitioners.”
The researchers used data from the Global Dietary Database, the World Bank, and dietary recall surveys in 31 countries to compare nutritional requirements with nutritional intake among the populations of 185 countries. (They have made these data, as well as code for analysis, freely available.) They divided populations into males and females belonging to 17 age groups: zero to 80 in five-year spans, as well as an 80+ group. The assessment studied 15 vitamins and minerals: calcium, iodine, iron, riboflavin, folate, zinc, magnesium, selenium, thiamin, niacin, and vitamins A, B6, B12, C, and E.
The study found significant intake inadequacies for nearly all of the evaluated micronutrients, excluding fortification as a potential source of additional nutrients. Inadequate intake was especially prevalent for iodine (68 percent of the global population), vitamin E (67 percent), calcium (66 percent), and iron (65 percent). More than half of people consumed inadequate levels of riboflavin, folate, and vitamins C and B6. Intake of niacin was closest to sufficient, with 22 percent of the global population consuming inadequate levels, followed by thiamin (30 percent) and selenium (37 percent).
Estimated inadequate intakes were higher for women than men for iodine, vitamin B12, iron, and selenium within the same country and age groups. Conversely, more men consumed inadequate levels of calcium, niacin, thiamin, zinc, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, and B6 compared to women. While patterns of micronutrient inadequacy emerged more clearly on the basis of sex, the researchers also observed that males and females ages 10-30 were most prone to low levels of calcium intake, especially in South and East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Calcium intake was also low across North America, Europe, and Central Asia.
“These results are alarming,” said Ty Beal, senior technical specialist at GAIN. “Most people — even more than previously thought, across all regions and countries of all incomes — are not consuming enough of multiple essential micronutrients. These gaps compromise health outcomes and limit human potential on a global scale.”
“The public health challenge facing us is immense, but practitioners and policymakers have the opportunity to identify the most effective dietary interventions and target them to the populations most in need,” added senior author Christopher Golden, associate professor of nutrition and planetary health at Harvard Chan School.
The researchers noted that a lack of available data, especially on individual dietary intake worldwide, may have limited their findings.
Simone Passarelli, former doctoral student and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School, served as co-lead author. She received funding from the National Institutes of Health (training grant 2T32DK007703-26).
“Global estimation of dietary micronutrient inadequacies: a modeling analysis,” Simone Passarelli, Christopher M. Free, Alon Shepon, Ty Beal, Carolina Batis, Christopher D. Golden, The Lancet Global Health, August 29, 2024, doi: 10.1016/S2214-109X(24)00276-6.
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When we don’t listen, we all suffer, says psychologist whose new book is ‘Rebels with a Cause’
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Harvard alum Niobe Way, author of “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection” and, most recently, “Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture,” is less interested in what boys and men can learn from the culture than what the culture can learn from boys and men.
Following the lead of Carol Gilligan and other Ed School mentors, Way, now a New York University development psychologist, has made it a point in her work to talk directly to young men about their experiences. In “Rebels with a Cause,” these moments reveal a deep desire to build rich relationships with others. Way talked to us about the research behind the book, and the argument at the heart of it, in a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.
Early in “Rebels” you distinguish between “thin” stories and “thick” stories. What’s the difference and why does it matter?
A thin story is a story we tell that exists on the surface. It’s the difference between asking, “Do you want to know what I think or what I really think?” It’s what we say when someone first asks us a question. But the thick story takes into account our context, the power structure, and what’s valued in the culture as a way to understand what we think and feel.
So when boys say, “I don’t care, I’m not emotional,” you don’t take it as simply a fact of how they feel, but as a reflection of a culture that doesn’t allow — in the case of boys — space for tender feelings without feminizing them. Or — in the case of girls — to have tender feelings without viewing them as lame or overreacting. We oftentimes find thin stories about culture — what people wear, how they talk, what they eat. But culture is also patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and the predominant power structure. And within those power structures, we have values that we promote.
Here’s another example: When you first ask boys about friendships, they will oftentimes say they have lots of friends. They hang out, do things, play basketball, and everything is great. But when you start to ask deeper questions, like to share a time when one of their friends hurt their feelings, you will start to hear an entirely different story. They will step out of what we call the mask of masculinity and start to tell a more complicated, nuanced human story.
Why is it damaging to believe thin stories?
It’s so interesting to me that we tell so many thin stories when we know oftentimes they’re not true; and it’s really because we think they are true. These stereotypes start to perpetuate themselves. I don’t generally like to use the word “toxic” because I think it’s overused, but thin stories are toxic because they get us to believe in stories that are not true.
Why does “boy” culture perpetuate the myth that it’s not natural for men to express emotions? Where did that idea originate?
One thing to clarify is that “boy” is in quotation marks because the culture doesn’t actually represent real boys. It’s a stereotype of a boy who only values his hard side, and there’s no such thing. Friendships are critical for men. There’s a whole history of men writing intimate letters to each other as friends. If you go to many of the other places I’ve lived — like France, Abu Dhabi, the Middle East, China — they value men’s friendships and boys’ friendships (although that’s starting to change as they’re getting more influenced by American culture).
One point of the book is to have us wake up and see the waters in which we swim. We’re all swimming in “boy” culture, privileging the hard over the soft. The solution is disrupting it. We’re a deeply immature culture in that we’re not recognizing our individual responsibility to take collective responsibility for the damage we’re doing to our children and to ourselves.
A lot of the boys you interviewed for the book had contradictory things to say about masculinity. On one hand, they would acknowledge that emotions are healthy, but on the other, they would struggle to actually express those emotions or allow themselves to be vulnerable. What is that telling us about the tension boys are feeling?
We do have boys saying that they don’t talk about their feelings, but they also know another story — they just have to have a safe space to be able to articulate the “thick” story about themselves and what they desire, which is deep connection. We raise our children to believe that being sensitive to another is “overly sensitive.” We study emotional regulation, but we don’t study emotional sensitivity. We’re a brutal culture, and boys speak that contradiction. Sometimes this conversation gets oversimplified by saying it’s about giving boys permission to cry; that misses the point. What both “Deep Secrets” and “Rebels” reveal is that boys and young men have remarkable emotional and relational intelligence. They can see these contradictions, they can articulate them, and they’re able to speak to their natural desire for connection. We are born so stunningly emotionally, cognitively, and relationally intelligent, but when we grow up in a culture that only values part of us, we become less intelligent.
How can we love our boys better?
I want to reframe that question: How do we love our children better? Because we’re now seeing girls and women suffer too. We love our children through valuing their sensitive, tender side from day one, as well as valuing their ability to hold it together and be stoic. It’s not prioritizing the soft over the hard, but valuing the two equally. When they say tender, beautiful, emotional things, rather than saying, “You’re overreacting” or “You’re being too sensitive,” say, “Tell me more about why you feel that way.” Have conversations about feelings and thoughts, with your son, husband, brother, sister. We have to start asking questions and talking about things that are meaningful to us. Talk about your friendships with your kids. Talk about the struggles you have had to find a good friend with your kids. We need to see the full humanity of our children, and by nurturing their full humanity, we nurture our own.
Her gift launched four centuries of Harvard financial aid
As a woman, Anne Radcliffe wouldn’t have been able to attend the University when she donated its first scholarship in 1643
Colleen Walsh
Harvard Correspondent
7 min read
Parchment dated May 9, 1643, noting Anne Radcliffe’s donation.
It’s been almost 400 years since the first donation to support financial aid was given to Harvard in 1643, and 50 years since Harvard Management Company began stewarding the gift as part of its management of Harvard’s endowment.
In that time billions of dollars have helped students access an education at Harvard.
But it may surprise some to know that original scholarship gift came from Anne Radcliffe, who, as a woman, wouldn’t have been able to attend the school for another three centuries (today the Harvard Radcliffe Institute bears her name). Radcliffe became known as Lady Mowlson after she married Sir Thomas Mowlson, a grocer and the former mayor of London, in 1600. While neither ever set foot on the Cambridge campus, nearly half a millennium later the gift continues to support Harvard students with financial needs.
Although the couple had no children who survived infancy, both husband and wife were committed to supporting education. During his lifetime, Thomas Mowlson established a fund in Hargrave-Stubbs, in Cheshire, England, for a chapel, and school for “the government, education and instruction of youth in grammar and virtue.” Radcliffe’s own family had long been involved in philanthropy, and had supported a professorship at Oxford, English university scholarships, and the endowment of two English grammar schools. In 1604 Anne’s father, Anthony Radcliffe, had even tried to help establish a university of higher learning in Yorkshire.
Savvy steward
When Mowlson died circa 1638, he left his wife, Lady Mowlson, half his estate. The remainder, noted Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1937 Commencement address, was divided “among sundry brothers, nephews, cousins, ‘twenty poor ministers,’ and the Worshipful Company of Grocers.” Radcliffe managed her portion so effectively that when a contingent from the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived seeking financial support a few years later, she contributed £100 for the yearly “maintenance of some poore scholler.”
1643
Lady Mowlson gift
1713
Colonial government of Massachusetts transfers fund to the Harvard Corporation
1894
Harvard Annex for women’s education is chartered as Radcliffe College in honor of Lady Mowlson, Anne Radcliffe
1977
Radcliffe College and Harvard College combine admissions
1999
With the complete merger of Radcliffe and Harvard colleges, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study is established
2004
Harvard Financial Aid Initiative launched, making tuition free for families making less than $40,000
2008
Harvard announces Middle Income Initiative making College more affordable
2022
HFAI expanded to $75,000
2023
HFAI expanded to $85,000
In painting a picture of Lady Mowlson’s life, historian Andrew McFarland Davis wrote in an 1894 article for New England Magazine that her “gift to the college was perhaps significant enough of her political sympathies; but if we need plainer indications, they are to be found in [her] subscription to the parliamentary fund to be paid to the Scottish army which was so soon to participate in the victory over the king’s forces at Marston Moor,” a 1644 battle during the English Civil War between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces. Radcliffe College’s then-President Wilbur Kitchener Jordan noted in November 1949 that, shortly after her husband’s death, it appeared Lady Mowlson “embraced the puritan and parliamentary cause with characteristic vigour.”
Unworthy first recipient
In 1643, Lady Mowlson signed over her gift to Thomas Weld. Pastor of the church of Roxbury, Weld had been appointed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a member of a three-person committee in 1641 to chart a course for England for a range of functions including the procurement of “cotton from some source for clothing.” During the trip, Weld also secured donations for the fledging school near the banks of the Charles River.
On the original parchment document dated May 9, 1643, now weathered and worn and safely nestled in Harvard’s extensive archives, Weld’s swirling script, as transcribed by this historian Davis, notes that he received from Mowlson: “o[ne] hundred pownds current English money the whc she hath freely given to Harvard Colledge in New England to be imp[roved] by the feofees of the sd Colledge for the time being to be the best yearly revenew that may be thought fitt in theire wisdomes which yearly revenew according to her good & pious intention is to be & remaine as a p’petuall stipend for & towards ye yea[rly] maintenance of some poore scholler.”
Weld, according to Kitchener, persuaded Mowlson that his own son John, at the time a Harvard junior, would be the ideal initial recipient of the gift. It was a poor choice. “The first Mowlson scholar, I regret to say,” wrote Kitchener, “was in the first year of his tenure, expelled from Harvard College, after a sound whipping administered personally by President Dunster, since he was caught burglarizing two Cambridge houses from which he took sums considerably in excess of his stipend.”
In the years that followed, little was known about the scholarship, in large part because the fund was initially entrusted to the treasury of the colony “for investment and safekeeping,” writes Kitchener. Only in 1713 was the fund returned to the custody of the Corporation of Harvard College, where it was merged with the general funds of the School. It was not until 1893 that the President and Fellows of Harvard voted to use $5,000 to re-establish the Lady Mowlson scholarship with an annual scholarship of $200.
Gift that keeps giving
Today, her legacy lives on. Since establishing the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative 20 years ago, which put the cost of Harvard College within reach of every applicant, the University has awarded more than $3 billion to thousands of undergraduates. In the coming year, more than 55 percent of College students will benefit from need-based financial aid, with the average family asked to contribute $13,000 in total toward the cost of tuition, room, board, and other fees.
$3 billion—Awarded to undergraduates since Harvard Financial Aid Initiative started 20 years ago
For the most recent academic year (2022–23), Harvard provided $851 millionin financial aid to students across the University, including $246 millionfor undergraduates. Roughly half of that financial support, approximately $440 million, was distributed from endowed funds, leaving the rest to be supplemented by other means. And as costs rise, and the University continues to expand financial aid support, the value of permanent endowed funds like Lady Mowlson’s grows in importance.
“Financial aid has never been more important as we continue to seek students of excellence from throughout the nation and the world,” said Harvard College’s longtime Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons. “Access to Harvard for promising students from all backgrounds is a foundational value and has been since the earliest days of the University. It is who we are.”
The College’s robust financial aid support allows students whose families make less than $85,000 a year — nearly 25 percent of the undergraduate student body — to pay nothing toward their student’s College costs. Additionally, qualifying students also receive a $2,000 “start-up grant” their first year at Harvard to cover living expenses that fall beyond the cost of attending, and another $2,000 “launch grant” at the start of their junior year to help them prepare for job interviews and explore graduate school possibilities.
‘A person who cared deeply about future generations’
In reflecting back on the original gift from 1643, Fitzsimmons said he felt inspired.
“Here she was in England, but envisioning the New World, and the new set of possibilities,” he said. “Anne Radcliffe was clearly a thoughtful person, a person of vision, and a person who cared deeply about future generations. So I’ve always really been inspired by someone with that degree of thoughtfulness and generosity.”
Such generosity also played an important part in his own College career, he added.
“As a first-generation student myself, it certainly hits home because Harvard made such an enormous difference in my life, and financial aid was critically important to me when I was an undergraduate,” Fitzsimmons explained. “I am delighted to report that over 20 percent of the class we just have admitted are first-generation, and again, more than 20 percent will receive Federal Pell Grants. That’s another sign that Anne Radcliffe’s vision of reaching out to people from every possible kind of background is being served by the foundational gift that she made.
“Hers is just a great example of how one person’s thoughtfulness can make a difference literally, in perpetuity.”
With help from family, first-years make themselves at home
For Madison Duckett, move-in day was a family affair. On Wednesday, Duckett’s mom, dad, uncle, younger sister, and younger brother all pitched in to help the first-year Harvard student carry her belongings from the family car to her new room in Stoughton Hall.
“I’ve been dreaming about this moment for a long time, and now that it’s finally here I don’t know what to think,” said Duckett, breathless as much from excitement as from the Stoughton stairs. “This is a new place and I’m excited to meet people and experience different things, but I also just have to realize that, because it’s new, I need time to get adjusted and find my place here.”
Madison Duckett ’28 gets help from her family as she moves into Stoughton Hall.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
The Ducketts drove to Cambridge on Wednesday morning from their home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Madison’s mother, Thasunda Duckett, described a mixture of feelings: pride and hope, but also reflection.
“This is her new home,” Thasunda said, gazing around Harvard Yard. “It’s bittersweet. She’s still your baby and you feel like you still have so much to teach her, but she’s ready.”
“No tears,” Richard Duckett reminded himself as he lifted his daughter’s suitcase from the car.
Harvard Yard was a hub of activity as students moved into their dorms, met roommates, and shared tearful goodbyes with their families in preparation for the start of their College experience. Parents and first-years sweated under the midday sun as they unloaded bags and boxes from their cars with the help of upper-level student volunteers. Under the key distribution tent in the center of the green, first-years lined up to get their room keys and pick up copies of the freshman register book.
Nicholas Yoo ’28 (right) sets up his room in room Holworthy Hall.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nicholas Yoo of New Jersey moved his items into his dorm room in Holworthy Hall with the help of his parents, Seung Yoo and Soo Park, who wiped down surfaces in preparation for unpacking.
“I’m feeling super excited,” Yoo said, cleaning gloves in hand, as he recalled receiving his acceptance letter back in the spring. “I feel like the day I got in [to Harvard] was a transformative experience, basically a dream come true. I’ve been waiting several months for today, and I’m like, ‘It’s finally here.’”
The two suitemates met last week when they moved in for pre-orientation and bonded over all the trips it took to lug their stuff up to the fourth floor of Canaday Hall. On Wednesday they helped their three other roommates move in.
Twins Rachele (left) and Michelle Chung speak with Harvard President Alan Garber and his wife, Anne Yahanda.
Photo by Grace DuVal
“Everyone’s super open and welcoming,” Bajomo said.
“It sounds like you’re having a good, smooth entry and now it’s time to gear up for classes,” Hoekstra told Bajomo and Hahn. “I’m in that building if you ever need anything,” she added, gesturing to University Hall.
Andrew Van Stone ’28 (from left) and their mother, Sarah Van Stone, meet Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Garber asked Andrew if his sister has been giving him any advice on things he needs to do to succeed at Harvard.
“She’s going to show me the ropes,” he confirmed.
“You’ll get to write your own story too,” Khurana told him, and Andrew agreed.
For many families, move-in day was a tearful turning point.
“For me, the main thing today is goodbyes,” said first-year Courtney Hines, who settled into Stoughton Hall with help from her mom, Lin Hines.
“Moving away from my parents has been a very emotional thing,” Courtney added. “I’m obviously really, really excited and I can’t wait for all the things, but at the same time I’m from California so it’s a major change.”
“I didn’t think I could feel so many different emotions all at once,” Lin Hines added.
Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (left), speaks with Nathan Georg ’28 (center) and his parents Win and Dolores Georg.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Kiley Wilhelm and her mom, Karen Gerkin, from North Carolina, spent a week on a mini-road trip before arriving in Cambridge.
“I think it is the end of one journey and the beginning of the next,” Kiley said. “It’s an amazing day for parent pride for the work they put into it and the dedication to get here. It’s an exciting day for everyone.”
After her mom drove off to find a parking spot, Wilhelm carried the last of her items upstairs and chatted with her suitemate, Paige Cornelius, who moved in last week. The students unpacked boxes and hung posters while discussing their decor plans for the room.
“I’m really excited to start College,” Wilhelm said. “I’m just really happy to be here.”
Smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson’s. Why?
Researchers test theory explaining medical mystery and identify potential new treatment
Brandon Chase
BWH Communications
3 min read
Paradoxically, previous research has shown that despite its inherent health risks, cigarette smoking is linked with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease. Until now, however, it was not clear how.
New research in lab models indicates that low doses of carbon monoxide — comparable to that experienced by smokers — protected against neurodegeneration and prevented the accumulation of a key Parkinson’s-associated protein in the brain.
The findings are published in npj Parkinson’s Disease by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“Because smoking has consistently been associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease, we wondered whether factors in cigarette smoke may confer neuroprotection,” said senior author Stephen Gomperts, an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
“We considered carbon monoxide in part because it is generated endogenously in response to stress and has been shown to have protective properties at low levels. Also, overexpression of heme oxygenase-1, a stress-induced enzyme that produces endogenous carbon monoxide, has been found to protect dopaminergic neurons from neurotoxicity in an animal model of Parkinson’s.” In addition, nicotine, a major constituent of cigarette smoke, has been found to be ineffective at slowing the disease’s progression in a recently reported clinical trial.
“Molecular pathways activated by low-dose carbon monoxide may slow the onset and limit the pathology in Parkinson’s disease.”
These findings led Gomperts and his colleagues to test the effects of low doses of carbon monoxide in rodent models of Parkinson’s.
They administered a low dose of carbon monoxide (comparable to the exposure experienced by people who smoke) in the form of an oral drug product provided by Hillhurst Biopharmaceuticals, and found it protected the rodents against hallmark features of the disease, including the loss of dopaminergic neurons and the accumulation of the Parkinson’s-associated protein alpha-synuclein in neurons. Mechanistically, low-dose carbon monoxide activated signaling pathways that limit oxidative stress and degrade alpha-synuclein.
The team also found that heme oxygenase-1 was higher in the cerebrospinal fluid of people who smoke compared with nonsmokers. And in brain tissue samples from patients with Parkinson’s, heme oxygenase-1 levels were higher in neurons that were free of alpha-synuclein pathology.
“These findings suggest that molecular pathways activated by low-dose carbon monoxide may slow the onset and limit the pathology in Parkinson’s disease. They support further investigation into low-dose carbon monoxide and the pathways it modifies to slow disease progression,” said Gomperts. “Building on multiple Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical studies in both healthy people and people with a variety of clinical conditions showing safety of carbon monoxide at the low doses studied here, a clinical trial of low-dose, orally administered carbon monoxide in patients with Parkinson’s disease is planned.”
Disclosures: There are relevant COI disclosures. Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article. Gomperts’ brother is CEO of Hillhurst Biopharmaceuticals.
Funding: This work was supported by the Farmer Family Foundation Parkinson’s Research Initiative, Michael J. Fox Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Challenger Foundation, with in-kind support from Hillhurst Biopharmaceuticals Inc.
You want to be boss. You probably won’t be good at it.
Study pinpoints two measures that predict effective managers
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Good managers are hard to find. Most companies pick managers based on personality traits, age, or experience — and according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper, they may be doing it wrong.
Co-authored by David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, the study concludes that companies are better off when they select managers based on two measures highly predictive of leadership skills.
The Gazette talked to Deming about the study’s findings. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are the qualities that make a good manager, and why is it so hard to find them?
Being a good manager requires many different qualities that often don’t exist in the same person. First is the ability to relate well to others, to create what Amy Edmondson and others have called psychological safety, meaning the ability to make people feel stable and secure in their role so they are comfortable with critical feedback. That’s a key component of being a good manager. Communication skills are also essential. As a manager, you should know that there’s not one good way to deliver feedback to your workers because the words you use and the way you frame your statements also matter.
At the same time, you must also be analytically minded and open to different ways of doing things and be able to take a step back and reassess whether your team or organization is working as well as it could be. Overall, being a good manager requires both interpersonal skills and analytical skills. You also need to have a strategic vision — which is something that our study does not capture. Managers must have a sense of what their organization is trying to accomplish. Any one of those skills is hard to find. Having all three, and knowing when to use them, is even more difficult.
“We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers.”
One of the paper’s most surprising findings is that people who self-nominate to be managers perform worse than those randomly assigned. Why is that?
In the study, we randomly assign the role of manager. That was half of the experiment. In the other half, we asked people which role they wanted, and we assigned the role of manager to the people with the greatest preferences for being in charge.
We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It’s hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.
This was a surprising finding. And it’s important, because interest in leadership plays a big role in how companies pick managers. Companies have their own hiring and employee evaluation policies of course — they don’t pick managers randomly like we did — but it’s surely true that preference for leadership plays a big part in who gets promoted to management. For example, we find that men are much more likely to prefer being in charge, but they aren’t any more effective than women in the role of manager.
The main lesson I take from this finding is that there’s a big difference between preferences and skills; just because you want to be a manager doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it. Organizations that take more scientific or analytical approaches to identifying good managers are going to come out ahead.
What are the best predictors for selecting a good manager, according to your paper?
It has nothing to do with how a person looks, how they speak, or what their preferences or personality traits are. None of those things are predictive. There are only two things that are: One is IQ as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, which measures general and fluid intelligence, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, etc. But the one that’s more interesting to me is a measure of what we call economic-decision-making skill, or the ability to allocate resources effectively, that my co-authors and I created in a different paper. We use that very same measure in this experiment, and we found that it is highly predictive of being a good manager.
Why do you think these two tests predict being a good manager, but other traits like age, experience, personality, or gender do not?
If you want to predict who’s going to be going to be good at a specific performance task, in this case, managing a team to solve a problem, the best predictors are most closely related to what you’re asking someone to do. What matters is the ability to make decisions about the allocation of resources under time constraints; how to organize and motivate the members of your team to produce the most output. The lesson for me is that it’s a crutch to use personality traits and preferences to predict performance because they’re not that closely related to the performance you’re interested in.
“Good managers are not necessarily the most vocal leaders; sometimes they’re quiet but effective, like diamonds in the rough.”
David Deming.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
We see this pattern elsewhere. There’s a huge research literature on figuring out who’s going to be a good teacher in the classroom, and study after study finds that characteristics such as age, gender, education, SAT scores, college major don’t do a very good job of predicting who’s going to be a good teacher. Yet if I put you in the classroom for a little bit of time and I see how much you improve student learning, that is a very good predictor, because it’s very closely related to the thing you ask people to do. If you want to know who’s going to be a good manager, make them manage. Don’t just rely on personality characteristics, or whether they raise their hand to say, “I want to do it.”
Why is it important to have good managers?
At the broadest level, it’s important to have good management because companies, universities, and other organizations face such an open-ended strategic landscape. They must tackle a variety of issues, such as where they should direct their attention, what are the most important things to focus on, and how to deploy resources toward solving certain problems. If you look at major corporations, they tend to be conglomerates that have many different divisions that do many different things. Google, just to give one example, in the beginning had a core product: a search engine. But now Google is Alphabet, and it still does search, but it also does venture investing, autonomous driving, drug discovery, and many other things.
If you zoom down to the micro level, a manager who leads a team of three or four employees faces the same sort of problems: What should I focus on? Who’s going to do what? How do I give people feedback? What are each person’s strengths and weaknesses? To be an effective manager, you must think about how to assign workers to roles to achieve the greatest success, and you must know how to communicate with a person to help them improve. The skill of being a good manager is probably underappreciated. Good managers are not necessarily the most vocal leaders; sometimes they’re quiet but effective, like diamonds in the rough.
The paper you and your co-authors wrote came up with a novel method to identify good managers. Can you explain?
It’s a hard problem to solve, because part of what makes a good manager is the people they’re supervising. If you give a manager a team of workers who aren’t very capable, that team is going to do a poor job, and if the workers are all-stars, they will make the manager look good regardless. In other words, when a team succeeds, we don’t know how much credit or blame to assign to the manager compared to other members of the team.
To solve that problem, we bring a bunch of people into a controlled lab setting, and we assign them a group task that they must do together. We randomly assign the role of manager to one of the three people on the team, and we ask them to lead their group in the task, and we see how well they do. Then we randomly assign each manager again to another group of workers. Each time, as a manager, you’re getting a different set of people, so we have a way to account for the quality of the workers you’re getting. And since we’re assigning workers, we can also identify who’s a good worker because we can see their performance with different managers.
What do you think the paper’s main contributions are to the literature of leadership and management in general?
I think the paper’s main contribution is to open the door to the idea that we can be scientific and analytical about selecting managers and that management is not a squishy thing that we can never get our arms around. We can measure management skill, and measuring it well unlocks huge productivity gains for organizations and for people. We’re doing this experiment in a lab; it’s not a real-world setting, but we are in talks with several folks to do this in the field. I do think it would work because we’re asking people to manage and we’re measuring their performance, and we’re showing you that there’s a repeatable predictive quality to this. Our contribution is to outline a very simple methodology for measuring who’s a good manager, and to say to people that they can use it. Figure it out in your own organization, and you will unlock big productivity gains.
Martin West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, and academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, sits on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card. The Gazette interviewed West about the dire state of civic education and the ways to revamp it to help future generations be better citizens. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The results of the latest Nation’s Report Card showed students’ scores declining in U.S. history and civics. How bad were they compared to other subjects and to past scores?
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in U.S. history and civics fell substantially in 2022 as compared to the last time they were administered, which was prior to the pandemic in 2018. Those scores, at least as judged by the proficiency levels established by the National Assessment Governing Board, are lower than we see in any other subject.
In 2022, only 14 percent of eighth graders nationwide scored “proficient” in U.S. history, and just 22 percent reached that benchmark in civics. It is also important to acknowledge that, although scores in these subjects fell during the pandemic, they had also been in decline for the decade leading up to the pandemic, and those declines were especially large for low-achieving students. Students’ understanding of U.S. history and civics has been falling and becoming less equal.
What are the reasons for the decline in students’ understanding of U.S. history and civics?
I’m not sure that we know all the reasons why our students are struggling, but a major part of the story is that schools are spending less time on history and civics content than was typical decades ago.
Part of that seems to be a result of school accountability systems that focus primarily, or even exclusively, on student achievement in math and reading, and most states don’t assess students’ performance in other subjects. It’s an exaggeration to say that only what gets tested is what gets taught, but it’s not too far from the truth.
Martin West.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Why should we be concerned about students’ low scores in U.S. history and civics?
One of the core purposes of education, both public and private, is to prepare students for civic life and to be effective citizens in our democracy. When students are unaware of our history and don’t have a solid grasp of our fundamental political institutions, they’re less prepared for civic life.
There’s broad consensus that American democracy is experiencing significant challenges, and it is hard to envision us overcoming those challenges unless citizens understand our political institutions and learn how to engage as participants in our civic life.
It’s also the case that the current moment is not the first time that American democracy has been threatened. An understanding of our nation’s history cannot just equip students for civic life, but hopefully also give them a sense of optimism that we can rise to the challenge.
Compare your score
Four questions taken from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade tests in civics and history
Step 1 of 4
25%
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See how eighth graders performed
What is the main idea of the following quotation?
“So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we’ll be called a democracy.” — Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union
The correct answer:B. In a democracy, citizens should protect their freedoms.
Results for students on this question
Response category
Percentage
A
6
B
82
C
6
D
5
Omitted
0
What helped farmers in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony be successful?
The correct answer:B. Farming techniques learned from local Native Americans
Results for students on this question
Response category
Percentage
A
10
B
47
C
35
D
8
Omitted
0
Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution?
The correct answer: C. Right to trial by a jury
Results for students on this question
Response category
Percentage
A
12
B
5
C
45
D
39
Omitted
0
According to the data, which of the following statements about the election is true?
The correct answer: B. Candidate A became president because he won the Electoral College vote.
Results for students on this question
Response category
Percentage
A
21
B
45
C
26
D
7
Omitted
1
Do you see any link between students’ low proficiency in U.S. history and civics and the level of disaffection among young people with civic life and politics?
We don’t have hard evidence establishing that connection, but in my mind, it’s almost certain that our inattention to civic content in K–12 schools has played a role in young Americans’ cynicism about politics and lack of engagement in the political process.
A 2019 survey found that only 40 percent of American adults could name the three branches of government. Is this something that surprises you?
It’s not a surprise based on the results we see on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One of the items we administered in 2022, for example, asked students to match each of the three branches of government to its core function. That’s a task that one in six would get right by answering at random, and just one in three students was able to do it correctly.
That same civic deficit that you’re seeing among adults is evident among students even while they are engaging in limited ways with these subjects in school.
Let’s talk about the efforts to revamp civic education in Massachusetts. In 2018, Gov. Charlie Baker signed a law mandating that civic education be taught in eighth grade, not just in high schools. Has the law made any difference or is it too early to tell?
The 2018 law requires that all students take a yearlong civics education course in eighth grade and complete a student-led civics project that year and again in high school.
The implementation of that requirement was obviously disrupted to some extent by the pandemic, but the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has put a lot of effort into ensuring that districts have access to strong curricular materials as they move forward.
We also hope to roll out a new eighth-grade assessment in civics that is still in a pilot stage.
What grade would you give Massachusetts for the state of civic education?
I would give it a grade of “needs improvement,” but I’m optimistic that things are moving in a positive direction. The law we discussed is still in the process of being implemented.
The history and social science standards we have in Massachusetts are among the best in the nation, and soon we will have an innovative assessment that will allow us to monitor the extent to which students are developing mastery of those standards. Like other states, we have a lot of work to do, but I’m optimistic that we’re headed in the right direction.
What’s challenging about the situation we’re in right now is that we don’t have direct measures of what students know and are able to do. The National Assessment of Educational Progress gives us data for the nation, but unlike in math and reading, we don’t get state-by-state or district-by-district results in history and civics.
That’s why I think it’s very important for states like Massachusetts to develop their own assessments that allow them to track students’ progress and to signal to educators that their efforts in these domains are valued.
New study of economic toll yields projections ‘six times larger than previous estimates’
Climate scientists have warned of calamitous consequences if global temperatures continue their rise. But macroeconomists have largely told a less alarming story, predicting modest reductions in productivity and spending as the world warms.
“The disconnect was always surprising,” said Adrien Bilal, an assistant professor of economics.
For a recent working paper, Bilal partnered with fellow macroeconomist Diego R. Känzig, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, to rethink their field’s approach to climate change projections. In the end, the pair emerged with an economic forecast more worrisome than previous predictions. The world is already 1°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times. The new analysis finds that every additional 1°C rise means a 12 percent hit to global GDP, with losses peaking just six years after the higher temp is recorded.
Study projects that every additional 1°C rise in temperature will lead to a 12 percent decline in global gross domestic product.
Illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
“In terms of the magnitude,” Bilal noted, “that’s six times larger than previous estimates.”
At a conference last year, Bilal and Känzig began puzzling over the challenges of estimating the economic fallout of climate change. “It’s really difficult, because the economy is always growing due to other factors,” said Känzig, who cited technological innovation as one example. “At the same time, one of the byproducts of that growth is emissions that feed temperature change.”
An influential set of studies completed over the past 15 years worked around this complexity with formulas that rely on temperature variation at the national level. “This approach lets you control for a lot of these confounding factors,” Känzig explained.
But local temperature doesn’t fully account for the 21st century’s increase in extreme weather events, with their devastating effects on capital as well as productivity. “When it gets a little hotter in Germany, you tend to see more heat waves but not more wind or precipitation,” Bilal said. “But when the world’s temperature goes up, you see more of all three. Global temperature is just much more correlated with extreme weather events.”
Diego Känzig.
Photo courtesy of Diego Känzig
Adrien Bilal.
Photo courtesy of Adrien Bilal
The co-authors set out to use the variable of global temperature — “an approach consistent with the geoscience,” Bilal said — to predict GDP damages in 173 countries starting in 2024. To achieve this, they assembled a data set that integrates weather and economy records going back 120 years. Then they set about modeling economic outcomes under the continued warming expected by 2100.
“Another way to look at our results is, what would happen if global temperature went up an additional 2°C by the end of the century?” Bilal said. “We found that would reduce output and consumption by 50 percent. That’s a big reduction. It’s twice as big as the Great Depression but it’s going on forever.”
Economic growth would continue. “We might still be richer in 2100 than we are today,” Bilal specified. “But we would be twice as rich in 2100 if there was no climate change.”
To understand the implications of these results for decarbonization policy, the co-authors applied global temperature to “the social cost of carbon,” a model developed in the 1990s by Nobel laureate William D. Nordhaus.
Globally, Bilal and Känzig arrived at a social cost of $1,056 per ton, whereas another recent estimate (again, set to local temperature variations) put global cost at just $185 per ton.
Using their new method to recalculate social cost for the U.S. alone, the co-authors landed on $211 per ton. Compare that with the cost of federal decarbonization interventions covered under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, estimated at $95 per ton by one study.
“The silver lining of our results,” Bilal offered, “is that decarbonization easily passes the cost-benefit analysis for large economies like the U.S. and European Union.”
Woodberry Poetry Room embarks on online preservation project
On the third floor of Harvard’s Lamont Library sits a portal to a world inhabited by the words, images, and sounds of modern and contemporary poetry.
Since the early 1930s, the Woodberry Poetry Room has been amassing an audio and video collection of recordings that includes thousands of hours of readings, interviews, lectures, workshops, seminars, oral histories, panel discussions, radio broadcasts, theatrical performances, folk music concerts, ethnographic field recordings, and even memorial services.
Now, thanks to a $250,000 Public Knowledge Grant from the Mellon Foundation, the poetry room will have the opportunity to preserve and further amplify its “library of voices.”
The funding will enable the poetry room to digitize 2,000 of its most rare, at-risk reel-to-reel recordings and create a Library of Voices website, a digital AV platform on which the curators hope to explore fresh ways for visitors to engage with literary recordings in the online environment.
“In the U.S., the reel-to-reel had its heyday in the mid-century, after American GIs brought an early model tape recorder — the Magnetophon — and related technologies back from Germany in 1945,” said Christina Davis, curator of the poetry room. “The poetry room’s earliest known use of the technology was in 1947, when we deployed it to record T.S. Eliot’s first big post-War reading at Sanders Theatre. Reels remained our primary format through the early 1980s, so by preserving them we’re saving a deeply diverse range of cultural and historical materials.”
Transcripts
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like patient etherized upon a table. Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells. Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question– Oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit. In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes. The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes. Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools that stand in drains. Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys. Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap. And seeing that it was a soft October night, curled once about the house and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the window panes. There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
There will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate. Time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed, there will be time to wonder, do I dare, and do I dare? Time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. They will say, how his hair is growing thin. My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin. My necktie rich and modest but asserted by a simple pin. They will say, but how his arms and legs are thin. Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute, there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all. Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all, the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin. When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all, arms that are braceleted and white and bare. But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair, is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl. And how should I presume? And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirtsleeves leaning out of windows. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully smoothed by long fingers. Asleep, tired, or it malingers stretched on the floor here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed. Though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter. I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker. And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me? Would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile? To have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it towards some overwhelming question. To say, I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all– if one, settling a pillow by her head, should say, that is not what I meant at all.
That is not it at all.
And would it have been worth it after all? Would it have been worthwhile after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets? After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor, and this, and so much more? It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern through the nerves in patterns on a screen. Would it have been worthwhile if one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl and turning toward the window, should say, that is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.
No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. Am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start the scene or two, advise the prince. No doubt an easy tool, deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous. Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse. At times, indeed, almost ridiculous. Almost, that times, the fool. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I saw wear white flannel trousers and walk up on the beach. I have heard the mermaid singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves combing with white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white then black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown.
“Gerontion.”
Thou hast nor youth nor age, but as it were, an after dinner sleep dreaming of both. Here I am, an old man in a dry month being read to by a boy waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates nor fought in the warm rain nor knee deep in the salt marsh heaving a cutlass bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, and the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. The goat coughs at night in the field overhead. Rocks, moss, stone crop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter. I, an old man, a dull head among windy spaces. Signs are taken for wonders. We would see a sign. The word within a word, unable to speak a word, swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger. In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas, to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk among whispers. By Mr. Silvero with caressing hands, at Limoges who walked all night in the next room.
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians. By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room shifting the candles. Fraulein von Kulp who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuffles weave the wind. I have no ghosts. An old man in a draughty house under a window knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now. History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues. Deceives with whispering ambitions. Guides us by vanities. Think now. She gives when our attention is distracted, and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving.
Gives too late. What’s not believed in or is still believed in memory only. Reconsidered passion gives too soon. Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think. Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing three.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last. We have not reached conclusion when I stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly, and it is not by any concitation of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom to lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion. Why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. How should I use them for your closer contact? These, with a thousand small deliberations protract the profit of their chilled delirium, excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, with pungent sauces. Multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors.
What will the spider do? Suspend its operations? Will the weevil delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled beyond the circuit of the shuddering bear in fractured atoms. Gull against the wind in the windy straights of Belle Isle or running on the Horn. White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims. And an old man, driven by the trades, to a sleepy corner. Tenants of the house. Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
“The Hollow Men.”
We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas. Our dried voices, when we whisper together, are quiet and meaningless as wind and dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color. Paralyzed force. Gesture without motion. Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death’s other kingdom. Remember us, if at all, not as lost, violent souls but only as the hollow men, this stuffed men.
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams. In death’s dream kingdom, these do not appear. There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column. There is a tree swinging, and voices are in the wind singing more distant and more solemn than a fading star.
Let me be known nearer in death’s dream kingdom. Let me also wear such deliberate disguises– rat’s coats, crow skin, crossed staves in a field, behaving as the wind behaves. No nearer. Not that final meeting in the twilight kingdom.
This is the dead land. This is cactus land. Here, the stone images are raised. Here, they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this in death’s other kingdom? Waking alone at the hour when we are trembling with tenderness. Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone.
The eyes are not here. There are no eyes here in this valley of dying stars, in this hollow valley, this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. In this last meeting places we grope together and avoid speech gathered on this beach of the tumid river. Sightless, unless the eyes reappear as the perpetual star, multifoliate rose of death’s twilight kingdom. They hope only of empty men.
Here we go round the prickly pear, prickly pear, prickly pear. Here we go round the prickly pear at 5 o’clock in the morning. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow. For Thine is the kingdom.
Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow. Life is very long. Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. For Thine is the kingdom. For thine is– life is– for thine is the– this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
“Triumphal March.”
Stone. bronze, stone, steel, stone, oak leaves, horses’ heels over the paving. And the flags, and the trumpets, and so many eagles. How many? Count them. And such a press of people. We hardly knew ourselves that day or knew the city.
This is the way to the temple, and we, so many, crowding the way. So many waiting. How many waiting? What did it matter on such a day? Are they coming? No, not yet. You can see some eagles and hear the trumpets. Here they come. Is he coming?
The natural wakeful life of our ego is a perceiving. We can wait with our stools and our sausages. What comes first? Can you see? Tell us. It is 5,800,000 rifles and carbons, 102,000 machine guns, 28,000 trench mortars, 53,000 field and heavy guns.
I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines, and fuses. 13,000 airplanes, 24,000 airplane engines, 50,000 ammunition wagons, now 55,000 army wagons, 11,000 field Kitchens, 1,150 field bakeries. What a time that took. Will it be he no? No. Those are the golf club captains. These, the scouts.
And now, the societe gymnastique de Poissy. And now, come the mayor and the liverymen. Look, there he is now. Look. There is no interrogation in his eyes or in the hands. Quiet over the horse’s neck. And the eyes, watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent. Oh, hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast. Under the palm tree at noon. Under the running water. At the still point of the turning world. Oh, hidden.
Now they go up to the temple. Then, the sacrifice. Now come the virgins bearing urns, urns containing dust. Dust. Dust of dust. And now, stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oak leaves, horses’ heels over the paving.
That is all we could see. But how many eagles, and how many trumpets? And Easter Day we didn’t get to the country, so we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell. And he said, right out loud, crumpets. Don’t throw away that sausage. It’ll come in handy. He’s artful. Please, will you give us a light? Light. Light. Et les soldats faisaient la haie? Ils la faisaient.
“Journey of the Magi.”
A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey. And such a long journey. The ways deep and the weather sharp. The very dead of winter. And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women. And the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters, and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly, and the villages dirty and charging high prices. A hard time we heard of it. At the end, we preferred to travel all night sleeping in snatches with the voices singing in our ears saying that this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness, and three trees on the low sky, and an old white horse galloping away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel. Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, and feet kicking the empty wine skins. But there was no information. And so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon finding the place. It was, you may say, satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago. I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this, set down this. Were we led all that way for birth or death? There was a birth, certainly. We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different. This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.
“A Song for Simeon.”
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and the winter sun creeps by the snow hills. The stubborn season has made stand. My life is light, waiting for the death’s wind like a feather on the back of my hand. Dust in sunlight and memory in corners wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land. Grant us Thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city, kept faith and fast. Provided for the poor. Have given and taken honor and ease. There went never any rejected from my door. Who shall remember my house? Where shall live my children’s children when the time of sorrow is come? They will take to the goat’s path and the fox’s is home flying from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation, grant us Thy peace. Before the stations of the mountain of desolation, before the certain hour of maternal sorrow. Now at this birth season of decease, let the infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken word grant Israel’s consolation to one who has 80 years and no tomorrow. According to Thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation with glory and derision. Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair. Not for me, the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer. Not for me, the ultimate vision. Grant me Thy peace. And a sword shall pierce Thy heart, Thine also.
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me. I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. Let Thy servant depart having seen Thy salvation.
“Difficulties of a Statesman.”
Cry? What shall I cry? All flesh is grass. Comprehending the companions of the bath, the Knights of the British Empire, the Cavaliers, oh, Cavaliers of the Legion of Honor. The Order of the Black Eagle, first then second class. And the Order of the Rising Sun.
Cry, cry, what shall I cry? The first thing to do is to form the committees, the consultative councils, the standing committees, select committees and subcommittees. One secretary will do for several committees. What shall I cry? Arthur Edward Cyril Parker is appointed telephone operator at the salary of 1 pound, 10 a week rising by annual increments of 5 shillings to 2 pounds, 10 a week. With a bonus of 30 shillings at Christmas and one week’s leave a year.
A committee has been appointed to nominate a commission of engineers to consider the water supply. A commission is appointed for public works, chiefly the question of rebuilding the fortifications. A commission is appointed to confer with the Volscian commission about perpetual peace. The fletchers and javelin-makers and smiths have appointed a joint committee to protest against the reduction of orders.
Meanwhile, the guards shake dice on the marches, and the frogs, O Mantuan, croak in the marshes. Fireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning. What shall I cry? Mother, mother, here is the row of family portraits, dingy busts, all looking remarkably Roman, remarkably like each other, lit up successively by the flare of a sweaty torchbearer yawning.
Oh, hidden under the, hidden under the, where the dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment, a still moment, repose of noon, set under the upper branches of noon’s widest tree. Under the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon. There, the cyclamen spreads its wings. There, the clematis droops over the lintel.
Oh, mother, not among these busts all correctly inscribed. I, a tired head among these heads, necks strong to bear them, noses strong to break the wind. Mother, may we not be some time, almost now, together? If the mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations are now observed, may we not be, oh hidden, hidden in the stillness of noon in the silent crooking night?
Come with the sweep of the little bat’s wing, with the small flare of the firefly or lightning bug. Rising and falling, crowned with dust. The small creatures, the small creatures chirp thinly through the dust through the night. Oh, mother, what shall I cry? We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation. Resign! Resign! Resign!
Among the many authors whose recordings will be preserved are: John Ashbery, W.H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, June Jordan, Li-Young Lee, Audre Lorde, Czesław Miłosz, Mary Oliver, George Oppen, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Dylan Thomas, and Derek Walcott.
Those recordings reflect only a portion of the diversity of materials the poetry room has documented, which include readings and performances in Arabic, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh.
Christina Davis (left) and Mary Walker Graham.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Following the digitization phase, the curators will work with a design firm to create the Library of Voices website, which will feature more than 150 archival and contemporary highlights from the collection, representing almost a century of the spoken word.
Plans for the site and its custom-designed Vocarium player are deeply rooted in the room’s rich history with recorded sound.
The archive is, according to its curators, one of the first devoted to the poetic voice, and is home to one of the first poetry-record labels in the world — the Harvard Vocarium, founded by Harvard Professor of Public Speaking Frederick C. Packard Jr. and active until 1955.
Harvard Vocarium founder Frederick C. Packard Jr. and the Woodberry Poetry room circa 1950.
Courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Houghton Library
Packard collected and recorded some of the earliest extant recordings of such writers as Eliot, Frost, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Anaïs Nin, and Muriel Rukeyser.
“Long after Professor Packard ceased recording for his Vocarium label, the poetry room curators carried on his vision for the library of voices, making recordings of both private studio sessions and public readings, a practice that continues to this day,” said Mary Walker Graham, associate curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room. “We build our collection by curating and recording all of the public programs we host each year. Increasingly, we also solicit studio recordings from poets who might be passing through.”
The Voices site, which is set to launch in Spring 2026, hopes to reflect the feel of the poetry room itself. Designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in 1949, the space is warm and inviting, clean and uncluttered, with lots of room for tables, chairs, and other comfortable seating, bookcases lining the walls, and two record players equipped with outlets for eight sets of earphones to allow for shared sessions.
“We want to bring the same thoughtfulness of design that’s found in the poetry room’s architecture — an architecture intended for listening — into the digital space,” Graham said.
Christina Davis, curator of the poetry room, pulls a recording from the collection.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A reel of an E.E. Cummings reading from 1954.
More recordings of Cummings from the 1950s and ’60s.
“Reel-to-reel had its heyday in the mid-century,” said Davis. And remained the poetry room’s “primary format through the early 1980s, so by preserving them we’re saving a deeply diverse range of cultural and historical materials.”
“The primary encounter that we are hoping to create is one of radical hospitality and pleasure, like this radiant and embracing Aalto-designed space with its luminous views of the Yard and the sky,” Davis added. “Our goal is to facilitate an immersive encounter with poetry in such a way that it honors the art form’s sensual and sonic dimensions.”
The poetry room is also notably the primary repository for the Academy of American Poets’ sound archive, which documents almost 50 years of New York City-based readings and performances; the Anne Sexton and Her Kind archive; the Phone-A-Poem archive; and the Galway Kinnell Recording Collection.
Other authors whose work will be included in this project are: Etel Adnan, Ai, Agha Shahid Ali, Yehuda Amichai, Margaret Atwood, Ingeborg Bachmann, Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, Robert Creeley, Forugh Farrokhzad, Louise Glück, Cathy Park Hong, Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, Eileen Myles, Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Claudia Rankine, Wallace Stevens, Susan Sontag, Cecilia Vicuña, Ocean Vuong, Anne Waldman, William Carlos Williams, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Raúl Zurita.
Though not all of the recordings that are preserved will be featured on the website, all will be deposited into the Harvard Digital Repository and ultimately will be available via HOLLIS.
His country restricted music. Suddenly he was a target.
Between Taliban regimes, Scholar at Risk gained stardom singing on Afghan TV show
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
When U.S. television audiences fell in love with the singing competition “American Idol” in the early 2000s, across the globe Afghans were equally — if not more — dazzled by its own version of the reality show. “Afghan Star” premiered in 2005, four years after the fall of a Taliban reign that had banned some forms of music.
Dawood Shah Pazhman, a singer, composer, and player of the traditional stringed instrument called the qeshqarche, earned acclaim for his performance in Season 9 of the show, which ended in 2021 when the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan. After years of playing music publicly, Pazhman went into hiding before fleeing his home country. For the past several months, he’s taken part in the Scholars at Risk program at Harvard.
“Music for me is very important,” he said. “It’s a part of culture. Every nation or ethnic community has something different, and music shows the different colors, and the beauty, and how they are rich.”
Pazhman, originally from Badakhshan, a remote part of Afghanistan, described a childhood marked by government suppression and secrecy.
In 2013, before a performance at an international music festival in Uzbekistan Pazhman told the Indonesian publication KBR that when he was a child he had been scolded by Mujahidin for attempting to sing with his father, another folk musician. The incident caused him to stop singing publicly for five years.
“In the opinion of the Taliban, doing music is not allowed according to sharia,” he told the Gazette. “I grew up with music … I fight all my life because they say music is against Islam.”
After the Taliban fell in 2001, Pazhman was able to pursue music out in the open. The 2006 graduate of Kabul University with a degree in music has performed extensively throughout Afghanistan, and abroad. His first public performance was in 2011, at the Melodies of the East music festival in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. He said his band received the first position award among musicians from 54 countries.
When he auditioned for “Afghan Star” in 2013, he traveled nearly 16 hours to Kabul.
The married father of four said that when the Taliban regained power, he and his family went into hiding for 11 months. “I could not go outside, not even to shop,” he said. Sometimes, he said, they couldn’t find enough food for their children.
Pazhman kept his music secret for nearly a year — wrapping his instruments in blankets when the family moved place to place. In a house in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, he said, “the Taliban started searching the house. When they found my instruments, they broke them.”
“I’m just a person but I have a big responsibility on my shoulder to just show that Afghanistan is not terrorists or the Taliban killing people. This is politics, but the people of Afghanistan, not all of them are thinking like this. There is culture there, and there is music. There is literature.”
Dawood Shah Pazhman
Once he was able to escape, the family made their way to Germany for a year and a half. He joined Harvard’s music department in February.
“It was so dangerous for me to just leave because I had lots of performances and TV programs where people know me,” he said.
Fears for his own safety weren’t his sole motivation for fleeing. He also wants to make a better life for his daughters and wife. “The Taliban is there so the women don’t go to work. The girls also cannot attend school,” he said. His oldest daughter, who is 7, has started learning the violin since leaving Afghanistan.
Pazhman is thinking about applying for his master’s degree in the U.S. after his time at Harvard finishes in January.
“I’m just a person but I have a big responsibility on my shoulder to just show that Afghanistan is not terrorists or the Taliban killing people,” he said. “This is politics, but the people of Afghanistan, not all of them are thinking like this. There is culture there, and there is music. There is literature.”
The Scholars at Risk Program is dedicated to helping scholars, artists, writers, and public intellectuals from around the world escape persecution and continue their work by providing academic fellowships at Harvard University. Founded in 2001 as an independent member of the International Scholars at Risk Network, SAR at Harvard relies on the generosity of private donors and the Office of the President to carry out its mission.
Alzheimer’s drug may save lives through ‘suspended animation’
Tadpoles from the Xenopus laevis species of frogs were used in the study.
Credit: Unravel Biosciences
Lindsay Brownell
Wyss Institute Communications
4 min read
Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital
Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Using donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.
“Cooling a patient’s body down to slow its metabolic processes has long been used in medical settings to reduce injuries and long-term problems from severe conditions, but it can only currently be done in a well-resourced hospital,” said co-author Michael Super, director of immuno-materials at the Wyss Institute. “Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”
This research, published Thursday in ACS Nano, was supported as part of the DARPA Biostasis Program, which funds projects that aim to extend the time for lifesaving medical treatment, often referred to as “the Golden Hour,” following traumatic injury or acute infection. The Wyss Institute has been a participant in the Biostasis Program since 2018, and has achieved several important milestones over the last few years.
Using a combination of predictive machine learning algorithms and animal models, the Wyss’ Biostasis team previously identified and tested existing drug compounds that had the potential to put living tissues into a state of suspended animation. Their first successful candidate, SNC80, significantly reduced oxygen consumption (a proxy for metabolism) in both a beating pig heart and in human organ chips, but is known to cause seizures when injected systemically.
In the new study, they once again turned to their algorithm to identify other compounds whose structures are similar to SNC80. Their top candidate was DNP, which has been approved since 1996 to treat Alzheimer’s.
“Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”
Michael Super
“Interestingly, clinical overdoses of DNP in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have been associated with drowsiness and a reduced heart rate — symptoms that are torpor-like. However, this is the first study, to our knowledge, that focuses on leveraging those effects as the main clinical response, and not as side effects,” said the study’s first author, María Plaza Oliver, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute when the work was conducted.
The team used X. laevis tadpoles to evaluate DNP’s effects on a whole living organism, and found that it successfully induced a torpor-like state that could be reversed when the drug was removed. The drug, however, did seem to cause some toxicity, and accumulated in all of the animals’ tissues. To solve that problem, the researchers encapsulated DNP inside lipid nanocarriers, and found that this both reduced toxicity and caused the drug to accumulate in the animals’ brain tissues. This is a promising result, as the central nervous system is known to mediate hibernation and torpor in other animals as well.
Although DNP has been shown to protect neurons from metabolic stress in models of Alzheimer’s disease, the team cautions that more work is needed to understand exactly how it causes torpor, as well as scale up production of the encapsulated DNP for use in larger animals and, potentially, humans.
“Donepezil has been used worldwide by patients for decades, so its properties and manufacturing methods are well-established. Lipid nanocarriers similar to the ones we used are also now approved for clinical use in other applications. This study demonstrates that an encapsulated version of the drug could potentially be used in the future to buy patients critical time to survive devastating injuries and diseases, and it could be easily formulated and produced at scale on a much shorter time scale than a new drug,” said senior author Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
This research was supported by DARPA under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0027, the Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, and the University of Castilla-La Mancha (NextGeneration EU UNI/551/2021).
‘This is not a time that calls for complacency. This is not a time that calls for standing still.’
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
With the start of the fall semester fast approaching and the memory of a contentious 2023-24 academic year still fresh, the Gazette sat down with the University’s new president, Alan Garber, to discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead. Garber, who was appointed on an interim basis in January and affirmed as the University’s leader earlier this month, expressed optimism about the excellence and character of Harvard students — evidenced by a record number of Rhodes Scholars last year and more recently by success at the Paris Olympics — and the desire of the community to come together despite differences. He also noted that discord around national and global events, including the Gaza war, is not going away, and that part of a university’s role in the world is to teach those with conflicting beliefs to exchange views by listening as well as talking. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Harvard athletes and alums did very well at the Paris Olympics, taking home 13 medals. Are there lessons for first-years in this demonstration of excellence?
Not long after I arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate, I noticed that most Harvard students don’t want limited choice. They seek “both/and,” not “either/or.” They don’t accept the notion that they can only do one thing really well, and they often succeed in the most stunning and improbable ways.
This is a place of audacious ambition. You can be a great student and also a graceful dancer, a swift cyclist, or a high-scoring forward. Our Olympians are examples of “both/and” at the very highest level. Each of their stories is inspiring. They have taught us that you can pursue a passion and still be successful at other pursuits. One activity can reinforce the other.
How are you approaching your first full year as president?
People can expect a heightened sense of urgency: a sense of urgency about overcoming the challenges we face and a sense of urgency about pursuing the opportunities before us. This is not a time that calls for complacency. This is not a time that calls for standing still. And this is not a time that allows us to ignore the problems that confront us. Although our community is divided about issues that matter deeply, fundamentally we remain one community. What I hear on our campus and from our alumni is great optimism about the University’s future, despite serious concerns about the challenges we face today. It is my responsibility to ensure that optimism is justified.
What do you see as the biggest challenges for the upcoming academic year?
Events in the Middle East and the presidential election will heighten tensions on campus. We have unfinished business in combating hate and bias, especially toward members of our community who are Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, and Israeli. Our biggest challenge is ensuring that the best aspects of our culture are experienced by everyone on our campus. We need to cultivate empathy, learn how to talk to one another, and understand how to listen to people who differ from us. We have announced several initiatives and are taking significant steps to address these issues, including through the activities of the task forces that will issue final reports and recommendations this semester, but achieving our goals will take time.
Is there any way to avoid protests and strife on campus?
With widespread reports of planned protests at Harvard and other universities, nobody should be surprised if they take place. The right to protest is enshrined in the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, assuring every member of the community’s “right to press for action on matters of concern.” But, as the statement sets out, with those rights come responsibilities, which have been clarified in recent months. Our policies concerning expression, protest, and the use of space have been communicated broadly as well.
“Grief should never be turned into disdain or hostility toward other members of our community, or anyone else, based on their identities. But grief is real.”
I hope that every member of our community who contemplates exercising the right to protest will recognize that universities are dedicated to learning. They seek to illuminate and persuade by drawing on facts and reasoning, not coercion. Coercive tactics lack legitimacy, and they are inimical to the ideals of the University. The same is true of discrimination and exclusion, which should never be tolerated.
People in our community are grieving about a war that has affected many of us deeply and personally. Grief should never be turned into disdain or hostility toward other members of our community, or anyone else, based on their identities. But grief is real. When we encounter one another, and especially when emotions run high, we should recognize the personal losses that members of our community have experienced, and we should acknowledge their pain and suffering. Beyond statements of rights and responsibilities, let us remember the basic humanity of those around us and the obligations we have to one another.
Can respect be taught? Can empathy be taught? Is it part of the University’s job to strengthen these qualities in students?
Harvard students today have had different educational experiences than those who arrived even a decade ago. They have grown up in an era of increasing polarization, with online connections permeating every aspect of their lives. We need to acknowledge these changes as the University fulfills its role as an educator. We cannot assume that every matriculating student is ready to be exposed to a wide range of beliefs, opinions, and unfamiliar facts, and to have their own view of the world challenged. It is incumbent upon us to set norms and to foster a culture of curiosity and inquiry in which the discovery and dissemination of truth thrive. Knowing that such fundamental changes take time adds to the urgency of our task.
Where do you see opportunities in the coming year?
The opportunities are many. They begin with a renewed focus on excellence in our core mission of teaching, learning, and research. The pursuit of excellence has long been synonymous with Harvard’s name. It remains the focus of our campus. But that is overlooked when public attention is directed toward events like protests and reports of bias and hate.
In so many domains — research, learning, extracurricular activities, public service — our community seeks success. There are many opportunities to support such efforts. The FAS is looking at ways to ensure that the humanities will have a greater impact in the future. Many students want a strong education in the humanities even when their primary interest is in a STEM field. In the sciences, major advances in the tools available to make new discoveries in the physical and life sciences are accelerating discovery and application to products, ranging from batteries to robotics to medical diagnostics to therapies. Perhaps the most visible of those tools is artificial intelligence. With its applicability to nearly every area of University activity, we are working quickly to apply and understand AI in tandem, exploring risks and opportunities on frontiers that seem to expand every day. You can expect to see a lot more activity in that arena going forward.
These are examples of a wide range of academic opportunities that are before us. I’ll have more to say about them in the coming months.
When Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker announced your presidency, she called this an especially demanding moment for higher education. What makes the moment so demanding, and have any of those forces weakened or shifted since last year?
The challenges that make it a demanding moment are broad and not unique to Harvard. We are a research university, steeped in scholarship and teaching. But in recent years trust in institutions has declined and expertise has come to be viewed with rising skepticism. There are complaints about the cost of education and doubt about its value. At Harvard, 55 percent of our undergraduates are on financial aid; their families pay an average of $13,000 per year. About 24 percent of families pay nothing for their child’s Harvard College education. Pointing out these facts, and that college graduates continue to earn substantially more than high school graduates, can help, but the misperceptions are tenacious.
We also face widely publicized lawsuits and congressional investigations. The resulting impression that higher education has lost its way has political consequences. Legislation has been proposed that would impose large financial penalties, including more punitive endowment taxes, and even mandate a review of nonprofit status. Needless to say, if such legislation were to become law, institutions like ours would have far fewer resources to support financial aid, teaching, and research.
The most challenging aspect of the moment we face now is that our community is divided. Social movements and protests have a long history at Harvard. Typically, students, along with other community members, have directed their protests against University administrations or outside parties. That is less true today. We now have protests and counterprotests, and the protests are sometimes experienced as personal attacks. At Harvard, this level of division has not been a feature of protests for many decades. We need to embrace the challenge of both encouraging debate and maintaining goodwill.
The interim recommendations are constructive and helpful. Their purpose is to set forth initial steps before the work of the task forces is complete. Some of these steps are educational and include training and orientation activities, as well as courses that will help students understand the issues in their full complexity. Other steps are structural, including religious accommodations that members of the community have requested.
Both task forces have emphasized that the path forward needs to be firmly grounded in our values as a university and as a community. The bias that we are trying to address is incompatible with the values of mutual respect, recognizing the humanity in one another, and using reason and facts to reach conclusions about controversial issues. The final recommendations, which will be submitted this fall, will be informed by extensive data collection to better characterize the situation we’re facing and to ensure that the measures we ultimately adopt will be effective.
“Exposure to a wide range of views, backgrounds, and experiences leads to learning and growth, and our commitment to diversity across many dimensions — demographic, socioeconomic, life experience, ideological, and many others — benefits every member of our community.”
Institutional voice is also being addressed. The faculty working group on that issue has reported and their recommendations have been accepted. Why was this work important?
The reaction that I’ve heard to the report of the Working Group on Institutional Voice, with its recommendation that the University be deliberate and limited in how and when it uses its official voice, has been overwhelmingly positive. Another group is exploring the implementation of the working group’s recommendations. The institutional voice report is an important component of our efforts to promote effective speech. It limits the circumstances under which stating a public, institutional view on social and political issues could create an orthodoxy that deters others from openly disagreeing with those views. It does so by enjoining the University to avoid staking out positions on topics that are not core to the University’s mission. The University should not have a foreign policy. It should not opine about the validity of public policy positions that are not about the business of the University. By that means, it is hoped that we will open more space for our students, faculty, and other members of our community to express a range of views on the topics of the day — and discuss and debate them in constructive ways.
There are all these efforts addressing different pieces of this difficult puzzle. Are you satisfied with where we are now in our response?
I doubt that I will ever be fully satisfied with where we are, because I am eager to see change. These problems should be addressed with alacrity. But looking back, I am very grateful for the work of the many, many people who have tried to develop solutions, since we have moved quickly and made progress.
Efforts to support diversity and inclusion — in academia and elsewhere — have lately been under attack. Has this affected the University’s commitment to building a diverse community of people with many different backgrounds?
When the Supreme Court announced its decision regarding the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions, we immediately stated that we will comply with the law and that our commitment to diversity remains. That commitment is longstanding, derived in large part from former President Derek Bok’s work. His argument, which I fully embrace, is that diversity is an ingredient of excellence at a university and that the entire community gains when we draw from as broad a pool of talent as possible. Exposure to a wide range of views, backgrounds, and experiences leads to learning and growth, and our commitment to diversity across many dimensions — demographic, socioeconomic, life experience, ideological, and many others — benefits every member of our community.
Are there other matters that you expect to be important in the coming year?
Allston is taking shape and its future as a vibrant area of the University is coming into view. Construction is underway on the new home for the American Repertory Theater at the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, along with our first University-wide conference center in the David Rubenstein Treehouse. The Science and Engineering Complex has emerged as a hub for research, education, and collaboration since it opened three years ago, and construction of the first phase of the Enterprise Research Campus is underway. It promises to attract research-oriented enterprises that will draw on, and contribute to, our intellectual community.
In each of these areas, and so many others, I see the “both/and” spirit and everything that it generates. There is a lot going on at Harvard — a lot to inspire excitement, joy, and pride — and I am looking forward to acknowledging and celebrating all that we’re accomplishing, and the many ways we are making a difference in the world.
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Physicists ease path to entanglement for quantum sensing
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Nothing in science can be achieved or understood without measurement. Today, thanks to advances in quantum sensing, scientists can measure things that were once impossible to even imagine: vibrations of atoms, properties of individual photons, fluctuations associated with gravitational waves.
A quantum mechanical trick called “spin squeezing” is widely recognized to hold promise for supercharging the capabilities of the world’s most precise quantum sensors, but it’s been notoriously difficult to achieve. In new research, Harvard physicists describe how they’ve put spin squeezing within closer reach.
A type of quantum entanglement, spin squeezing constrains the way an ensemble of particles can fluctuate. This enables more precise measurements of certain observable signals, at the expense of measuring other, complementary signals as accurately — think of how squeezing a balloon yields more height at the expense of width.
“Quantum mechanics can enhance our ability to measure very small signals,” said Norman Yao, a physics professor and author of the new paper on spin squeezing in Nature Physics. “We have shown that it is possible to get such quantum-enhanced metrology in a much broader class of systems than was previously thought.”
In the balloon metaphor, a circle represents the uncertainty intrinsic to any quantum measurement, explained Maxwell Block, co-author of the paper and a former Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student. “By squeezing this uncertainty, making the balloon more like an ellipse, one can reshape the sensitivity of measurements,” Block said. “This means that certain measurements can be more precise than anything one could possibly do without quantum mechanics.”
Spin squeezing is a form of quantum entanglement that can enable more precise measurements (middle). Previously known to arise only in all-to-all interacting systems (left), Harvard researchers have shown that spin squeezing can occur more generally in locally interacting systems that form planar magnets (right).
Credit: Bingtian Ye
An analog of spin squeezing was used, for example, to increase the sensitivity of the Nobel-garnering gravitational wave detectors in the LIGO experiment.
The Harvard team’s work built upon a landmark 1993 paper that first described the possibility of a spin-squeezed, entangled state brought about by “all-to-all” interactions between atoms. Such interactions are akin to a large Zoom meeting, in which each participant is interacting with every other participant at once. Between atoms, this type of connectivity easily enables the build-up of the quantum mechanical correlations necessary to induce a spin-squeezed state. However, in nature, atoms typically interact in a way that’s more like a game of telephone, only speaking with a few neighbors at a time.
“For years, it has been thought that one can only get truly quantum-enhanced spin squeezing via all-to-all interactions,” said Bingtian Ye, co-lead author of the paper and also a former Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student. “But what we have shown is that it is actually way easier.”
In their paper, the researchers outline a new strategy for generating spin-squeezed entanglement. They intuited, and together with collaborators in France quickly confirmed via experiment that the ingredients for spin squeezing are present in a ubiquitous type of magnetism found often in nature — ferromagnetism, which is also the force that makes refrigerator magnets stick. They posit that all-to-all interactions are not necessary to achieve spin squeezing, but rather, so long as the spins are connected well enough to sync into a magnetic state, they should also be able to dynamically generate spin squeezing.
The researchers are optimistic that by thus lowering the barrier to spin squeezing, their work will inspire new ways for quantum scientists and engineers to create more portable sensors, useful in biomedical imaging, atomic clocks, and more.
In that spirit, Yao is now leading experiments to generate spin-squeezing in quantum sensors made out of nitrogen-vacancy centers, which are a type of defect in the crystal structure of diamond that have long been recognized as ideal quantum sensors.
The research received federal support from: the Army Research Office, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation.
David E. and Stacey L. Goel Quantum Science and Engineering Building opens
Quantum science at Harvard is finally home.
The interdisciplinary consortium of researchers comprising the Harvard Quantum Initiative has settled into a space of its own, completed this summer, at 60 Oxford St. in Cambridge.
The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Quantum Science and Engineering Building is a top-to-bottom, 70,000-square-foot renovation of a former University data center built in 2004, in the heart of Harvard’s science campus. It houses researchers across many disciplines, including the Rowland Institute at Harvard and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in addition to HQI’s scientists working at the forefront of quantum engineering, networking, and theory.
The building features faculty and student offices; meeting spaces; state-of-the-art, low-vibration laboratories; places for impromptu discussions; a “quantum shop” with engineering resources for researchers; and a teaching lab.
“The extraordinary possibilities of serendipitous ideas that occur through contact and proximity can elevate innovation in major ways,” said HQI Co-Director Evelyn Hu, the Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering. The Goel Building, she said, will be “a field of dreams” for the community of researchers.
A view inside the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Quantum Science and Engineering Building.
Photo by Jon Ratner
A laser system for atom cooling in the lab of Giulia Semeghini.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Meeting spaces are designed to spark creativity and collaboration.
Photo by Jon Ratner
An atomic source in the lab of Giulia Semeghini.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
The Rowland Insitute, a fellowship program for early career scientists taking creative risks in their research, has moved its physical scientists into the Goel Building after residing near Kendall Square since 2002, when the institute founded by Edwin H. Land first merged with Harvard. While chemists and engineers, some of whom work on quantum materials, will occupy the building’s second floor, Rowland’s biologists will work in the neighboring Northwest Building. Shared meeting and social spaces are expected to give rise to greater interaction between HQI and Rowland scholars.
“I think we wanted to create ways of changing the dynamic of how people work together,” said Christopher Stubbs, former dean of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He said planners envisioned less of a traditional academic building and more of an idea-friendly project space.
“We wanted to create ways of changing the dynamic of how people work together.”
Christopher Stubbs
The University thrives by “changing and adapting,” agreed John Doyle, HQI co-director and the Henry B. Silsbee Professor of Physics.
“The Goel Building was designed with different social and meeting spaces than typical. We even developed different, dynamic methods for assigning research space to make optimal use of one of our most precious resources at Harvard: square footage,” Doyle said.
Planning for the space began in earnest around 2020, but the need for a quantum science and research hub was recognized long before that. What would eventually become the Harvard Quantum Initiative had begun coalescing around 2004 as a committed group of researchers studying quantum optics and related areas. HQI was officially established in 2018.
“It was clear at the time that we needed a home, both for high-quality labs, but also a community,” said Mikhail Lukin, HQI co-director and the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor in the Department of Physics.
One of the first to move in was Giulia Semeghini, assistant professor in applied physics, who joined the SEAS faculty in 2023 after completing postdoctoral research at Harvard.
“These collaborations are crucial, and having more occasions to facilitate conversations is very beneficial,” said Giulia Semeghini, an assistant professor in applied physics.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
An experimentalist who is designing quantum computers using ytterbium and rubidium atoms, Semeghini leads experiments that require precise control of temperature, humidity, and vibration, all of which were major considerations for the building.
As Semeghini’s team aims to build a stable quantum computing platform, she recognizes the importance of connection to other fields beyond atomic physics.
“HQI brings people together,” she said. “These collaborations are crucial, and having more occasions to facilitate conversations is very beneficial.”
“This is definitely the spirit of bringing us all together,” said Rowland Fellow and HQI member Ismail El Baggari about the new space.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Rowland Fellow and HQI member Ismail El Baggari finished moving into the new building in early August alongside other fellows and staff. An experimental physicist innovating low-temperature imaging technologies to study quantum materials, El Baggari is busy setting up a laboratory in the Goel Building while also continuing to access shared microscope facilities at the Center for Nanoscale Systems, just around the corner in the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering. His research goals include using liquid helium to cool exotic materials down to 4 Kelvin and employing cryogenic electron microscopy to explore their quantum properties.
“I think we have some research projects where electron microscopy would interface very nicely with HQI, and we can think of new problems to solve now that we have these cooling capabilities — things we never thought about before,” El Baggari said. “It’s fun to have these kinds of interactions and conversations, and this is definitely the spirit of bringing us all together.”
Without assistance, it allows for precise administration of naloxone at the moment it is needed
BWH Communications
4 min read
An implantable device to detect and reverse opioid overdoses has been developed by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT.
The device, which they call “iSOS,” continuously monitors heart and respiratory systems for signs of overdose and automatically delivers the effective antidote naloxone when necessary. In preclinical studies, iSOS effectively detected and reversed opioid overdoses. The study is published in the journal Device.
“Naloxone is life-saving but frequently may not be delivered in time,” said co-first author Peter Ray Chai, Department of Emergency Medicine at BWH. “The iSOS device provides a highly innovative strategy to provide detection of opioid overdose, allowing for precise administration of naloxone at the moment it is needed, hopefully saving individuals from overdose and facilitating continued recovery from opioid use disorder.”
During overdoses, people generally lose consciousness, so having an automated delivery system for naloxone could save the lives of people who use opioids by themselves.
“To combat the high mortality associated with opioid overdoses, our fully implantable iSOS could serve as a pivotal next-generation antidote platform.”
Seungho Lee
“In overdose cases where there is a bystander nearby, that individual can be rescued through either intramuscular or intranasal administration of naloxone, but you need that bystander. We wanted to find a way for this to be done in an autonomous fashion,” said corresponding author Giovanni Traverso, Department of Medicine at BWH and MIT.
To do away with the need for bystander intervention, the researchers wanted to design a “closed loop” system that could both detect opioid overdose and deliver the drug without outside guidance. To enable autonomous detection, the team fitted the device with multiple sensors that continuously monitor the user’s respiratory rate, heart rate, body temperature, and blood oxygen saturation. These sensors connect to an algorithm that is trained to recognize the signs of overdose by integrating the various cardiorespiratory signals.
When the device detects a suspected opioid overdose, it begins buzzing to alert the user and sends an alert to their phone, which allows the user to cancel naloxone administration if they are not experiencing an overdose. If it is not overridden, the device administers a shot of naloxone directly into the user’s tissue.
“To combat the high mortality associated with opioid overdoses, our fully implantable iSOS — with its continuous monitoring and rapid drug infusion capabilities — could serve as a pivotal next-generation antidote platform,” said co-first author Seungho Lee, a research scientist at MIT and in the Department of Medicine at BWH.
The prototype device measures 8 mm x 12 mm x 78 mm (larger than a contraceptive implant but smaller than a subcutaneous cardiac defibrillator). It has a wirelessly rechargeable battery that can last up to 14 days, a refillable drug reservoir, and can be implanted subcutaneously via a minimally invasive procedure under local anesthesia. The team tested the device’s safety and efficacy in a large animal model, finding that the device effectively detected and reversed opioid overdoses in 24 out of 25 pigs.
The researchers note that the device could be particularly useful for individuals who have previously overdosed, since these individuals are more likely to overdose again. They also say that having an implantable device may be more effective than a wearable device.
“The problem with wearables is that one has to wear them, and that in itself presents a potential challenge from an adherence perspective,” says Traverso. “If the patient really wants to help protect themselves against overdose, an implantable or ingestible device could help support this sort of general vision.”
The researchers are now working to further optimize and miniaturize the device and intend to conduct additional preclinical trials before moving onto human testing. They also plan to begin collecting data on end-user preferences to help guide their engineering efforts.
“Understanding the preferences of this patient population will be a critical part of our ongoing work to develop and mature this technology,” said Traverso. “This is only the first lab-based prototype, but even at this stage we’re seeing that this device has a lot of potential to help protect high-risk populations from what otherwise could be a lethal overdose.”
Disclosures: The authors declare submission of a provisional patent application (PCT/US2022/080385) describing the materials and applications of the systems discussed here. Complete details of all relationships for profit and not for profit for Traverso can be found at the following link. All other authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Work described in this manuscript was funded by Novo Nordisk, the McGraw Family Funding, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT Karl Van Tassel (1925) Career Development Professorship Chair. Chai funded by NIH DP2DA056107.
Study detects ‘hidden consciousness’ in brain injury patients
Jennifer Welsh
MGB Communications
5 min read
25% of participants with severe brain injury followed instructions covertly
When tested for “hidden consciousness,” one in four patients with severe brain injury who appeared unresponsive were able to respond to instructions covertly, according to new research, co-led by experts at Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham.
The findings were published Aug. 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In the study, 241 participants with severe brain injury who did not respond when given a simple instruction were assessed with functional MRI (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), or both tests. During these tests, participants heard instructions, such as “imagine opening and closing your hand,” followed 15-30 seconds later by “stop imagining opening and closing your hand.” The fMRI and EEG brain responses showed that 60 participants (25 percent) repeatedly followed this instruction covertly over minutes.
Yelena Bodien, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.
According to the authors of the study, patients who demonstrate this phenomenon, called cognitive motor dissociation, understand language, remember instructions, and can sustain attention, even though they appear unresponsive. For these patients, cognitive (i.e., thinking) abilities exceed, and are therefore dissociated from, motor abilities.
“Some patients with severe brain injury do not appear to be processing their external world. However, when they are assessed with advanced techniques such as task-based fMRI and EEG, we can detect brain activity that suggests otherwise,” said lead study author Yelena Bodien, an investigator for the Spaulding-Harvard Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery. “These results bring up critical ethical, clinical, and scientific questions — such as how can we harness that unseen cognitive capacity to establish a system of communication and promote further recovery?”
Following a significant brain injury, individuals may have a disorder of consciousness, which can include coma, a vegetative state, or a minimally conscious state. Since the first study demonstrating cognitive motor dissociation in individuals with disorders of consciousness was published nearly two decades ago, centers around the world have found that this condition occurs in approximately 15 to 20 percent of unresponsive patients. However, the current study suggests it could be present in 25 percent of patients, or even more. Cognitive motor dissociation was most common in participants assessed with fMRI and EEG, suggesting that multiple tests, using different approaches, may be required to ensure consciousness is not missed.
Patients who demonstrate cognitive motor dissociation understand language, remember instructions, and can sustain attention, even though they appear unresponsive.
This study included participant data from six different sites spanning the U.S., U.K., and Europe collected over approximately 15 years. Each site developed and rigorously tested their methods for detecting cognitive motor dissociation to minimize the possibility that a positive result was obtained spuriously. Some sites recruited participants from the intensive care unit just days after they sustained a severe brain injury, often from a trauma such as a car accident, a stroke, or cardiac arrest. Other sites included participants who were months to years after their injury or illness and were living in nursing facilities or at home.
In addition to studying the 241 participants who did not respond to simple instructions, the research included 112 participants who did respond to simple instructions at the bedside. This latter group would be expected to perform well on the fMRI and EEG tests, but, in 62 percent of those participants, researchers did not detect brain responses suggesting they were covertly following instructions. The authors note that this finding may reflect the complexity of the fMRI and EEG tasks and underscores the high-level of thinking skills required to perform them.
Just knowing that somebody is cognitively aware and more capable than is immediately apparent can alter their clinical care substantially. “Families have told us that once a positive test result revealing cognitive motor dissociation is shared with the patient’s clinical team, it can change the way that the team interacts with their loved one,” Bodien said. “Suddenly, the team is paying more attention to subtle behavioral signs that could be under volitional control, or speaking to the patient, or playing music in the room. On the other hand, failing to detect cognitive motor dissociation can have serious consequences, including premature withdrawal of life support, missed signs of awareness, and lack of access to intensive rehabilitation.”
One limitation of the study was that the testing was not standardized; each of the study sites tested patients in its own way, creating variability within the data. In addition, many participants were enrolled because family members heard about the study and reached out to researchers. This recruitment approach limits the researchers’ ability to determine the global prevalence of cognitive motor dissociation. There are no professional guidelines that stipulate how cognitive motor dissociation should be assessed, and most centers are unable to provide this testing; clinical translation will need to be a focal point for future research.
“To continue our progress in this field, we need to validate our tools and to develop approaches for systematically and pragmatically assessing unresponsive patients so that the testing is more accessible,” said Bodien. “The Emerging Consciousness Program at Mass General Hospital offers these evaluations clinically, however elsewhere, a patient may have to enroll in a research study to get tested. We know that cognitive motor dissociation is not uncommon, but resources and infrastructure are required to optimize detection of this condition and provide adequate support to patients and their families.”
The researchers added that the findings may spur research of specific interventions to foster effective communication, including brain-computer interfaces.
The study was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Bodien is supported by grants from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research: H133A120085; 90DPTB0011; and 90DPTB0027.
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Examining new weight-loss drugs, pediatric bariatric patients
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Researcher says study found variation in practices, discusses safety concerns overall for younger users
Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, have surged in popularity as treatment for weight loss and management. The increase involves not only adults but also adolescents, along with bariatric surgery patients. Michael Kochis, Ed.M. ’19, M.D. ’20, a resident in the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, realized that little research had been done regarding the use of these drugs on adolescent bariatric surgery patients. Kochis and his team examined practice patterns across the nation, and he spoke to the Gazette about the group’s recent study as well as safety issues for youth generally. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Have these drugs been found to be safe, both for adults and adolescents?
There is increasing evidence that these can be safely used, especially in adults but more recently in pediatrics. Studies happen before drugs get licensed to make sure that they’re safe enough to go to market, and that factors into FDA approval. After approval, they’re still monitored.
And I think it’s important to note that safety can mean different things to different people. And so while there are no glaring problems that would withdraw these drugs from the market — which has happened in the past with other medications related to obesity — there are side effects that aren’t well-tolerated by everyone, like nausea or feeling like you’re full all the time. They’re not a “cure all” drug with all benefits and no risk.
For pediatrics specifically, there’s far less data on their use in children and young adults because they’re not as frequently prescribed in the first place. It’s harder to get studies where we can collect tons of data on adolescents.
One of the areas that this research is highlighting is the fact that these drugs are being used in the pediatric population. It’s really important that we collect data to make sure there’s nothing different about the drugs’ use in this population, compared to what we know from adults.
For your study, why did you choose to look at bariatric surgery patients as opposed to just general adolescents who might be using these drugs?
Our research group has a specialty in bariatric surgery. We’re hearing more and more and more about these drugs and that sparked our interest.
But secondly, the use of these medications in the context of pediatric bariatric surgery has a few unique considerations beyond safety. Those relate to the many physiologic changes that happen as a result of bariatric surgery, not just to weight loss.
The surgeries themselves change the body’s metabolism and hormone balances. It’s unknown how the changes from surgery might relate to the hormone balances that these medications affect. And so the questions are relevant before surgery, during surgery, and after surgery in regard to the effects of these medications on patients. We asked questions in all three domains.
“More likely than not, you’re doing things differently than your colleagues. So why don’t we start talking about it and sharing our experiences to try to come to the best practices?”
Michael Kochis
What did your study find in terms of the usage of these medications?
There were two really big-picture findings. One is that, yes, these medications are being used for adolescents with obesity who are undergoing bariatric surgery. So essentially the cat’s out of the bag, it’s already happening.
And then the second finding is that there’s a lot of uncertainty and variation in the exact practice patterns across institutions. There’s a recognition that we’re doing it this way at our place, and they’re doing it that way at that place. And no one really knows what the right answer or the best answer is. We’re in uncharted territories.
That creates an opportunity for deliberate convening amongst these different groups and data-sharing so we can try to establish best practices. That can be based on consensus regarding what experts think the best approach is or hopefully — in time — an evidence-based approach. But that might take time.
What are the benefits and potential dangers of realizing there’s so much variation?
I think overall, it’s sparking discussion and increasing awareness. A lot of these pediatric bariatric centers have to be really good at what they do. We specifically looked at the larger centers throughout the country, which are often reference points for entire regions.
My hunch is that people come to their practices based on what they think is going to be helpful for their patients, not realizing that other places do it differently. This study highlights that and will hopefully spark a discussion so different providers will start talking with their peers and asking questions.
More likely than not, you’re doing things differently than your colleagues. So why don’t we start talking about it and sharing our experiences to try to come to the best practices?
The problem with this is there might be the recognition that one approach is better than others. If you have variety, the implication is that there might be variations in the quality of care. Once we do have a better understanding of optimal use of these medications in the pre-op, peri-op, and post-op setting, there will be opportunities for standardization of care.
What do we still need to learn?
Above all, there’s a need for more data. I also hope this highlighted an opportunity for different institutions to come together and collaborate. We’re working on both of those things.
Pediatric surgery in general is relatively small; fortunately, a lot of times kids and adolescents don’t need operations as frequently as adults do. So it’s a great space for collaboration and gathering knowledge.
There are a couple collaboratives of pediatric hospitals and surgeon networks throughout the country; we at Mass General are currently working to establish another collaborative specifically focused on pediatric metabolic and bariatric surgery. We’re working on creating databases where we can pool all of our data from our separate institutions — about how we treat these patients before they’re getting surgery, what we do during the surgical context, and then how they do after surgery — to get on the same page about what data we’re collecting and how we can assess it in the long term.
We can ask some really good research questions that we would never be able to get the answers to (with as much level of detail and discernment) if any one of our institutions did that exact same study alone. More efforts like that will be helpful in providing the high-level evidence we need to make informed decisions about the optimal care for patients.
Is there anything that parents should be aware of when considering these medications for their children?
I’m glad you brought that up. One of the findings from the study is that some providers’ practices — in the absence of strict guidelines or criteria — were informed partially by patients or families.
The use of these medications should be a multidisciplinary discussion with the patient’s pediatrician, primary care doctor, obesity medicine physician, and potentially with a surgeon, if that’s applicable.
Every patient has unique circumstances. So I would say to parents that if they see advertisements for this on the news or see these medications on social media, it’s great that they can be informed about what’s out there. But then bring that background knowledge to an informed discussion with your doctors. Understand that just because you heard some celebrities have used them and had certain experiences it does not mean that they are for everybody or should be applied in your circumstance. You can really only discern that based on a comprehensive discussion with your doctors.
‘We have the most motivated people, the best athletes. How far can we take this?’
Videos by Maureen Coyle and James Byard/Harvard Staff
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Seven members of Team USA train at Newell Boat House for 2024 Paralympics in Paris
It is the sound, of all things, that keeps Gemma Wollenschlaeger going. The whisper of the boat slipping through the water meansspeed to her; it means power. Four rowers pulling as one.
“When the boat gets going, there’s a sound that puts you in another dimension. It doesn’t feel like anything else in real life,” Wollenschlaeger said. “It’s a ‘swiiish,’ and it takes a lot to get to that point. It’s an adrenaline rush, a satisfaction rush, and then it disappears and you’re like, ‘Wait, I need to do that again.’”
It’s a good thing Wollenschlaeger wants to do that again because she’s going to have to. The rising senior at Temple University is headed to the 2024 Paralympics in Paris after spending the last seven months rowing on the Charles River out of Harvard’s Newell Boat House. She trained, with four other members of the U.S. Paralympic Rowing Team, under the tutelage of Tom Siddall, assistant coach for Harvard’s men’s heavyweight crew and one of two coaches for the U.S. Paralympic rowing team.
Siddall is coaching the four-person sweep team, made up of Wollenschlaeger; Skylar Dahl, a rising senior at the University of Virginia; Alex Flynn, who’ll be a junior at Tufts University in the fall; Ben Washburne, a 2023 Williams College graduate; and coxswain Emelie Eldracher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student.
The Paralympic double scull, featuring Todd Vogt of Rochester, New York, and Saige Harper of Easthampton, Massachusetts, also trained at Newell, coached by two-time Olympic rower Andrea Thies.
“I’m just interested in seeing how fast we can go,” said Siddall, who rowed at Fairfield University and came to Harvard after coaching at Tufts. “We have the most motivated people, the best athletes. How far can we take this?”
The top disabled athletes from around the world compete every four years in the Paralympic Games, which typically follow the Olympics. This year’s run is Aug. 28-Sept. 8 in Paris.
For the seven members of Team USA training at Harvard this summer, that has meant long days of multiple workouts, building strength and endurance even as they focus on the technique critical in keeping the boats moving forward through the synchronized movements of the crew.
It is the need to maintain technique even when they’re exhausted that makes rowing, to Dahl, both the hardest and most rewarding thing she’s done.
“You are searching for that point where your muscles are screaming, but the race isn’t over, and you have to keep going,” said Dahl, who hails from Minnesota. “It hurts the whole time. There’s a wall, and you just have to go through it. Then there’s this whole other element. You have to work together and match up your form. It’s a constant give-and-take about what is best for the boat, what’s going to move it over the water.”
“It hurts the whole time. There’s a wall, and you just have to go through it. Then there’s this whole other element. You have to work together and match up your form. It’s a constant give-and-take about what is best for the boat, what’s going to move it over the water.”
Skylar Dahl
The two boats qualified for the Paralympics at last summer’s world championships, where each came in second. Crews were finalized in January during a selection week in Florida, after which the rowers began to make their way to Harvard.
Washburne lives in Cambridge, works nearby, and already rowed regularly on the Charles. Wollenschlaeger arrived in January, taking the semester off from Temple and moving to Boston to train with Siddall through the winter. Flynn was also local, rowing for Tufts’ crew in the spring, and managed to squeeze in workouts with Siddall around team obligations.
The full crews came together after the academic year ended in May. Training for the Games began in earnest, Siddall said, after a race in Poland at the beginning of June.
During their weeks at Harvard, the rowers’ days began early, arriving at Newell at 6:30 a.m. and getting on the water by 7. They worked until 9 a.m., then, a couple of days each week, headed to weightlifting sessions. They had time off during the middle of the day and then a second session from late afternoon until early evening.
During that time, Siddall mixed it up, throwing in different training sets, called “pieces,” which included work on technique, hard intervals, short intervals, long hard intervals, and pieces focused on the race’s start and finish.
Paralympic boats are co-ed, adding another variable in getting the crew to mesh as a team. The boats practicing at Harvard this summer are classified as PR3, the Paralympics’ least-disabled category. Each member of Siddall’s crew has clubfoot, a condition where the ankle has no flexibility.
“I went 19 years without meeting someone with clubfoot, and then here I am in a whole boat with clubfoot,” Dahl said. “It’s crazy that we all found this sport, and we all found each other, and we’re all doing this in the same place.”
Rowers received significant support while at Harvard, Siddall said. U.S. rowing provided stipends, which allowed the crew to train full-time. There was a dietitian, catered meals when sessions ran long, and a physical therapist for any training-related injuries.
It was also significant, crew members said, just being welcome at the Newell Boat House, home of Harvard’s storied crew program.
“I am a student at MIT, and we call Harvard the ‘other Cambridge school,’ but it’s such a privilege to be here, to be a part of this historic venue and a culture that you can sense when you enter the boat house,” Eldracher said. “There’s just an energy of excitement as you attack your pieces. There’s an energy of champions here.”
The two teams headed to Italy on Aug. 15, for pre-Games training. Among their goals before heading to France on Thursday is to get accustomed to a new boat, provided by the Italian manufacturer of the one in which they trained at Harvard. The switch eliminates logistical hurdles involved in shipping their fragile, 44-foot training craft across the Atlantic.
When racing starts, the first hurdle is the heats, Siddall said. The top boats advance to the final while those that don’t make it compete in a second race whose top finishers also go to the final. With a second-place showing at the world championships last year, the team is cautiously optimistic about these Paralympics.
But regardless of who comes home with the hardware, they said, the whole experience has already been an unforgettable ride.
“I feel like I’m just grabbing onto the days we have left because I don’t want this summer to end,” Wollenschlaeger said. “It’s just been an awesome experience.”
Availability of vaccine offers opportunity to reduce burden of shingles and possible dementia
BWH Communications
4 min read
A new study has found that an episode of shingles is associated with about a 20 percent higher long-term risk of subjective cognitive decline, one of the earliest noticeable symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
The results of the study, conducted by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are published in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy.
Shingles, medically known as herpes zoster, is a viral infection that often causes a painful rash. Shingles is caused by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chickenpox. After a person has chickenpox, the virus stays in his or her body for the rest of his or her life. Most of the time, our immune system keeps the virus at bay. Years and even decades later, the virus may reactivate as shingles.
Researchers don’t know the mechanisms that link the virus to cognitive health, but there are several possible ways it may contribute to cognitive decline.
Almost all individuals in the U.S. age 50 years and older have been infected with VZV and are therefore at risk for shingles. There’s a growing body of evidence that herpes viruses, including VZV, can influence cognitive decline. Subjective cognitive decline is an individual’s self-perceived experience of worsening or more frequent confusion or memory loss.
Previous studies of shingles and dementia have been conflicting. Some research indicates that shingles increases the risk of dementia, while others indicate there’s no association or a negative association. In recent studies, the shingles vaccine was associated with a reduced risk of dementia.
“Given the growing number of Americans at risk for this painful and often disabling disease and the availability of a very effective vaccine, shingles vaccination could provide a valuable opportunity to reduce the burden of shingles and possibly reduce the burden of subsequent cognitive decline,” said senior author Sharon Curhan of the Channing Division for Network Medicine at BWH.
To learn more about the link between shingles and cognitive decline, Curhan and her team used data from three large, well-characterized studies of men and women over long periods: the Nurses’ Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study 2, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The data included 149,327 participants who completed health status surveys every two years, including questions about shingles episodes and cognitive decline. They compared those who had shingles with those who didn’t.
Curhan designed the study with first author Tian-Shin Yeh, formerly of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers found that a history of shingles was significantly and independently associated with a higher risk — approximately 20 percent higher — of subjective cognitive decline in both women and men. That risk was higher among men who carried the gene APOE4, which is linked to cognitive impairment and dementia. That same association wasn’t present in the women.
Researchers don’t know the mechanisms that link the virus to cognitive health, but there are several possible ways it may contribute to cognitive decline. There is growing evidence linking VZV to vascular disease, called VZV vasculopathy, in which the virus causes damage to blood vessels in the brain or body. Curhan’s group previously found that shingles was associated with higher long-term risk of stroke or heart disease.
Other mechanisms that may explain how the virus could lead to cognitive decline include causing inflammation in the brain, directly damaging nerve and brain cells, and activating other herpes viruses.
The limitations of this research include that it was an observational study, information was based on self-report, and included a mostly white, highly educated population. In future studies, the researchers hope to learn more about preventing shingles and its complications.
“We’re evaluating to see if we can identify risk factors that could be modified to help reduce people’s risk of developing shingles,” Curhan said. “We also want to study whether the shingles vaccine can help reduce the risk of adverse health outcomes from shingles, such as cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline.”
This study was supported by GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals SA Supported Studies Programme Protocol 216148.
His seven-year tenure as Law School dean noted for commitments to academic excellence, innovation, collaboration, and culture of free, open, and respectful discourse
President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced Thursday that John F. Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, has been appointed the next provost of the University. Manning, who has been a professor of law at Harvard Law School (HLS) since 2004 and HLS dean since 2017, has been on leave from that post since March to serve as interim provost.
The search for Manning’s replacement at HLS will launch in September, with John C.P. Goldberg, who was previously deputy dean, continuing to serve as interim dean until the conclusion of the search.
“Since he became interim provost in March, John has done an outstanding job maintaining momentum across a broad portfolio of academic activities while leading efforts to articulate, communicate, and uphold the values of the University,” Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. “John is a widely respected colleague, rigorous scholar, and celebrated teacher who is admired as much for his dedication to Harvard as for his broad and deep intellect.
“Through his efforts to understand more about more parts of our community, he has demonstrated both humility and wisdom, two attributes that will serve him exceedingly well throughout his tenure,” Garber continued. “Most important, he is the right person for the moment in which we find ourselves, motivated by love for and service to the institution that raised his own sights, and eager to make it possible for all members of our University to thrive.”
“John is a widely respected colleague, rigorous scholar, and celebrated teacher who is admired as much for his dedication to Harvard as for his broad and deep intellect.”
President Alan M. Garber
As interim provost, Manning played a central role alongside Garber in advancing several key University-wide initiatives. Earlier this year he led the formation of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group and the Institutional Voice Working Group. Both groups bring together the expertise and leadership of faculty from across the University to examine vital questions – specifically, how to foster open inquiry on campus and when the University should speak on public issues — that affect the way the University fulfills its mission of research, teaching, and learning.
“I love this University, and I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Harvard community at this critical time,” said Manning. “Over the past five months as interim provost, I have gotten to know better the depth and breadth of this University’s academic excellence — in the arts and humanities, in the social sciences, in the sciences, and in our world-class professional Schools. I’m excited about meeting and hearing from colleagues across this great University and learning more about the spectacular work they do. I am also looking forward to working with colleagues to nurture academic excellence, collaboration, open and constructive dialogue, and a sense of belonging in which everyone feels that this is their Harvard and that they can thrive here.”
As provost, Manning will serve as the University’s chief academic officer, working in tandem with academic and administrative leaders to foster collaboration among faculty across all the Schools, advance innovations in teaching and learning, promote academic excellence and the free exchange of ideas, and support the array of offices under the provost’s purview. These include Harvard’s University-wide offices dedicated to advances in learning, faculty development, research, international affairs, technology development, trademark, student affairs, gender equity, and Harvard Library.
Manning will also have responsibility for cultural and artistic units, such as the Harvard University Native American Program, Harvard Art Museums, and the American Repertory Theater. He will also support the scholarship and programs of the University’s 33 interfaculty initiatives, academic collaborations among multiple Schools on shared areas of research. Manning will also support the University’s important work addressing its legacy of slavery, guided by the recommendations and findings of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.
Manning brings many perspectives to his new role — as an alumnus of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, as a professor, as dean of HLS and, most recently, as interim provost. An active University citizen, he has also served on numerous University-wide committees, including the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Committee, and the HarvardX Faculty Committee.
Manning, who first set foot on campus in the fall of 1978, described his enthusiasm and enduring gratitude for his experience as a Harvard College student. “I was a first-generation student, and it felt like I had a lot to learn. I felt nervous, but also determined. I had great teachers and classmates, and every class I took was mind-opening and exciting. Especially coming to Harvard College as a first-gen student, you get to feel the sensation of your life changing in real time. It was amazing.”
“I am … looking forward to working with colleagues to nurture academic excellence, collaboration, open and constructive dialogue, and a sense of belonging in which everyone feels that this is their Harvard and in which everyone can thrive.”
Provost John F. Manning
After graduating summa cum laude in 1982, he attended HLS, earning his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985. He clerked for two judges — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge Robert Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — and served in the U.S. Department of Justice in both the Office of Legal Counsel and in the Solicitor General’s Office.
Before returning to Cambridge in 2004 to join the Harvard Law faculty, Manning was a professor at Columbia Law School for 10 years. A renowned scholar of administrative law, legislation, and federal courts, he was appointed deputy dean at HLS in 2013 and dean in 2017.
During his seven years leading the Law School, Manning focused on several key objectives: continuing to deepen the excellence of HLS’s world class faculty; nurturing a culture of free, open, and respectful discourse; supporting curricular and teaching innovation, including online learning; broadening access to legal education; and deepening the HLS community.
“John Manning has brought great integrity, huge intelligence, real creativity and action, empowerment of others, genuine listening, and a big heart to his leadership first of Harvard Law School and recently to the entire University in his interim provost role,” said Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor and former HLS dean.
Academic excellence and the free exchange of ideas
In the past seven years, Harvard Law School has continued to build its world-class faculty, recruiting outstanding new colleagues across multiple fields, who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship, classroom pedagogy, and clinical education. Manning and his colleagues also launched a number of initiatives to help nurture the free exchange of ideas and a culture of generous listening.
These included building a greater variety of faculty workshops in which colleagues could exchange ideas about important issues in real time, as well as new orientation programming for incoming students on how to have difficult conversations. In addition, the Law School adopted for its classrooms a new principle modeled on the Chatham House Rule to foster classroom conversation and debate — to create room for students to express what they truly think, take risks, try on ideas for size, and make the mistakes that are part of learning. And just last year, the faculty implemented a negotiation and leadership requirement with the objective of having all students engage in an academic offering focused on listening actively and generously to opposing viewpoints.
The launch of a new January Experiential Term for first-year students in 2019 was an early sign that Manning and his colleagues planned to think continuously about how a law school curriculum could best prepare students for legal practice in the 21st century. Through that new program, the Law School launched an array of hands-on courses intended to give students opportunities to explore areas of the law and build practical skills often not taught during the first year of law school.
To better prepare incoming students, Manning and his colleagues also drove the creation of a new, self-paced online course, Zero-L, which premiered in 2018. Taught by Harvard Law faculty, the program was designed to prepare all incoming students to feel ready for law school on day one. Manning, who was the first in his family to graduate from college or attend law school, saw it as a way to give new students, regardless of their backgrounds, “a common baseline of knowledge about the American legal system and about the vocabulary of law.” More recently, Manning and his colleagues spearheaded the creation of Harvard Law School Online, a strategic initiative designed to bring the expertise of the School’s faculty to new learners around the world.
Manning and his colleagues also responded to the changing demands of the legal profession, gathering data through student and alumni surveys, regular curricular focus groups with students, and focus groups with lawyers in the private, public interest, and government sectors. Resulting innovations included a newly instituted legal writing requirement, another in negotiation and leadership, the introduction of a first-year Constitutional Law course to provide foundational knowledge of the nation’s basic charter, and the development of a new Transactional Law Workshop that uses deal simulations to deepen students’ understanding of complex transactions in the global economy.
As dean, Manning also oversaw the creation of five new in-house legal clinics focusing on animal law, LGBTQ+ issues, election law, religious freedom, and ending mass incarceration. With 37 clinics and 11 student practice organizations, HLS students have more opportunities to get hands on experience serving clients in need than at any other school in the nation.
Making legal education accessible to all
Manning worked with colleagues to reduce barriers to legal education. In addition to increasing spending on financial aid grants, Manning announced in February the launch of a new Opportunity Fund, which enables J.D. students with the highest financial need to attend Harvard Law tuition-free for all three years.
Under Manning’s leadership, HLS also repeatedly bolstered the School’s Low Income Protection Plan, or LIPP, which helps J.D. graduates pursue lower-paying, often public interest, jobs by repaying some or all of their student loans based on income and assets. In recent years, the School improved the threshold for full coverage of loan repayments by nearly 50 percent, ensuring that graduates working in qualifying roles earning $70,000 or less annually are eligible to have LIPP cover the full cost of their loan repayments. At the same time, HLS also launched a new Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Manning and his colleagues have also focused on broadening access to law school for people from all backgrounds, primarily reflecting first-generation and less advantaged backgrounds. Last year, the Law School launched Future Leaders in Law, a yearlong pre-law pipeline program co-sponsored by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to help prepare students to apply for admission to law schools around the nation. Two years earlier, the School partnered with the National Education Equity Lab to create Future-L, which introduces high achieving high school students from underserved backgrounds to law and the legal profession. These two initiatives joined an existing pre-law program, TRIALS, a collaboration between HLS, NYU Law School, and the Advantage Testing Foundation that just celebrated its 15th anniversary.
Creating a community where everyone feels they belong
Strengthening the Harvard Law community by making it deeper and more inclusive has been a key objective of Manning’s time as dean. In 2019, the Law School launched HLS Amicus, a new online directory and matching platform for alumni, students, and faculty, to enable community members to connect more easily across backgrounds, interests, aspirations, and generations. The School has also expanded its student mentoring and advising offerings, including several new mentorship programs using the Amicus platform, such as an Alumni Mentorship Program that matches interested graduates with first-year J.D. and LL.M. students. During Manning’s time as dean, the School also funded and encouraged lunches between faculty and students; sponsored School-wide community service weeks for staff; fostered a speaker series to bring together faculty and staff around important topics of the day; and hosted mock classes to enable staff to experience what it is like to learn in a law school classroom.
“John Manning has been a brilliant and indefatigable leader of the Law School,” said Guy-Uriel Emmanuel Charles, Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “He is a person of deep integrity and wisdom. He is also someone who genuinely cares about people.”
Addressing Harvard Law School’s past and looking forward
In 2017, at the opening of the HLS bicentennial observance, Manning helped unveil on the Law School campus a memorial to the enslaved people whose labor helped make possible the founding of the School. And as the new academic year began in 2021, he unveiled a new Law School shield that sought to convey the dynamism, inclusiveness, connectivity, and strength of the HLS community, while underscoring the School’s commitment to truth, law, and justice. The previous shield, which reflected the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., an early donor to Harvard College and subsequently the Law School, had been retired in 2016 by then-Dean Minow with the Corporation’s approval.
Following the release of Harvard’s long awaited report detailing the many ways the University participated in, and profited from, slavery, Manning announced several initiatives that the Law School would undertake, including the commitment to create a meaningful, central convening space and commemorative installation on the HLS campus to pay tribute to Belinda Sutton and other enslaved people from the Royall estate, an academic conference and lecture series designed to advance the understanding of the legacy of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of racial justice, a more formal relationship with and support for the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, and the retirement of the Royall Professorship.
A sense of gratitude
Reflecting on his new role at Harvard, Manning says, “I am grateful every day to be here. Harvard has enabled me as a student, as a teacher, as an administrator to learn and grow and to live a life of professional fulfillment that I could not have imagined as a child. Even on the hardest days, I love the alma mater and am grateful for the opportunity to serve.”
President Garber also acknowledged Goldberg’s work as interim dean of HLS.
“I especially want to thank John C. P. Goldberg, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, for his continued service as interim dean. He is an admired, generous, and respected colleague whose thoughtful counsel continues to enrich the University,” Garber said. “I look forward to commencing a search for a permanent dean in September, and I will be in touch soon with more details.”
Finding lessons on power of federally funded childcare for working mothers
New research by Claudia Goldin takes look at World War II-era Lanham Act
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Story hour at a 1940s-era childcare center in New Britain, Connecticut.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images/via Getty Images
As women continue to fight for gender equity in the workplace, a new paper co-authored by Nobel Prize economist Claudia Goldin on a World War II-era act used to support working mothers reveals what can be done with political will.
As the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper explains, the Lanham Act created and supported both nurseries for preschool-age children and extended-hour services for schoolchildren. “This was a national, practically universal, federally funded preschool program,” said Goldin, the 2023 Noble laureate. “It is, to this day, the only one.” (The well-known Head Start program, she noted, is federally funded but focuses on low-income children and families so is much more limited in scope.)
“I love being an economic historian. I am a detective,” said Nobel Prize-winning study author Claudia Goldin.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Conceived as a way to free additional labor that might be needed for the war effort, many of the so-called “Lanham nurseries” repurposed some Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) nurseries for young children, utilizing an Emergency Relief Appropriation Act that authorized “not less than $6 million” for this purpose. (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt added an additional $400,000 from another emergency fund, with more appropriations approved in 1943, putting the overall federal outlay at nearly $52 million from 1943-46.)
But while the WPA nurseries were designed to help children of low-income and unemployed parents, the Lanham nurseries aimed at helping working mothers with children ages 2 to 11.
In addition to year-round supervision, these nurseries and the extended care also provided education and, at most of the nurseries, nutritionist-devised meals.
“We know that from Gallup polls of the era that practically no one thought that it was a good idea to employ women with preschool children,” said Goldin. “There was a lot of negative sentiment about that.”
But as the war progressed with no end in sight, mothers were viewed as an essential resource to keep many industries going as well as to contribute directly to the war effort while men went off to fight. These efforts included producing supplies as well as munitions or armaments manufacturing.
“The contracts for goods and services increased enormously” as the law went into effect, said Goldin, who analyzed some 191,000 federal contracts from this period.
What Goldin and co-authors Joseph Ferrie of Northwestern University and Claudia Olivetti of Dartmouth College found was that while the act did free up labor, much of its benefit went to women who were already working.
In the wake of the Great Depression, Goldin said, women sought higher-wage jobs at defense contractors and in textile factories of the South, which, at that time, were primarily available to white women.
Women, said Goldin, “were greatly attracted by the sudden increase in wages.”
The act, she said, unquestionably increased the labor force. However, “It was pretty clear that women were going into the labor force, whether they had kids or not, and whether they had preschool children or not,” she said. “Some of the nurseries were set up in 1942, but the vast bulk were set up in 1943 and ’44, and by then a lot of the employment in these places was pretty high.
While the act did free up labor, much of its benefit went to women who were already working.
“We have data on federal contracts by town, and we also have where the Lanham money was going by town for some of the early years,” Goldin said.
Matched up with the 1940 Census, this data shows that the money, which was distributed to 685 towns by 1945, was primarily going to areas where many women had already been working. “We can see that that’s where the Lanham nurseries were opening. Not in the places necessarily with the greatest need, but in the places where women actually had a desire to find additional work.”
While this paper examines “how this program evolved and why it evolved the way it did,” that wasn’t the original impetus of the research, said Goldin.
The Nobel laureate’s original idea was to study the impact of the program on the nursery school children as adults, but the insufficiency of federal records giving exact locations of the nurseries proved challenging.
“We probably have right now the addresses of about half of them.” In the course of that research, however, Goldin and her co-authors realized uncovered information that could be used in the other project.
“I love being an economic historian. I am a detective,” she said.
While noting that the Lanham Act research is ongoing, she continues to discover new insights into the impact of this 1940 legislation. “It was really a very small program,” said Goldin. “But it had a large impact in some of the small towns.”
Houghton Library’s 1949 edition of “The Green Book.”
Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Rare original copy of Jim Crow-era travel guide ‘key document in Black history’
Black travelers often struggled to find hotels, restaurants, and other needed services during the Jim Crow era of segregation. So that they might “travel without embarrassment,” New York City postal carrier Victor H. Green created a tour book in 1936 for African Americans on the road.
“The Negro Motorist Green Book,” its pages filled with addresses of businesses friendly to Black travelers, became an invaluable annual guide during its nearly 30 years of publication. The Green Book was not widely known outside of African American communities, and it faded from view after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations.
There has been a resurgence of interest in the guide in recent decades, owing in part to the growth in academic attention to the history of African Americans in the 20th century as well as the 2018 eponymous feature film and 2019 documentary. Original copies of the book have become hard to find.
“In the context of the 20th and 21st century, when we’re trying to document more deeply the Black experience, this is really an important document for our library.”
Leslie Morris
The Harvard Library acquired in March a 1949 international edition, which includes Canada and Mexico, said Leslie Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library, Harvard’s rare books and manuscripts, literary and performing arts archives.
The purchase is part of an effort to diversify the library collections, said Morris. When Houghton Library was inaugurated in 1942, a travel guide for Black Americans was not considered a collectible item, she said.
“While Harvard may be the largest university in the world, it collected certain things to support teaching and research, but this was not something that anyone thought was important,” said Morris. “But in the context of the 20th and 21st century, when we’re trying to document more deeply the Black experience, this is really an important document for our library. One of our priorities has been to diversify the collection and try to remediate some oversights that our predecessors made.”
While The New York Public Library has the most complete collection of “The Green Book” in the country, original editions are scarce, said Morris.
The library bought the 80-page guide from a Manhattan-based auctioneer for $50,000, which included a buyer’s premium.
It was worth it, Morris said.
“‘The Green Book’ was one of those things that I didn’t think was likely to come up anytime in the near future,” she said. “We work closely with faculty, and Skip Gates has been a wonderful partner. He is not only knowledgeable, but everybody knows him. For both teaching purposes and exhibition purposes, I did feel it was important that we have an example of ‘The Green Book’ because it really is a key document in Black history.”
The 1949 edition includes a chapter dedicated to Massachusetts, listing nearly 50 businesses open to Black travelers in Boston.
“‘The Green Book’ was a lifesaving guide for Black Americans,” said Candacy Taylor, author of “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America” (2020). “It is an important document of the Jim Crow era: a Black Yellow Pages for people to get their hair done, where to buy medicine, spend the night or eat out. It also speaks to the entrepreneurship, resilience, and courage of Black business owners and that of Black travelers, who with their travels helped shape the culture of this country.”
The guide is a “symbol of Jim Crow America” and a “stunning rebuke of it, born out of ingenuity and the relentless quest for freedom,” wrote Gates in his blurb of Taylor’s book, which she worked on while a Hutchins Center fellow in 2017.
The 1949 edition includes a chapter dedicated to Massachusetts, listing nearly 50 businesses open to Black travelers in Boston, including three hotels, nine restaurants, 21 beauty parlors, two barber shops, six tailors, and one night club — Savoy on 410 Massachusetts Ave.
Many of the businesses were located on Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street; among them were restaurants such as Loonie Lee’s, Sunnyside, and Green Candle; and “tourist homes,” informal hotels, with the names of “Mrs. Williams,” “Julia Walters,” and “M. Johnson.”
The book served a clear and necessary purpose in its time, but its editors looked forward to the day when it would no longer be needed.
“There will be a day sometime when this guide will not have to be published,” they wrote. “That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes, we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.”
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How a few Facebook posts brought heat on Ugandan professor
Sylvester Danson Kahyana, Congo activist Amani Matabaro Tom finish terms as Scholars at Risk
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Sylvester Danson Kahyana has written poetry and children’s literature, but what seems to have gotten him in trouble was what he wrote on Facebook. Amani Matabaro Tom is a longtime activist who spoke out on child labor abuses and environmental effects of mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Both are finishing out 10-month stints as Fellows at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy as part of the Scholars at Risk program after facing persecution and threats of physical violence in their home countries for speaking out against their governments and what they viewed as corrupt practices.
“Each one of them became viral … forwarded so many times. I started public debates about governance, about the pandemic and governance about the Ministry of Education, which is what a university professor should do.”
Sylvester Danson Kahyana
Kahyana was something of an accidental activist. He was an associate professor in the Department of Literature at Makerere University in Uganda, with a Ph.D. in English studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. During the pandemic, he began posting critiques about the government’s handling of elements of the crisis.
“I didn’t even write very many, maybe 10 Facebook posts in nine months,” Kahyana said. “Each one of them became viral … forwarded so many times. I started public debates about governance, about the pandemic and governance about the Ministry of Education, which is what a university professor should do.”
The posts were written while Kahyana, a father of six, was living in the U.S. and working as a Fulbright Scholar at Michigan State University. Among the issues he raised was the poor handling of remote learning by Janet Museveni, Uganda’s minister of education and wife of President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986.
“She’s not a teacher,” Kahyana said. “And we’re going to expect her to have any clue on how to manage the studying during the pandemic?
“I returned to Uganda November 2021,” he said. “When I went back, there were a lot of threats on my Facebook: ‘You think you will be in the U.S. forever. You’re coming back, where I’ll be waiting for you,’ and so on. My posts were meant to start debate in a very responsible way. I did not take those threats seriously.”
Other Ugandan writers, however, faced government retribution for their criticisms. Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, a novelist and lawyer, was arrested and tortured in 2021 for his novel “The Greedy Barbarian” — a thinly veiled critique of Museveni — before escaping to Germany.
In 2022, Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan human rights advocate, was also exiled to Germany after serving two jail sentences for her outspoken critiques of Museveni.
Sylvester Danson Kahyana.
Kahyana, a former president of the Uganda branch of the global writers organization PEN, wrote several poems critical of the government in response to what happened to Rukirabashaija, who is also a PEN member.
One night in late April 2022, Kahyana was attacked and robbed by two men armed with a machete. “I thought they were thieves so I gave them my bag,” Kahyana said. “I gave them my phone. I gave them everything. After giving them everything, they cut me.”
Kahyana grew suspicious. He says when he discovered his cellphone service had not been shut off and his Gmail hacked, he began to suspect they had a more nefarious motive.
“Now robbers never do that,” he said. “Robbers just remove the SIM card because they want to sell the gadget.”
Fearing for his life, Kahyana fled to Finland, South Africa. Then Malawi.
“Basically, I was restless, because I knew anytime they could finish me off. Then I applied to the Artist Protection Fund, which is an organization run by the Institute of International Education. I won it, but in that process, I also received an email from Harvard,” he said.
Kahyana arrived on campus in November and has been working on papers about Uganda’s anti-homosexuality laws and transnational repression.
“The anti-homosexuality law is not just about homosexuality; it is actually about using law to control dissidents. It doesn’t matter that I’m not [gay], but the government will have used that declaration to its own purpose, to have me in prison for three weeks, as investigations take place, and so on. And then you have to report every week to the courts of law,” he said.
He added the government still has a grip on what he can and cannot do politically because he still has family in Uganda. He’s currently trying to get his eldest daughter to the U.S. to join him, his wife, and four of their other children.
Kahyana said he has been talking to other local universities about joining their faculties after his time at Harvard ends in September.
Amani Matabaro Tom.
Unlike Kahyana, Tom, a married father of six from the Democratic Republic of Congo, has made a career out of activism.
He is the founding director of Action Kivu and co-founder and executive director of ABFEC, a partnering nonprofit. The two work to raise funds and awareness and support community-based initiatives to help those affected by the ongoing armed conflict in the North and South Kivu provinces of eastern Congo.
He also founded the Congo Peace School Program, which aims to provide students affected by the war with quality education in an effort to keep them from being lured into local militias and mines.
His work with the Enough Project, a shuttered nonprofit that had its roots as a project of the Center for American Progress, focused on uncovering corruption in the export of strategic minerals from Congo.
“It is a region where there is an ongoing humanitarian crisis,” Tom said. “Our research was focusing on the lack of transparency on the strategic minerals supply chain, and our focus was on the three T’s.” Gold and the “three T’s” — tin, tungsten, and tantalum — are used in everything from electronics and cars to medical devices and even household goods. Congo is rich in these minerals, and export has been largely controlled by militias and often corrupt politicians.
“My work over the past years has been to try to show the link between the ongoing armed conflict with illicit exploitation of these minerals,” Tom said. “I see, unfortunately, history repeating itself over and over again.”
“My work over the past years has been to try to show the link between the ongoing armed conflict with illicit exploitation of these minerals. I see, unfortunately, history repeating itself over and over again.”
Amani Matabaro Tom
From the late 1800s into the early 20th century, Congolese rubber exports, which surged to feed a booming automobile industry, were controlled by Belgium, which had colonized the area.
“It’s no longer the automobile industrial revolution. It is now tech industrial revolution,” Tom said.
Tom and his colleagues at the Enough Project have spoken out against child labor abuses, as well as the environmentally damaging impacts of mining. Because of this, Tom says he became a target of threats and violence from unknown sources.
“I became an easy target because I was leading this nonviolent movement,” he said. “There was a time where my house was completely set on fire after an interview denouncing over-militarization of mining areas. I’ve been threatened by text messages, by calling me on the phone with unknown numbers, asking me to step down, asking me if I don’t stop doing the work I’m doing they will kill me, they know where I live. That it doesn’t take them 10 minutes to shoot a bullet in my head. Very, very traumatizing, very challenging, very difficult.”
Like Kahyana, Tom has family he’s left behind. All his children are too old to be eligible for entrance to the United States under his visa except for one son who is 18. His daughters currently live in a conflict zone on Congo while his older son lives in Kenya.
“It is an everyday threat. Even before joining this program we were hiding,” Tom said.
At one point, he said, unknown attackers killed the family dog.
“I am 47 years old. But for the past three decades, I’ve seen nothing done well in my country,” he said. “Right after the Rwandan genocide in 1994 I’ve seen nothing other than war and violence.”
New research suggests having connection to your dog may lower depression, anxiety
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
They are said to be our best friends, and a new study suggests the possibility there may in fact be a mental health dividend for pet owners who feel a real bond with Fido.
Researchers at Harvard’s Nurses’ Health Study exploring conflicting findings on whether pet ownership is good for our mental health have found that having — and loving — a dog (sorry, cat people) is associated with lower symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Schernhammer said the work, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is an initial step to discover connections between ourselves, our physical and mental health, and the pets we keep.
What did you find?
We used several different measures for depression and for anxiety and found overall that there is an inverse association between pet attachment and negative mental health outcomes. That means the more attached you are to your pet, the lower your risk of depression and anxiety.
“The more attached you are to your pet, the lower your risk of depression and anxiety.”
The effect was particularly strong among women who had a history of sexual or physical abuse in childhood, who made up the majority of our study population.
I think those findings were mostly driven by dogs, because the majority of the pets owned in the study were dogs — it was about two-thirds dogs and one-third cats. The association was similar to what we found when restricting the analysis just to dogs, but not as strong.
With cats, there doesn’t seem to be an association between pet attachment and mental health outcomes. There was a smaller number of respondents though, so we cannot rule out that we don’t see anything because there were too few cats in the survey.
I think we all were a bit surprised that there’s such a big difference between dogs and cats. It’ll be interesting to explore this further.
Is this a topic you’ve been studying for some time?
This is part of a bigger study to examine human-animal interaction, specifically with pets. We felt that this is understudied, and there was a great opportunity to explore it in the Nurses’ Health Study cohort. It’s also something that people like to share — it turns out that the nurses in the study were more than willing to provide interesting details about their pets.
Many studies have been done on the effects of pet ownership, but the premise of this study is that it may matter more how much you are attached to the pet than if you simply own a pet. Many people have pets, but not every owner is attached to their pet.
“The premise of this study is that it may matter more how much you are attached to the pet than if you simply own a pet. Many people have pets, but not every owner is attached to their pet.”
Plenty of people don’t enjoy having to walk their dogs in the morning because the dog is the beloved pet of their child, for example. So the goal was to sort out whether attachment is the more important variable that links pets to health outcomes in humans, and then to study mechanisms.
We have completed, to some extent, the first part of this project and are now starting to look at mechanisms that could explain why higher pet attachment could be linked to better mental health outcomes in these cohorts. The primary hypothesis is that this could be mediated by the microbiome and metabolomics.
We are just starting to look at this and the finding — in the paper that we’re discussing — that there’s a big difference between dogs and cats. That was not entirely expected but it’s strong.
Interestingly, in our preliminary metabolomics analysis, we see quite different patterns between cats and dogs. It’ll be interesting to understand whether some of these hypothesized microbiome mechanisms indeed differ by cats and dogs and might explain what we see in this first paper.
That’s interesting. So in Nurses’ Health Study II, which is the cohort that you’re using, there were biological samples taken?
Yes, but this cohort is from a sub-study, the Mind Body Study, conducted about 10 years ago. The goal of that study was to take a closer look at psychosocial factors, which had not been a main focus of the Nurses’ Health Study, which was initiated to study breast cancer risk and lifestyle factors.
The Mind Body Study captured a lot of different aspects of the psychosocial context of participants and one of them was pet attachment, which is usually not assessed. So it gives us a rare opportunity to look at that.
They also provided two samples of blood, urine — pretty much everything — at the beginning of the study and a year later. And, because of its focus on psychosocial aspects, they also oversampled women who had experienced some form of childhood abuse. About three-quarters of the women in this cohort have experienced some form of abuse, be it sexual or physical.
You mentioned a follow-up study on the microbiome as a potential mechanism for these effects. What did you examine? Were there stool samples taken?
“With cats, there doesn’t seem to be an association between pet attachment and mental health outcomes.”
There are stool samples. We have a study — we are trying to get fundingto run additional analyses — the Nurses’ Health Study 3, which is still recruiting and is online-based. We have started querying about pets, because it’s fairly easy with online questionnaires to send questions to the participants.
And we have started to collect stool of the participants and of their pets. That means we have concurrent samples from both the owner and their cat or dog. We want to analyze them to look for specific patterns in the microbiome that have previously been shown in depressed individuals.
Perhaps we will see those patterns diverging between those attached to pet dogs and pet cats, for example, which could provide an explanation for the information for the lower risk of depression. By looking at concurrent owners and their pets’ stool, we can also see whether there’s microbial transfer going on, thereby altering their depression risk.
I had always thought that the positive benefits of pet ownership were due to companionship and the affection they give, but it all might boil down to physical, biological reasons?
Yes, we want to understand whether there are some biological mechanisms that we can explore. It makes sense, because even for some of the psychosocial variables in humans that have been linked with health outcomes, usually when you start looking they also have an impact on biology.
Stress can alter your susceptibility to glucose intake, for example. So, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising, even if this is driven primarily by psychosocial factors, that those translate into something more mechanistic. That’s something very tangible and could explain also why, for instance, this might differ for cats, asmost cats are indoor cats. That’s part of what we will look at too, whether there’s big differences between the microbes that we find in the dogs’ feces versus the cats’ feces.
Is the take-home message that everyone should get a dog? The cat owners might not like that.
Moreover, the cats might not like it. An important message is that in our subgroup of women who were abused, these findings were particularly strong. Maybe in the future, we can define more subgroups who might particularly benefit from having a pet. We shouldn’t prescribe a pet to somebody who doesn’t like animals, but if somebody wants a pet and can accommodate it in their living environment, then this might be one good way to deal with depression-related symptoms.
This also helps us understand better this subgroup of women who suffered childhood abuse. They were the vast majority in our sample, and I think that’s an important point to make. I do hope that there’s going to be more well-done studies that illuminate this.
It’s an interesting potential way to do something about mental health in humans and at the same time, increase physical activity and alter other aspects of our lives that are affected by pets. We’re just starting to understand the benefits of pets, and this may be one important step.
Research suggests power, influence of watching behavior of others
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Watching how others behave is one of the primary ways people learn social cues and appropriate behaviors. But might that also be a way biases are spread and perpetuated?
A recent psychology study in Science Advances aims to understand how prejudice might be passed along this way and how that contributes to societal-level inequality.
“Transmission of social bias through observational learning” was a collaboration between Harvard, the University of Amsterdam, and the Karolinska Institute. Researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants observed people who are aware of the stereotypes (demonstrators) and members of stereotyped groups (targets).
“There’s something about watching the choice transpire that is then inculcating in observers an inference about the chosen person despite there being no rational evidence for that person’s generosity,” said Mina Cikara, professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study, which involved how subjects select players in a money-sharing game.
In the first two experiments, participants were asked to observe interactions in a money-sharing exercise between a demonstrator and players from two social groups, which were given descriptions aligning with positive or negative stereotypes of white and Black Americans. The demonstrator picked one of the players to interact with, who then responded by sharing or not sharing a reward. On average, the participants showed a preference for those of the positively stereotyped group.
Participants who observed these interactions without knowledge of the stereotypes driving demonstrators’ choices were then asked to make their own choices. They tended to exhibit the group bias expressed by demonstrators.
“We found that people can form prejudice by observing the interactions of others, specifically by observing the actions of a prejudiced actor toward members of separate social groups,” explained lead co-author David Schultner, a postdoc in the lab of co-author and principal researcher Björn Lindström at Karolinska Institute. “After observing such biased intergroup interactions, observers then in turn expressed a similar bias themselves.”
The study’s senior co-author David Amodio and lead co-author David Schultner.
When researchers asked participants to explain their decisions, they pointed to perceived differences over reward feedback between the two groups that was inaccurate.
“It’s important to note though, that observers were sensitive both to individuals’ history of giving rewards and their group membership,” cautioned Cikara. “Participants paid quite a bit of attention to what they had learned about individual actors when they were making their own selection. It wasn’t just that they were copying prejudice completely ignoring the cost to their own outcomes or self-interests.”
A control experiment administered in study three was particularly enlightening, the authors noted. For this experiment, participants observed interactions involving actors who displayed more overt bias toward players in a bid to make it easier for observers to pick up on the prejudice and potentially adjust their own behavior. Results, however, still reflected the bias seen before.
Participants were given additional information about chosen and unchosen players during the fourth study. However, this failed to change preconceived beliefs these participants had for the two social groups.
“It blew my mind that the transmission still persisted, because it just made so clear how important the choosing rather than the outcome was for this process,” Cikara said.
The research team then introduced a computer actor making random choices in the fifth study to discover whether having a nonhuman demonstrator made a difference. This might prevent observers from thinking that a human demonstrator knew something about the targets, the psychologists believed.
What they found was virtually no difference between those following human actions and those following a computer. “It’s not 100 percent clear why people acted the way they did,” Schultner said. “It could be that people anthropomorphize the computer [or] … that people assumed this was actually a purposeful robot.”
“The connection to AI was serendipitous because that’s something we care about in other studies: how prejudice and stereotypes work their way into artificial intelligence and are recapitulated back to users, which then lead users to act, often unwittingly, in ways that reinforce those prejudices,” added senior co-author David Amodio, professor of social psychology at the University of Amsterdam.
So, what does this mean for the real world? Cikara urged caution about what the research could mean outside of the confines of the highly controlled lab experiments the team conducted but noted it could lead to important inquiries into social media.
“Our broader goal is to understand the psychological mechanisms through which societal prejudices and stereotypes get inside the heads of individuals and affect their behavior,” Amodio said. “This new work looks at what happens next — once a bias forms in an individual’s head, how does it get back out into the community from which it can begin to influence society more broadly.”
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Millions of people play Wordle, the popular online game in which players must guess a five-letter word in six tries. We asked researcher Nadine Gaab, associate professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, about the game’s possible benefits on young people’s brains. Gaab’s work is at the intersection of developmental psychology, learning sciences, and cognitive neuroscience.
People wonder if Wordle makes young people or adults smarter, but I don’t think playing the game has much to do with your general cognitive abilities. If you’re good at it, it may be because of your reading abilities, spelling abilities, recognizing spelling patterns, and memorizing word combinations. But what I can tell you is pure speculation because to my knowledge no one has looked at this. There are many literacy games such as Scrabble, crossword puzzles, and so on, that can be beneficial for both children and adults in general. For young children, it’s good to engage them with letters and letter combinations, or anything that’s related to reading, the earlier the better.
“For young children, it’s good to engage them with letters and letter combinations, or anything that’s related to reading, the earlier the better.”
I have three young children, and at least one of them is really into Wordle. I play it, too. People like it because it’s satisfying and gives you fast feedback. If you’re drawn to play these kinds of games and you have fun doing it, it’s fine as long as you’re not spending hours a day doing it and neglecting other aspects of your life. Overall, educational games are a good way of engaging a child’s attention and having positive emotions while adding educational value. Any extracurricular engagement — sports, recreational games, chess, reading books, etc. — has been shown to be beneficial for the overall development of a child. There have been studies looking at the impact of martial arts, chess, or physical activity on kids, and the research didn’t find that one activity is better than others. If a child is positively engaged, and the activity has a social component and evokes positive emotions, it’s a good thing.
In general, the brain gets activated from playing all types of games. It all depends on the nature of the game more than whether it’s online or on a board. When we play Wordle, we can speculate that at least the four key areas in the brain that are involved in reading get activated. All these areas are in the brain’s left hemisphere; one is the visual word form area, which French scholar Stanislas Dehaene calls the brain’s letterbox. This area, located in the back part of the brain in the left hemisphere, is probably engaged when people are playing Wordle because you see letters and you recognize words. Other areas that get activated are the oral language areas and the higher order areas of the brain (especially the inferior frontal lobe) often nicknamed the CEO of the reading brain, which helps with integrating everything into a bigger picture by making sense of things you read or hear. I would hypothesize that probably all these areas are somewhat involved in playing Wordle, but to be honest, I don’t think that this will be much different from any other letter game, or any other letter activity kids do in a kindergarten classroom or second-grade classroom. Those activities have reading, oral language, and memory components, and they also have what we call orthographic mapping because if you’re guessing words, you must retrieve words that fit a combination. People who are good spellers and have both good orthographic mapping and spelling abilities are probably better at the game than people whose skills are not as pronounced as others.
I would say that playing Wordle or any word game is good, but it doesn’t mean that if you play word games at home and you read every day that will automatically lead [your child] to be a superior reader or prevent reading disabilities. Learning to read requires several skills and develops over a very long period. A study we did in my lab shows that brain areas foundational for both language and reading development start developing as early as in utero. The quality of early education also plays a role. Wordle can be one of many of activities you play with your kids, but parents shouldn’t think it’s going to turn their kids into superior readers. My recommendation is to read to your child every day and start playing fun letter games early on. Our lab did several studies showing that home literacy is correlated with brain development, especially for the reading-related areas.
We often forget the mental health component of early childhood. It’s good to remember that if a child is happy and engaged in doing something that has educational value, the best thing is to let them do what they’re doing. If every morning you pull your child away from their wonderful outside play or whatever activity they’re engaged in, and say, “We have to do the word of the day because it’s good for your brain development or your reading development,” that is a mistake. Games are beneficial, especially if kids don’t see them as a chore.
New research suggests those with less healthy lifestyles may get highest benefit from regular use
MGB Communications
4 min read
Regular aspirin may help lower risk of colorectal cancer in people with greater lifestyle-related risk factors for the disease, according to a study led by researchers at Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham.
The study, which was published in JAMA Oncology, showed that among the more than 100,000 men and women followed for 30 years, those with less-healthy lifestyles had benefited the most from regular aspirin use.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force previously recommended daily low-dose aspirin to prevent cardiovascular events and colorectal cancer in adults ages 50 to 59, who are at notable risk for cardiovascular disease. This group is also the highest-risk age group for colorectal cancer. In 2022, the task force focused the recommendation only on aspirin to prevent CVD, removing CRC —and calling for more research — because the latest evidence on the benefits and harms of taking aspirin specifically to prevent CRC was unclear.
For the study, researchers analyzed the health data from 107,655 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. They compared the colorectal cancer rates in those who took aspirin regularly with those who did not take aspirin regularly. Regular aspirin use was defined as either two or more standard-dose (325 mg) tablets per week or daily low-dose (81 mg) aspirin.
Study participants were followed starting from an average age of 49.4 years. Those who regularly took aspirin had a colorectal cancer 10-year cumulative incidence of 1.98 percent, compared with 2.95 percent among those who did not take aspirin.
“Based on prior studies, the best evidence supports daily low-dose (81 mg) aspirin for prevention.”
Daniel Sikavi
“We sought to identify individuals who are more likely to benefit from aspirin to facilitate more personalized prevention strategies,” said co-senior author Andrew Chan, director of epidemiology for the Mass General Cancer Center and gastroenterology director of the Center for Young Adult Colorectal Cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital. Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., according to the National Cancer Institute.
The benefit of aspirin was largest among those with the unhealthiest lifestyles. Those with the least-healthy lifestyle scores had a 3.4 percent chance of getting colorectal cancer if they did not take regular aspirin and a 2.12 percent chance of getting colorectal cancer if they took aspirin regularly. Bycontrast, in those with the healthiest lifestyle scores, the colorectal cancer rates were 1.5 percent in regular aspirin-taking group and 1.6 percent in the non-regular aspirin group. This means that in the least-healthy group, treating 78 patients with aspirin would prevent one case of colorectal cancer over a 10-year period, while it would take treating 909 patients to prevent one case for the healthiest group. Lifestyle scores were calculated based on body mass index, frequency of cigarette and alcohol use, physical activity, and adherence to a high-quality diet.
“Our results show that aspirin can proportionally lower the markedly elevated risk in those with multiple risk factors for colorectal cancer,” said Daniel Sikavi, lead author of the paper and a gastroenterologist at MGH. “In contrast, those with a healthier lifestyle have a lower baseline risk of colorectal cancer, and, therefore, their benefit from aspirin was still evident, albeit less pronounced.”
One outcome of the study could be that “healthcare providers might more strongly consider recommending aspirin to patients who have less-healthy lifestyles,” said co-senior author Long H. Nguyen, a physician investigator in the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit and Division of Gastroenterology at MGH and a Chen Institute Department of Medicine Transformative Scholar at MGH.
While the study included those who took standard-dose aspirin two times a week in the regular-aspirin using category, Sikavi noted that “based on prior studies, the best evidence supports daily low-dose (81 mg) aspirin for prevention.”
Previous studies have found evidence to suggest aspirin can reduce the production of pro-inflammatory proteins, known as prostaglandins, that can promote the development of cancer. Aspirin may also block signaling pathways that cause cells to grow out of control, influence the immune response against cancer cells, and block the development of blood vessels that supply nutrients to cancer cells. “Aspirin likely prevents colorectal cancer through multiple mechanisms,” Chan said.
The study did not assess potential side effects of daily aspirin use, such as bleeding. In addition, while the study tried to control for a wide range of risk factors for colorectal cancer, in comparing non-aspirin and aspirin-taking groups with the same level of risk factors, because this was an observational study, it is possible there may have been additional factors that influenced the findings.
Disclosures: Chan reported receiving personal fees from Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer Inc., and Freenome outside the submitted work.
The research was supported by grants from the Nurses’ Health study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study from the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society.
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Research suggests encouragement toward humanities appears to be very influential for daughters
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Women have been underrepresented in science and technology fields, and new research suggests a somewhat surprising possible contributing factor: the influence of moms. A recent paper by Michela Carlana, Harvard Kennedy School assistant professor of public policy, and Lucia Corno, an economics professor from Cattolica University in Italy, studied 2,000 Italian students — ages 11 to 14 years old — to quantify the role parents play in nudging their sons and daughters toward either STEM fields or the humanities. The Gazette spoke with Carlana about the paper. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your paper looks at the role parents might play in helping steer children toward academic paths. What did you find?
Parents play a role in shaping educational choices of children. In particular, mothers have the strongest effect on their daughters in pushing them away from STEM fields and into humanistic fields.
It’s not mothers in general. The gap is largely driven by those mothers who explicitly recommend a humanistic field who tend to push girls away from STEM. Interestingly, we did see a positive effect of mothers suggesting STEM fields, but it’s very small, not statistically significant.
What about the impact of fathers on their sons?
Photo courtesy of Michela Carlana
There is a similar effect for fathers who are in STEM fields pushing boys to choose STEM fields, but it’s not as strong as the connection between mothers pushing their daughters toward the humanities.
Can you tell us a bit about your testing methods?
We used a randomized control trial: In one group of mixed male and female students we asked students to choose their field of study. Another group was encouraged to think about their mom’s suggestions before choosing their field of study. And one was encouraged to think about their dad’s suggestions before choosing the field of study.
This is how we see that even in a low-stakes environment, just like thinking about what your mom or your dad would recommend affects the choices of these students.
Is the influence of parents due to them encouraging their children to enter these different fields or is it just the parents themselves are modeling the gap that already exists?
We can’t distinguish the two. But we do see that even for a child with similar abilities in STEM and humanities, mothers are systematically more likely to advise their daughters into humanity fields compared to their sons.
Overall, we see that dads are way more likely to recommend STEM compared to mothers. Even within the same family with similarly abled children, one is pushed more toward STEM because of his gender. Likely, some of these differences are capturing stereotypes in broader society.
When students were asked to think about what their parents would recommend, you discovered that they were very accurate in predicting their parents’ preferences. What does that tell us about the cues kids pick up on from their parents?
To be honest, we were surprised. We didn’t know how much kids would know about the recommendation of their parents. We surveyed both the parents and their kids so we could match their actual responses to their perception.
The kids were pretty accurate in knowing what their parents thought. So maybe parents are talking about their preferences, but even in daily interactions, when helping with homework, when the kids are thinking about their educational path after middle school, these messages are being received.
In Italy, we have a very segregated system for a STEM track versus a humanistic track. You will be in different schools based on your decision, so it’s very high stakes and will strongly affect your probability of going to college.
Students choose that track at 14 years old. It’s not like in the U.S. where you go to college and then you’re free to explore; in Italy, you’re choosing very early on in life. Because of this, I think there are lots of discussions with parents and their kids about their future. If we ask the kids, almost half say that they’re not sure about what they want to do.
But still, they may pick up informally what their parents do, or friends of their parents do. Kids pick up all this information early on, even in the types of toys we expose them to since early childhood, the “right” toy for a boy or girl. In the U.S., there has been more awareness in recent years. But around the world, I think there are still a lot of deeply held stereotypes.
“The kids were pretty accurate in knowing what their parents thought. So maybe parents are talking about their preferences, but even in daily interactions … these messages are being received.”
Did you find that kids feared disappointing their parents, based on their choices?
In most cases, we told students we were not going to reveal to their parents what they said. But in some, we told them that we were going to tell their parents their decision. And we saw that the results were a bit less dramatic, but the same overall.
My takeaway from this is that they may be concerned about their parents’ opinion, but even if the parents don’t know, there are still deeply ingrained stereotypes that affect their choices, regardless of whether their parents are aware.
Another part of the study that was interesting was that it asked students how confident they felt pursuing different fields, as opposed to what fields they wanted to pursue. Why did you focus on confidence levels rather than preference?
We did this because other research shows the importance of confidence in a field of study. Studies on the implicit bias of teachers show that when a girl gets exposed to a teacher with stronger implicit association — associating a boy with a scientific field — the girls develop lower self-confidence. Not only do they have lower ability by the end of the exposure, but also they believe they are less good in math as a consequence of the exposure to stereotypes.
Now, compare a teacher they only see in school to a parent who has a very deep influence since the first days of life. That’s part of the reasoning in thinking about how the confidence of the students could be shaped by their parents.
But with parents, you can’t really have that randomized exposure, so we were trying to create some causality in having students think about the preferences of their mom or dad.
The study took place in Italy. Do you think your results are unique to Italy? Or might you see the same tendencies elsewhere in the world?
I think it’s very widespread and there have been papers replicating a version of these findings on the role of gender bias in other countries. Italy is by far not an exception, unfortunately.
Was there anything about the study that surprised you?
It was extremely shocking that even a very simple intervention, like thinking for a few minutes [about what their parents want], could have such a deep impact on the choice of children, and that it affected the fields they believe they are better at.
How do we help parents understand they have deep impacts on the choice of the field of study of their own children? We want to increase the awareness of parents, and I’m thinking with my co-author about what to do as a next step.
We have a small-scale pilot study with around 200 parents in which we showed them the results of this research. And they were all shocked and were like, “Oh, now I need to be very careful when I talk with my daughter because even if I don’t explicitly say things, they are picking up what we associate between gender and field of study.”
For me, the next step in the research is thinking about how we can solve this deep problem. We observe gender gaps in choice all over the world. We may be more careful in hiding our stereotypes, but these things are so deeply ingrained that evidence shows that thinking is still present. We have a long way to go.
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How to help urban young people progress? Nurture hope.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Youth development specialist promotes holistic approach to healing, growth of individuals, communities amid poverty, drugs, trauma
A series focused on the personal side of Harvard research and teaching.
During his sophomore year at San Diego State University, Shawn Ginwright worked at a middle school. He befriended and mentored a student there named Michael, and on the day when the two were to visit Ginwright’s college, Michael didn’t show up. He had been killed in the driveway of his apartment building. He was 15 years old.
The young man’s death stunned all those around him, including Ginwright, who began to see how much trauma and hopelessness Black youth face amid the poverty and crime that plague many urban neighborhoods. He felt that he’d found his calling.
“What happened to Michael shaped how I thought about my career and how I wanted to spend my life,” said Ginwright, Jerome T. Murphy Professor of the Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “I realized that it wasn’t just the issues of poverty and the influx of drugs, but that young people were losing hope.”
Ginwright went on to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and become a scholar of youth development and social and emotional learning. With his wife, Nedra, he launched a summer camp in San Diego in 1989 for Black youth to offer resources for healing and growth, and later, he founded a nonprofit in Oakland, California, to empower marginalized youth.
“I realized that it wasn’t only Michael, that there were thousands and thousands of Black young people who were losing hope, had no vision of their lives for the future, and no avenue or pathway to achieve it, except for drugs and so forth.”
Shawn Ginwright
“I realized that it wasn’t only Michael, that there were thousands and thousands of Black young people who were losing hope, had no vision of their lives for the future, and no avenue or pathway to achieve it, except for drugs and so forth,” said Ginwright. “My work has tried to understand both the conditions and secondly, the solutions for young people to have pathways out of misery and hopelessness.”
Ginwright has written four books on Black youth development, youth activism, and urban education. He is known for his theories of radical healing and healing-centered pedagogy, which embrace a holistic approach to addressing the challenges faced by American youth. His ideas also serve as a rebuttal to programs that focus on prevention through discipline and fear.
“Radical healing was a response to the dearth of programmatic ways of thinking about Black youth and to the belief that Black and marginalized youth are problems rather than possibilities,” said Ginwright. “It also came from the idea that you must understand what’s going on in young people’s lives and how they experience trauma. Some youths are not just thinking about suspensions or dropping out of school; they’re worried about being shot or killed.”
Ginwright’s approach seeks to overcome the limitations of a trauma-informed focus in youth development programs. His thinking sprang from a conversation he had with a young man who was participating in an initiative he was running in Oakland in the early 2000s.
“This young man said to me, ‘I don’t like to always talk about the worst thing that ever happened to me; I want to talk about my dreams and hopes,’” said Ginwright. “That made me think about the gaps in trauma-informed approaches because naming somebody a trauma victim does not acknowledge their assets. You can be wounded but still have assets, dreams and hopes. Healing-centered engagement involves a more holistic way to support young people who experience trauma.”
“You can be wounded but still have assets, dreams and hopes. Healing-centered engagement involves a more holistic way to support young people who experience trauma.”
Shawn Ginwright
Around that time, Ginwright also experienced something of a personal crisis as he was dealing with the pressures of pursuing a doctorate, raising money for youth programs, and caring for his young family.
“I was so stressed, and one night I just woke up crying, uncontrollably sobbing,” he said. “I shared that with the young people one Saturday morning, and it allowed them to see me as a human being. Part of our journey working with young people is how we must be human with one another.”
Through his work, rooted in more than 30 years of experience, Ginwright hopes to both broaden the concept of behavioral and mental health and shift the approach that considers trauma episodic and only experienced by individuals. Trauma can be also environmental, said Ginwright, and healing needs to happen at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels.
“Behavioral and mental health is also the fact that young people may have shame because their mother uses drugs, or they’re not sure where they’ll be living next week,” said Ginwright. “It’s racism and discrimination. The fact that young Black people walk into a store and are followed around also affects their mental health.”
He noted that “part of what I’m trying to get people to understand is that we have to widen our understanding of what creates trauma to come up with responses that are holistic because while we need to treat individuals, the entire neighborhood, the entire ZIP code is experiencing trauma.”
Christina Villarreal is a lecturer at the Ed School who specializes in ethnic studies in education, teacher education, and trauma and healing. She says that Ginwright, who was her master’s thesis adviser at San Francisco State University and a member of her doctoral dissertation committee at Columbia, has helped bring about change in the field.
“He is somebody who has pushed against pathology, which happens a lot in our field — a tendency to focus on the problem rather than solutions,” said Villarreal.
“I’d say that at least over 10 years that I’ve known him, because of his work and research I’ve seen so many people move toward thinking differently about how we approach trauma, especially in schools, specifically that young people are more than the trauma that they experience.”
Christina Villarreal
“I’d say that at least over 10 years that I’ve known him, because of his work and research I’ve seen so many people move toward thinking differently about how we approach trauma, especially in schools, specifically that young people are more than the trauma that they experience.”
Working with young people to help them heal from trauma requires imagination, said Ginwright, who would like to see behavioral and mental health conversations taking place in basketball courts, beauty salons, or barber shops.
“Young people experience all kinds of trauma, and they have no way to talk about it,” said Ginwright. “When we created our first camp in San Diego, we were overwhelmed by the amount of sorrow, hopelessness, joy, and beauty that these young people brought in.”
He also noted that transforming the lives of individual young people pays an additional dividend: It helps change entire communities.
“I changed listening to their stories year after year after year, and [it] gave me a sense of compassion, empathy and joy,” said Ginwright. “Because when you see young people who have experienced trauma and still desire joy and want to be embraced and be hugged, that shifts you. What I’ve learned is that it’s not just what we do for young people, but it’s also what they do for us. There’s a relationship between our own healing and the healing of young people.”
Faster ‘in a dish’ model may speed up treatment for Parkinson’s
Could result in personalized models to test diagnostic and treatment strategies
Kira Sampson
BWH Communications
5 min read
A new model that allows scientists to rapidly create Parkinson’s disease in a petri dish using stem cells could provide personalized diagnostic and treatment methods, according to researchers at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Existing “Parkinson’s in a dish” models can effectively transform stem cells into brain cells, but not quickly enough to study patient-specific cellular pathologies to guide tailored treatment strategies. This is important because patients with Parkinson’s disease are diverse and a one-size-fits-all treatment strategy may not work for some patients. The Brigham research team’s technology not only enables the transformation from stem cells to brain cells to occur reproducibly within weeks instead of months, but also allows researchers to develop models that reflect the diverse protein misfolding pathologies that can occur in the brain in that timeframe.
Existing “Parkinson’s in a dish” models can effectively transform stem cells into brain cells, but not quickly enough to … guide tailored treatment strategies.
“We sought to assess how quickly we could make human brain cells in the lab that give us a window into key processes occurring in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and related disorders like multiple system atrophy and Lewy body dementia,” said senior author Vikram Khurana, chief of the Movement Disorders Division at BWH and principal investigator within the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at BWH. “And, unlike previous models, we wanted to do this in a short enough timeframe for these models to be useful for high-throughput genetic and drug screens and easy enough for many labs to use across academia and industry.”
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive and degenerative brain condition. Individuals with the disease often struggle with slowed movement, tremors, muscle stiffness, and speech impairment, among other health complications. PD, along with other neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, causes protein build-up in neurons, leading to protein misfolding and impaired cell function. Current PD therapies can alleviate some symptoms but do not address the root cause of the protein misfolding.
“The problem is that the way protein clusters form in PD looks different in different patients, and even in different brain cells of the same patient,” said Khurana. “This begs the question: How do we model this complexity in the dish? And how do we do it fast enough for it to be practical for diagnostics and drug discovery?”
To create this model, Khurana’s lab used special delivery molecules called PiggyBac vectors to introduce specific cellular instructions, known as transcription factors, to quickly turn stem cells into different types of brain cells. They then introduced aggregation-prone proteins like alpha-synuclein, which is central to the formation of protein clusters in PD and related disorders, in nerve cells. Using CRISPR/Cas9 and other screening systems, they identified diverse types of inclusions forming in the cells, some of them protective and some of them toxic. To prove relevance to disease, they used their stem-cell models to discover similar inclusions in actual brains from deceased patients. The work enables new approaches for classifying protein pathologies in patients and determining which of these pathologies might be the best drug targets.
While marking progress, the model has several limitations researchers aim to address. For one, it currently generates immature neurons. The researchers aim to replicate this model with mature neurons to model the effects of aging on the protein aggregates that form. While the new system can rapidly create both neurons and key inflammatory “glial” cells in the brain, the current paper only examines these cells individually. The team is now combining these cells to study the inflammatory responses to the protein aggregation process that might be important for PD progression.
The two lead authors on the study, both research fellows in the Department of Neurology at BWH, commented on the clinical applications already underway in the lab.
“In one key application, we are utilizing this technology to identify candidate radiotracer molecules to help us visualize alpha-synuclein aggregation pathologies in the brains of living patients we see in the clinic,” said co-first author Alain Ndayisaba.
“This technology will pave the way for rapidly developing ‘personalized stem cell models’ from individual patients. These models are already being used to efficiently test new diagnostic and treatment strategies ‘in a dish’ before jumping into clinical trials so we target the right drug to the right patient,” said co-first author Isabel Lam.
Disclosures: Khurana is a co-founder of and senior adviser to DaCapo Brainscience and Yumanity Therapeutics, companies focused on CNS diseases. Co-authors Chee-Yeun Chung and Xin Jiang contributed to this work as employees of Yumanity Therapeutics. Toru Ichihashi and Yasujiro Kiyota contributed to this work as employees of Nikon Corp. Lam, Ndayisaba, Jackson Sandoe, and Khurana are inventors on a patent application filed by Brigham and Women’s Hospital related to the induced inclusion iPSC models.
Funding was provided by National Institutes of Health (NIH), Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), Michael J. Fox Foundation, New York Stem Cell Foundation, Multiple System Atrophy Coalition, and private donors.
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How did life begin on Earth? A lightning strike of an idea.
Yahya Chaudhry
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Researchers mimic early conditions on barren planet to test hypothesis of ancient electrochemistry
About four billion years ago, Earth resembled the set of a summer sci-fi blockbuster. The planet’s surface was a harsh and barren landscape, recovering from hellish asteroid strikes, teeming with volcanic eruptions, and lacking enough nutrients to sustain even the simplest forms of life.
The atmosphere was composed predominantly of inert gases like nitrogen and carbon dioxide, meaning they did not easily engage in chemical reactions necessary to form the complex organic molecules that are the building blocks of life. Scientists have long sought to discover the key factors that enabled the planet’s chemistry to change enough to form and sustain life.
Now, new research zeroes in on how lightning strikes may have served as a vital spark, transforming the atmosphere of early Earth into a hotbed of chemical activity. In the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of Harvard scientists identified lightning-induced plasma electrochemistry as a potential source of reactive carbon and nitrogen compounds necessary for the emergence and survival of early life.
“The origin of life is one of the great unanswered questions facing chemistry,” said George M. Whitesides, senior author and the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. How the fundamental building blocks of “nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites emerged spontaneously remains unanswered.”
One of the most popular answers to this question is summarized in the so-called RNA World hypothesis, Whitesides said. That is the idea that available forms of the elements, such as water, soluble electrolytes, and common gases, formed the first biomolecules. In their study, the researchers found that lightning could provide accessible forms of nitrogen and carbon that led to the emergence and survival of biomolecules.
A plasma vessel used to mimic cloud-to-ground lightning and its resulting electrochemical reactions. The setup uses two electrodes, with one in the gas phase and the other submerged in water enriched with inorganic salts.
Credit: Haihui Joy Jiang
Researchers designed a plasma electrochemical setup that allowed them to mimic conditions of the early Earth and study the role lightning strikes might have had on its chemistry. They were able to generate high-energy sparks between gas and liquid phases — akin to the cloud-to-ground lightning strikes that would have been common billions of years ago.
The scientists discovered that their simulated lightning strikes could transform stable gases like carbon dioxide and nitrogen into highly reactive compounds. They found that carbon dioxide could be reduced to carbon monoxide and formic acid, while nitrogen could be converted into nitrate, nitrite, and ammonium ions.
These reactions occurred most efficiently at the interfaces between gas, liquid, and solid phases — regions where lightning strikes would naturally concentrate these products. This suggests that lightning strikes could have locally generated high concentrations of these vital molecules, providing diverse raw materials for the earliest forms of life to develop and thrive.
“Given what we’ve shown about interfacial lightning strikes, we are introducing different subsets of molecules, different concentrations, and different plausible pathways to life in the origin of life community,” said Thomas C. Underwood, co-lead author and Whitesides Lab postdoctoral fellow. “As opposed to saying that there’s one mechanism to create chemically reactive molecules and one key intermediate, we suggest that there is likely more than one reactive molecule that might have contributed to the pathway to life.”
The findings align with previous research suggesting that other energy sources, such as ultraviolet radiation, deep-sea vents, volcanoes, and asteroid impacts, could have also contributed to the formation of biologically relevant molecules. However, the unique advantage of cloud-to-ground lightning is its ability to drive high-voltage electrochemistry across different interfaces, connecting the atmosphere, oceans, and land.
The research adds a significant piece to the puzzle of life’s origins. By demonstrating how lightning could have contributed to the availability of essential nutrients, the study opens new avenues for understanding the chemical pathways that led to the emergence of life on Earth. As the research team continues to explore these reactions, they hope to uncover more about the early conditions that made life possible and to improve modern applications.
“Building on our work, we are now experimentally looking at how plasma electrochemical reactions may influence nitrogen isotopes in products, which has a potential geological relevance,” said co-lead author Haihui Joy Jiang, a former Whitesides lab postdoctoral fellow. “We are also interested in this research from an energy-efficiency and environmentally friendly perspective on chemical production. We are studying plasma as a tool to develop new methods of making chemicals and to drive green chemical processes, such as producing fertilizer used today.”
Harvard co-authors included Professor Dimitar D. Sasselov in the Department of Astronomy and Professor James G. Anderson in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The study not only sheds light on the past but also has implications for the search for life on other planets. Processes the researchers described could potentially contribute to the emergence of life beyond Earth.
“Lightning has been observed on Jupiter and Saturn; plasmas and plasma-induced chemistry can exist beyond our solar system,” Jiang said. “Moving forward, our setup is useful for mimicking environmental conditions of different planets, as well as exploring reaction pathways triggered by lightning and its analogs.”
Researchers devise way to boost CAR T-cell therapy to potentially ensure it doesn’t fade prematurely
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have figured out how to give a timely boost to a revolutionary treatment that enlists immune cells in the anticancer fight, potentially bypassing a flaw that allows the therapy to fade before all diseased cells are gone.
The researchers, Mohammad Rashidian, assistant professor of cancer immunology at Dana-Farber and radiology at HMS, postdoctoral fellow Taha Rakhshandehroo, and their team created an enhancer protein that selectively energizes the anticancer cell therapy called CAR T-cells. This protein not only boosts the cells’ anticancer activity, it also promotes the development of memory CAR T-cells, which provide long-term immune protection against cancer, similar to the immune response after chicken pox infection or vaccination.
The cancer treatment, CAR-T cell therapy, was approved by federal regulators in 2017. It works by extracting immune T-cells from patients and reprograming them with a “chimeric antigen receptor” (CAR) on the cell surface. The receptor works like a lock and key for a protein marker on the surface of the cancer cells. That allows the CAR T-cells to recognize and attack cancer cells once they’re infused back into the body.
In recent years, CAR T-cell therapy has made headlines by working where conventional treatments failed, in some cases completely clearing cancer cells from the sickest patients.
But once the CAR T-cells have cleared most of the cancer, their numbers fade over time, allowing any remaining diseased cells to proliferate. For example, in multiple myeloma, a cancer of white blood cells, CAR T-cell therapy increases patients’ survival over the short term, but half of patients relapse within one to two years. Within three years, most patients see their cancers recur.
The advance, which has yet to be tested in humans, was developed using models of multiple myeloma in preclinical mice studies in work sponsored by Dana-Farber’s Innovation Research Fund Award, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, and a Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Award.
Results of the study were published recently in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The researchers said the procedure should be useful against other cancers, and have studies underway testing it against leukemia and lymphoma.
CAR T-cell therapy is one of a suite of relatively recent cancer treatments that have revolutionized care. Unlike traditional surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, the therapy turns the body’s own immune system into a powerful weapon to fight the disease.
The enhancer protein devised by Rashidian and Rakhshandehroo selectively targets CAR T-cells, enhancing their activity and persistence. The pair began the work two years ago with the goal of developing a procedure that could quickly translate to clinical care.
Other researchers have been addressing the CAR T-cell longevity problem for a decade by focusing on re-engineering them to extend their lifespan in the body, a strategy that largely fell short. Instead, Rashidian and Rahkshandehroo focused on stimulating the CAR-T cells post-infusion and at a desired time, rather than altering them.
To do so, they designed a protein that targets and stimulates CAR T-cells. The CAR receptor is the engineered part of the CAR T-cell that allows it to recognize cancer cells by detecting a specific marker on them.
The enhancer protein fuses the cancer marker to a molecule called IL-2, which enhances T-cell activity and persistence. The IL-2 is engineered to be weak so it does not affect normal T-cells, thus avoiding toxicities. However, because the enhancer protein targets CAR T-cells, the weak IL-2 enhances their activity through proximity.
“Sometimes in science, you see marginal differences here and there, and then you do the statistics, and you find out the significance,” Rakhshandehroo said. “For us, it was like night and day. Once we saw it, we knew there was something very robust happening here.”
Rakhshandehroo said subsequent experiments were aimed at illuminating specific questions about the process, but what impressed them was the persistence of the response despite shifting variables.
“We’ve tuned our experiments to be more specific, trying to answer specific questions, but what we’ve seen has always been very robust,” Rahkshandehroo said. “The door has been opened, and everyone can come and take advantage of the system and use it to understand the biology behind the enhancer’s impact on T-cells and their persistence as well as finding new therapies.”
To avoid overstimulating the CAR T-cells, Rashidian said they’ve tuned the enhancer protein to have a short circulatory half-life of just two hours before it clears from the body. That will give it time to stimulate the CAR T-cells without overstimulating them.
That also allows closer control of dosing once human trials begin — Rashidian has started the search for funding for a Phase 1 trial to gauge efficacy and safety. With such a short enhancer circulatory lifetime, Rashidian said, researchers can more easily adjust doses according to how patients respond in the trial.
“I’m very excited about it,” Rashidian said. “It works beyond what we have expected. It’s incredibly robust. I’m very hopeful that it will save patients’ lives.”
A look at five projects, including a hunt for stolen coins, tracing history of long closed, Jim Crow-era beach in New Orleans
Summer isn’t only for lazing on the beach. For some College undergraduates, it’s also the time for diving into crucial research. Here are five who are participating in the Harvard Summer Undergraduate Research Village Program or received the Ethnicity, Migration, Rights Summer Thesis Research Grant.
Puyuan “Alvin” Ye ’27
Ye, a prospective computer science concentrator, is working with the Coins Recovery Project to create a crawler bot that searches online auction databases with the goal of tracking down hundreds of coins stolen from Harvard Art Museums in 1973.
“You’re basically cosplaying the FBI,” Ye joked.
The collection, which included ancient Greek and Roman coins, was on loan to the Fogg Art Museum at the time of the theft. Nearly 6,000 were stolen by a group of armed gunmen who overpowered a lone night watchman, according to news reports. Most have since been recovered by FBI agents, museum staff, Harvard students, and consultants.
The Coins Recovery Project kicked off last fall with archival work on the hundreds that remain missing. The initiative continued into the spring with the creation of a database on the stolen treasures. Now, Ye is using his tech skills to pitch in.
The Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program fellow is working under Laure Marest, Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins, and Jeff Steward, director of digital infrastructure and emerging technology, to comb through descriptions of auction entries. Ye is working on creating an image- and description-matching bot to flag coins of interest, which will then be passed to the curator to confirm any potential match.
“This is the first time I’ve ever used my computer science skills for a real-life application,” Ye shared. “I’m learning while I’m working on this project, and I’m also preparing myself better for what I might do in the future.”
Emily Peck ’25
Peck has spent time tutoring English language learners in Boston Public Schools during her time at Harvard. The experience illuminated many of the challenges immigrant children face in the U.S. education system.
“A lot of these students were being asked to do work at an English level that was much higher than the level they spoke,” said the social studies concentrator. “It seemed like there was this huge gap that wasn’t being bridged by their education.”
Peck was inspired to research the history of bilingual education in Boston, learning about two laws that had a significant impact across the state. It turns out the city had several thriving bilingual programs in the early 2000s. But a 2002 referendum replaced multiyear transitional English education with a single year of intensive language training, effectively ending bilingual programs in Massachusetts. Fifteen years later, a coalition of advocacy groups worked to reverse the ban with passage of the 2017 LOOK Act.
This summer, Peck — a recipient of the EMR Summer Thesis Research Grant — is investigating how support for bills such as the LOOK Act emerges in the first place. The quest brought her to the State House, where she spoke to staffers about representatives’ support of the bill and how their constituencies affect decisions to endorse particular causes.
Her research is helping her learn more about the democratic process, but it’s also informing her views on best practices for improving bilingual education for immigrant students.
“Public schools should assess the needs and wants of their students and parents and the achievements of their students,” she said. “From there they should decide what program would be best.”
Abel Rodríguez ’27
What began as a first-year seminar turned into a summer research opportunity for Rodríguez. The rising sophomore is participating in the Foundational Undergraduate Experience in a Laboratory (FUEL) program, which exposes students to the world of lab research.
One of 10 students participating in FUEL, Rodríguez is studying porphyrins — a group of macrocyclic compounds that are aromatic and absorb light — and how to synthesize them for cancer treatment.
Along the way, Rodríguez, who hopes to concentrate in chemistry, is also picking up lab techniques, safety, and social norms for those working in a lab.
“Coming to a place like Harvard, I had this notion that everything that people will do will be immaculate,” Rodríguez said. “But being in the lab surrounded by so many bright people and seeing their mistakes … It’s changed my perspective in the sense that when I make a mistake in the lab, this is where I’m really learning and growing.”
The experience also clarified plans for his academic career. “The program was the last step I took toward figuring out what I really want to do,” he said. “It has established for me that I want to go into the sciences. I want to engage in research.”
Shruti Gautam ’25
Interning with public defenders in New Orleans last summer led Gautam to discover a local gem known as Lincoln Beach, a former Jim Crow-era amusement park and recreation area for Black residents that was closed after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act but is still used by locals.
A year later, Gautam, a history concentrator with a secondary in neuroscience, is back in The Big Easy, this time as an EMR summer thesis-research grant recipient. Now she spends her days combing through city archives and land documents or analyzing old maps to learn about the beach’s history.
She also is working with community members organizing to make Lincoln Beach safer, cleaner, and more accessible.
“Histories of small properties are the best way to explain a much larger, complicated history,” the Mather House resident said. “For New Orleans, it’s incredibly important because the histories that are written about the city are often mythologized and make this city live in its past. Everything is focused on its French colonial history, or jazz … and not an actual true history of the people who are still there.”
Before settling on Lincoln Beach as her thesis topic, Gautam learned more about its history last fall during a Harvard Law School class on labor history and the law. While researching a course assignment, Gautam learned that the privately leased and run beach under public jurisdiction had been managed for part of the 20th century by local Black community members, many of whom were also unionized.
The beach sits on Coushatta tribal land and was previously owned by United Fruit Company President Samuel Zemurray and the public-private Orleans Levee Board.
On July 10, the beach was designated as part of the National Registry of Historic Sites, an important development in its preservation and planned redevelopment.
Gautam was particularly interested in the site’s identity as it transitioned from tribal land to an important gathering space for Black and Latinx communities. “I came to the conclusion that it never really transforms how people associate themselves with the land,” she said. “What it does transform is who companies decide they want to be able to access the land.”
Kayla Reifel ’26
The History of Science concentrator is spending the season processing a new seriesof Polaroids of historical scientific instruments and creating a mini exhibition for display in the foyer of her department at the Science Center.
The department is home to the collection. “It’s a pretty small museum and small staff, so we get to really be deeply involved with all different facets,” Reifel said.
The opportunity is part of the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) and includes research on the instruments themselves.
“One of the most interesting things I’m learning about is the ethics of museum collecting and displaying,” Reifel said. “It’s been really interesting to hear about what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to accepting donations and displaying things in a certain way.”
Reifel has even learned how to handle the historical instruments. “My work this summer has made me think a lot harder about education and what considerations we need to have to think about when it comes to teaching science and the history of science,” she noted. “It’s also allowed me to develop this ability to really find joy in whatever I’m researching.”
Reifel feels she is now better equipped to advocate for the importance of historical research. “This experience really made me realize how important it is to tell the stories of the history of pretty much anything,” she said. “If you don’t know the history behind something, then you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Jason Rezaian following his release from an Iranian prison, January 2016. Both he and his wife, journalist Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested in 2014. She was released within a few weeks.
Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, held for 544 days by Iran, offers advice to three Americans just released by Russia
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva looked joyful, relieved, and perhaps a bit dazed as they stepped onto U.S. soil last Thursday night.
The three, freed in a historic prisoner swap between Russia and the U.S. and four European nations, were reunited on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland with family members they hadn’t seen in more than a year, and for Whelan, in six years.
Few can truly understand the feelings the three Americans experienced in those first moments of freedom. Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian is one of them.
While serving as the newspaper’s Tehran bureau chief, Rezaian and his journalist wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested without cause in 2014 by the Iranian government. Salehi was released on bail weeks later. Rezaian, who like Gershkovich became a cause célèbre in journalism circles, was held for 544 days before being released in a January 2016 deal between Iran and the U.S.
Rezaian, a global opinions writer for the Post and host of the “544 Days” podcast, spoke with the Gazette about what it’s like to suddenly regain one’s freedom after a long period of captivity. He was a Spring 2023 resident fellow at the Institute of Politics and a 2017 Nieman Fellow. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Not many know what these people have gone through and will go through now that they’re home. Tell me about those final days and hours before your release. What was going through your mind?
It was a lot of exhilaration but also continued anxiety and tension that started to dissipate once I got on the plane and realized that this was the end of it. There are so many false starts, false promises that happen in the span of your detention that it’s hard to believe that it’s real. Our deal almost fell through at the very last minute while I was at the airport. It’s an episode in my life, and certainly in those 544 days, that stands out in my memory as being very charged.
How much time elapsed between finding out a deal had been struck and stepping off the plane in Germany?
They had told me about 10 days in advance that this was going to happen. And there were reasons to believe that that was the case. The Iran nuclear deal was on the verge of being consummated. But there were a lot of twists and turns in that last week and a half or so. It was 24 hours between the time I was taken from my cell for the last time and when I got on the plane.
Did you have to manage your emotions or expectations so as to not get your hopes up?
If you read the second-to-last chapter of my book [“Prisoner” (2019)], it gives a very precise timeline of what was going on. Ultimately, the Iranian side was trying to renege on essential part of the deal, which was allowing my wife to leave. I didn’t know that was part of the deal. They had been telling me during those last days after I was told that I was being released, that she wouldn’t be coming with me.
I had no way to check if that was the case or not. And it was probably 10 o’clock at night, at the airport, when the Swiss ambassador came to ensure that everything was as it should be. And he said, “Where are your wife and your mother? They’re supposed to be here.”
And I said, “The Revolutionary Guard told me that my wife [who is Iranian] can’t come because she’s not American.” And he said, “I’ve been part of these negotiations for 14 months. Your wife has been a part of it from the very beginning.” So, there was a lot of doubt and the ways that they continue to harass you right up until the end are pretty nasty.
Whelan, Gershkovich, and Kurmasheva have finally been reunited with their families. Do you remember what that moment felt like?
My mother and wife were in Tehran, and I had had the opportunity to see them a day, maybe two days, before we left. And then to go through that moment of being told, “No, they’re not coming” and then to “Yes, they were” and then we’re on a plane with other Americans, and we’re going home. That was a huge relief.
Seeing my brother when we got to Germany the next day and having my brother be reliably himself, kind of nonplussed by the moment and normal, I think that was the moment where I thought to myself, “Okay. Not only is that over, but some things haven’t changed.”
When did it sink in that your ordeal was really and truly over?
Sitting on the plane on the tarmac in Tehran and looking at the skyline of a city that I had lived in for the past several years and that I thought would be my home for a long time, I think that was the first moment where I thought to myself, “OK, this is over. This horrific experience is over, but also this chapter of my life in this country is over.”
You were treated quite harshly during the 18 months you were imprisoned. Was there a process of adjustment you went through after you returned?
Huge. It was a long process. One difference in my case than the cases of some of these folks was I was isolated the whole time, first in solitary confinement, and then with just one other cellmate for the entire time, so I didn’t have a lot of social interactions.
Getting back to that, being able to see people and to relate to different kinds of people of my own choosing, but also, everyday life. I had worked for The Washington Post, but I was an anonymous person before all this happens, and then I couldn’t go anywhere for quite a long time without people recognizing me.
So that reintegration — I guess you could say integration because you’re coming back to a brand-new life that wasn’t like what you experienced before, and your relationships are very different — took a long time. I would say it’s still a work in progress.
Do you have any advice for these folks as they transition back into society?
I hope they take their time in their recovery. I hope that they do the hard work of trying to process and come to terms with what they’ve experienced. I hope that they’re able to reconnect fully with their families.
The one thing that I would say about all of them, and I wish I could go back and really convince myself of this, is they don’t owe anybody anything: their privacy, their time, how they want to spend the rest of their life after having a good chunk of it stolen from them is completely up to them. I hope there are ways, big and small, that I could be supportive. Because it takes a long time to come to that realization if you’re not guided towards it.
You’ve been an outspoken advocate for hostages and political prisoners and for how to think more strategically about disincentivizing the growing practice of hostage-taking.What do you think about this deal?
There are always going to be people who want to politicize the deal and talk about why it was a great deal or why it was a terrible deal. The reality is these people suffered an abuse that they never should have been experienced. The U.S. government and other governments did what was necessary to end that abuse.
That doesn’t do anything, though, for combating this problem long-term. I helped start a commission on hostage policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, D.C. We’re looking at what do we do to disincentivize this in the future. The answer is not simply don’t do deals. Because the problem isn’t the deal, the problem is there is nothing standing in the way of bad actors like Russia, China, and Iran from doing it and so we have to cultivate mechanisms that make it unattractive.
And I think that quest has to live in parallel with the reality that there are people who have been held for far too long in a variety of countries around the world who need to come home. Those two goals have been seen as conflicting for a long time. I just don’t think that they are conflicting. They are two problems related to the same issue on two different timelines. And if we don’t get to work very quickly on cultivating practical deterrents, opportunities, and tools, we’re going to be facing a lot more of this.
Garber to serve as president through 2026-27 academic year
long read
Search for successor will launch in 2026
Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s interim president since January and previously its longest-serving provost, will serve as president through the 2026-27 academic year, it was announced Friday following a meeting of Harvard’s governing boards. A full-scale search for his successor will begin in the late spring or summer of 2026.
“Alan has done an outstanding job leading Harvard through extraordinary challenges since taking on his interim presidential duties seven months ago,” Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, wrote in a message to the community. “We have asked him to hold the title of President, not just Interim President, both to recognize his distinguished service to the University and to underscore our belief that this is a time not merely for steady stewardship but for active, engaged leadership.
“Alan has led with a deep concern for all members of the Harvard community, a strong devotion to enduring university ideals, and a paramount commitment to academic excellence,” Pritzker added. “At an especially demanding moment for higher education, Harvard is very fortunate to benefit from his intellectual acumen and breadth of interests, his integrity and fair-mindedness, his equanimity and empathy, his decades-long devotion to the university, his extensive knowledge of its people and parts, and his ardent belief in the power of higher education and research, and their potential to improve the lives of people and communities near and far. His time in Mass Hall has demonstrated his clear-eyed determination both to help the university chart a course through troubled waters and to affirm the primacy of the teaching, learning, and research at Harvard’s heart.”
A native of Rock Island, Illinois, Garber served as Harvard provost from 2011 until January of this year, when he was named interim president. An economist, physician, and expert on health policy, he holds faculty appointments in medicine, economics, government, and public health. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in three years, he went on to receive a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and an M.D. from Stanford, where he served on the faculty for 25 years and was founding director of two academic centers.
In his own message to the Harvard community, Garber reflected on the values that underpin the University’s mission.
“From the moment I arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate, I have been inspired by the people who make this institution what it is,” he wrote. “We believe in the value of knowledge, the power of teaching and research, and the ways that what we do here can benefit society. Those commitments matter today more than ever.
“Our work now is to focus on them with renewed vigor, rededicating ourselves to academic excellence. That excellence is made possible by the free exchange of ideas, open inquiry, creativity, empathy, and constructive dialogue among people with diverse backgrounds and views,” he added. “This is a challenging time, one of strong passions and strained bonds among us. But I know that we are capable of finding our way forward together because we share a devotion to learning and because we recognize our pluralism as a source of our strength.”
Writing that he was “excited by the prospect of what we can achieve in these next years,” Garber said that he would do his “utmost to ensure that we continue to advance knowledge and drive discovery even as we work to mend the fabric of our community.”
“From the moment I arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate, I have been inspired by the people who make this institution what it is.”
Alan M. Garber
In her message, Pritzker noted that the decision to extend Garber’s presidential service through 2026-27 benefited from a series of consultations with deans, faculty, alumni leaders, and others, leading to the judgment that Harvard would be well served by Garber’s leadership for three more years, as the University continues to navigate challenging times, before the launch of a full-scale presidential search in 2026.
“In conversations with many people across our community and beyond during the past weeks and months — including especially helpful recent consultations with each of the deans as well as an array of faculty and alumni leaders from the various schools — we have consistently heard praise for Alan’s qualities and how his leadership meets the current moment,” wrote Pritzker. “People have highlighted his thoughtful and balanced judgment, his openness to different points of view, his even temperament in turbulent times, his concern for student well-being, his commitment to academic freedom and constructive dialogue, his recognition of diversity and inclusion as integral elements of academic excellence, his appetite for innovation, and his constant focus on the best interests of Harvard as a whole. Our recent consultations have strongly underscored the high regard in which Alan is held by a broad range of people who have watched him work and come to appreciate his strengths.”
“I have come to admire Alan deeply during his years as provost and more recently as interim president, and I’m very pleased he has agreed to carry forward as president for the three years ahead,” said Vivian Hunt, president of the Board of Overseers. “He has been a trusted partner to the Overseers throughout my time on the board, engaging with us candidly and helping us fulfill our oversight role. Especially over these past several months, he has shown his remarkable leadership qualities, his clarity of mind, his calm demeanor, and his skills as an empathetic listener with real concern for others. He always has the University’s best interests and core academic mission at heart. These remain challenging times, but also times of opportunity in which Harvard can strengthen and extend our values and impact. My Overseer colleagues and I look forward to actively supporting Alan’s leadership.”
Forward thinker
Garber served as provost alongside three Harvard presidents — Drew Faust, Larry Bacow, and Claudine Gay — with responsibility for overseeing academic policies and activities across the Schools and fostering collaboration. When she appointed Garber in 2011, Faust noted his “extraordinary breadth of experience in research across disciplines” and highlighted his “incisive intellect” and “loyalty and commitment to Harvard.” As the University’s chief academic officer, he worked closely with faculty and deans throughout Harvard’s Schools as well as its academic centers and affiliates, aiming to advance academic excellence, innovation, and integration across the institution.
As provost, Garber played a significant role in shaping a range of major cross-disciplinary collaborations. These have included the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural & Artificial Intelligence, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and the Harvard Quantum Initiative. Garber also oversaw the work of the provost’s office in areas spanning advances in learning, faculty development and diversity, international affairs, research policy, technology development, and institutional research, as well as the activities of such diverse organizations as the American Repertory Theater, the Harvard Art Museums, the Harvard Library, Harvard University Health Services, HarvardX, and Arnold Arboretum.
“Alan’s intellectual curiosity spans not only his own diverse fields of medicine and economics but also enduring questions explored in the humanities, interdisciplinary developments in sciences and social sciences, and vital concerns of public affairs and ethics,” said Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard and a former dean of Harvard Law School. “He couples inquisitiveness with a sense of wonder; his devotion to the projects of education and research is ardent and genuine; he also is an excellent listener and apparently does not need much sleep. For these reasons and more, Alan has rightly earned respect and gratitude across the University, higher education, and beyond.”
“Alan Garber is an exceptional academic leader of intellectual breadth and depth who has demonstrated a tireless commitment to the pursuit of Veritas and the teaching and research mission of Harvard University.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., who serves as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, pointed to Garber’s leadership attributes in addition to his academic credentials.
“Alan Garber is an exceptional academic leader of intellectual breadth and depth who has demonstrated a tireless commitment to the pursuit of Veritas and the teaching and research mission of Harvard University,” said Gates. “But, as importantly, he leads with empathy, integrity, and a deep devotion to the people who make up this institution. Not only does he know Harvard and its people well, he also cares deeply about them. I look forward to supporting his efforts in the years ahead as he leads us forward.”
Garber has been a leading figure on the University’s Academic Leadership Council, a close partner of dozens of deans, and a convener of annual multiyear planning sessions for Schools and units across Harvard.
Garber also launched the Provost’s Academic Leadership Forum in 2012 as a cross-School program and resource for emerging faculty leaders from across the Schools. Over 120 faculty have participated in the program since its inception, some of whom have gone on to become deans or assume other significant leadership roles.
“Alan’s deep devotion to Harvard is unparalleled, with a remarkable history marked by an unwavering commitment to supporting and mentoring faculty,” said Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration. “His leadership is defined by a dedication to attracting top talent — students, faculty, and staff —and emphasizing Harvard’s greatest strength: its people. Alan’s collegial and collaborative style further enriches our community, ensuring Harvard remains a beacon of excellence.”
An expert on health policy, Garber also helped shape the University’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizing efforts to take advantage of the best available medical and public health advice and helping shape the University’s strategy for sustaining education and research in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.
Calling Garber “an inspirational and principled leader,” Bruce Walker, Director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT and Harvard, said, “Having had the opportunity to work closely with him as he led the University through the fractious COVID crisis, I have profound respect for his integrity, judgement, investment in others, and his ability to build consensus.”
Strengthening the community
Since taking office as interim president in January, Garber has led a series of initiatives and efforts aimed at strengthening the community during what he has called “an extraordinarily painful and disorienting time for Harvard.”
In a January message to the community, he wrote: “It’s crucial that we bridge the fissures that have weakened our sense of community and, through our words and deeds, affirm the immense worth of what we do here, notwithstanding our shortcomings. Doing so will not be easy, especially in the face of persistent scrutiny, but we must rise to the challenge. It will take a willingness to approach each other in a spirit of goodwill, with an eagerness to listen as well as to speak, and with an appreciation of our common humanity when we encounter passionately held but opposing convictions.”
Garber launched two presidential task forces, one devoted to combating antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, the other focused on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias. These task forces each announced preliminary recommendations earlier this summer and are continuing their intensive efforts as the fall term approaches.
Garber has also emphasized the importance of taking additional steps to safeguard academic freedom and free expression and to create a campus climate that fosters constructive conversations among people who disagree with one another.
He initiated the Harvard Dialogues series at the start of the spring term to encourage constructive dialogues on difficult topics. In addition, together with Interim Provost John Manning, he launched a faculty working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue, chaired by Professors Eric Beerbohm and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, as well as a faculty working group on institutional voice, chaired by Professors Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons. The president, provost, and deans accepted the report and recommendations of the institutional voice working group in late May; the working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue is expected to report this fall.
Driver of innovation, collaboration
Under Garber’s guidance, Harvard has been a leader and innovator in online learning. As part of Faust’s administration, Garber led Harvard’s efforts alongside MIT to create edX, an innovative online learning platform that launched in 2012 and reached millions of learners across the globe. In 2023, following the sale of edX, Garber played a leading role in the creation of the nonprofit Axim Collaborative, a joint effort between Harvard and MIT aimed at creating learning opportunities and technologies that widen access to education and help learners from all backgrounds reach their full potential.
“Alan’s intellectual curiosity spans not only his own diverse fields of medicine and economics but also enduring questions explored in the humanities, interdisciplinary developments in sciences and social sciences, and vital concerns of public affairs and ethics.”
Martha Minow
Garber has been a champion of Harvard’s pre-eminence and innovation in the life sciences, including its partnerships with the Harvard teaching hospitals. He also helped to spearhead collaboration with life science partners from across Greater Boston, including five Harvard-affiliated hospitals and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, to spur the creation of Landmark Bio, an innovative, public-private biomanufacturing facility in Watertown, Massachusetts, that was formed to advance the development of new medicines by translating cutting-edge research into breakthrough therapies.
“The development of tools like CRISPR and progress in stem-cell science are among the advances that have given us hope that we will soon be able to treat cancer, immunological diseases, neurological conditions, and many other inherited conditions far better,” Garber said at the time Landmark Bio was launched in 2021. “This facility will help turn scientific findings into approved therapies by making these resources available to early stage companies and labs.”
“As a Harvard grad who worked with Alan Garber throughout my career, I congratulate him on his appointment as the president of Harvard University,” said Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey ’92. “I am grateful for Dr. Garber’s leadership in ensuring that we remain the hub of higher education, life sciences, and innovation. Alan has been a steady leader for the community throughout this transition, and I am excited for the future of Harvard under his leadership.”
Harvard’s unfolding development in Allston has been another key area of Garber’s focus. In partnership with the executive vice president and other colleagues, he has played a role in the launch of the Science and Engineering Complex, now the principal home of the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; in planning for the Goel Center for Creativity and Performance, the future home of the American Repertory Theater; and in advancing plans for Harvard’s anticipated Enterprise Research Campus, envisioned as a major venue for collaboration among academia, industry, and others.
Frank Doyle, current provost at Brown University and former dean of the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, lauded Garber’s efforts in Allston. “I experienced firsthand Alan’s extraordinary ability to lead collaborative faculty teams to advance strategic priorities, from the earliest stages of brainstorming and ideation, all the way through to project execution,” said Doyle. “As a leader that is constantly confronted with myriad opportunities, he has a keen sense of where to focus the energies and efforts of the community to achieve the greatest impact.”
Before returning to Harvard in 2011, Garber rose to become the Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Professor at Stanford University, where he also held professorial appointments in medicine, economics, and health research and policy. He was founding director of Stanford’s Center for Health Policy and its Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, and served as a staff physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. A research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, he served as the director of its healthcare program for the program’s first 19 years.
Garber is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Physicians.
Garber is an avid cyclist and an accomplished runner, having completed six Boston Marathons and nine others. He is married to Anne Yahanda and has four children.
Looking ahead
In her message, Pritzker elaborated on the plan to have Garber serve as president through the 2026-27 academic year and to launch “a full and wide-ranging search for his successor in the late spring or summer of 2026.”
“We believe this plan will give Alan and his leadership team the opportunity to sustain and build momentum on a range of priorities and initiatives,” Pritzker said. “It will also provide an ample interval for those of us on the Corporation to reflect, in consultation with others, on how best to approach the future presidential search, including how to ensure robust input from across Harvard and beyond.”
Pritzker closed with thanks to the Harvard community for supporting Garber’s leadership and contributing to the University’s work ahead. “Alan’s talents and experience position him well to guide us in this vital work,” she said. “Along with my colleagues on the governing boards, I hope you will offer him your concerted support, and I thank all of you — faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends — for all you do for Harvard.”
Worried about violence, threats as election nears? Just say no.
Campaign rally site days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
Key is for leaders, voters to stand in solidarity against it, political scientists say
Political violence has been increasing in the U.S. from the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump to the 10-fold surge in threats against members of Congress in the past decade. And experts see serious risk of more incidents as the election nears.
Late last week, the Ash Center for Governance and Innovation convened a panel discussion on “Political Violence and the 2024 Presidential Election” to clarify what is happening in our country and suggest some possible solutions.
Moderator Erica Chenoweth, academic dean for faculty engagement and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the Harvard Kennedy School, opened the hourlong online event by asking the panelists to respond to the attack on Trump that left one audience member dead and two others wounded besides the former president.
“I was angry that gun violence had once again marred American life,” said Hardy Merriman, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. “The premise of democracy is that we have this broad and beautiful and diverse country and we resolve our differences through institutions, through elections, through our judicial system, and through other systems,” continued the author of “Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence (HOPE).”
Lilliana Mason, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, concurred. “I was holding my breath because what happens next is extremely consequential.”
Mason, co-author of “Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy” went on to explain: “Whether or not it is interpreted as a partisan event or ideological can really, really change how everyone experiences that act. I was very relieved to see that both Republican and Democratic leaders spoke out against violence, and it didn’t seem to be a partisan event. That allowed us to take a breath.”
“I was very relieved to see that both Republican and Democratic leaders spoke out against violence, and it didn’t seem to be a partisan event.”
Lilliana Mason, associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Birch, professor of political science at King’s College, London, studies violence in emerging democracies, primarily in Africa. After the shooting, however, she “went to my electoral violence data set, and I discovered that electoral violence has increased quite a lot in the last 15 years in established democracies. This is something political scientists have not paid attention to — and this calls out for urgent attention.”
Her research suggests that “when it does happen it is not orchestrated by political elites,” said Birch, the author of “Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order.” “But the most interesting unanswered question is how the tenor of election campaigns … might contribute to electoral violence.”
Chenoweth noted an “overwhelming majority of Americans … categorically reject using violence to achieve domestic political ends under basically any circumstance,” citing poll numbers in the high 80 percent range. At the same time, “a number of recent polls suggest growing anxiety over political violence.”
But Mason, who has been collecting data on electoral violence since 2017, shared some worrisome trends: “We saw a spike in approval of violent threats around both of Trump’s impeachments, particularly among Republicans. When partisans feel that their groups are being threatened, they become more approving of violence.”
Throughout Trump’s administration such threats increased, she said. “During Biden’s admin, we saw them calming down.”
Although one recent poll, found that 10 percent of participants said “use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president,” and seven percent supported the use of force “to restore Trump to the presidency.”
Most threats, the panelists agreed, are simply designed to intimidate.
“In general, there are lots of people who threaten and never enact political violence, and there are some people who enact political violence and never threaten,” said Merriman.
This makes sense, he explained: “If you were serious, why would you tip people off with threats?”
He went on to cite CNN research done on threats that were serious enough that their perpetrators were subject to prosecution. That research revealed that less than 50 percent of those who made this most severe level of threat had plans to commit violence, which means that most threats are never going to be acted upon.
Still, he said, “You don’t need that many acts of violence to make those threats credible.”
“A lot of it is intimidation and trying to disarm the other side,” agreed Birch. “Turnout tends to be lower [for elections] when people fear there might be violence.”
That, she explained, may be the point. “Preventing people from exercising their democratic rights can be an important objective of electoral violence. In that context, we do find women and people of other racial groups other than the dominant group are targeted because they may be seen as particularly vulnerable.”
Countering this atmosphere of violence is challenging. However, the panel did have suggestions.
“Most of our data shows it is very easy for leaders to reduce approval of violence,” said Mason. “All they have to do is say, ‘Don’t do that.’ We have the power to change America’s attitudes about violence as long as our leaders are willing to do the responsible thing and provide leadership that keeps our democracy functioning in a peaceful way.”
Merriman suggested a ground-up approach. “We have to begin to tell the story of incitement and to call them out,” he said.
People must stand together in the face of intimidation and attempts to invoke fear, he said. “Those who oppose you might turn up the heat a bit before they realize that’s not going to be a viable strategy.” But they will back off.
“The goal is deterrence,” Merriman continued. “If we can change the psychology from one where those who are making or inciting violence think, ‘This always wins’ to ‘This is more likely to lose,’ we’re going to see a major change in threat trajectory and people feeling empowered.
“The key is solidarity.”
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Economic prospects brighten for children of low-income Black Americans, study finds
Opportunity Insights also finds gap widening between whites at top, bottom
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Illustration by Roy Scott/Ikon Images
Economic prospects have improved in recent years for Black Americans born poor, according to new research from Opportunity Insights. At the same time, earnings have fallen for white Americans from low-income families.
The analysis, drawn from 40 years of tax and Census records, finds a dramatic narrowing of the economic divide between the poorest Black and white Americans. But it also reveals a widening gap between low- and high-income white people, driven by shifts in the geography of employment.
“This is the first big data study to look at recent changes in economic opportunity within the same place over time,” said study co-author Benny Goldman, M.A. ’21, Ph.D. ’24, a research affiliate with Opportunity Insights. “And what we see are shrinking race gaps and growing class gaps.”
The research, published last week, follows what Goldman called “a long history of folks studying intergenerational mobility.” That includes Opportunity Insights co-founder and director Raj Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and one of the study’s five co-authors. For more than a decade, Chetty has built an influential body of work demonstrating how access to the American Dream varies by region, race, and history.
Changes in economic mobility of Black Americans
U.S. heat maps compare mean household income percentile at age 27 of Black Americans born in 1978 (left) vs. 1992.
“Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility”
Social scientists have found the patterns he uncovered to be persistent. For example, a Swedish demographer compared findings from a 2014 study co-authored by Chetty on upward mobility across generations in the U.S. to the prevalence of slavery from the 1860 census. Counties with high rates of bondage at the outbreak of the Civil War showed less mobility for residents born more than 100 years later.
With the new study, Chetty et al. set out to investigate whether these dynamics are changing. Anonymized records provided by the federal government were used to compare earnings at age 27 with socioeconomic factors from childhood. The sample included 57 million Americans born in 1978 or 1992.
Across the country, the sample’s Black millennials fared better than its Black Gen Xers. Individuals born in 1978 to low-income families (with earnings in the 25th percentile or lower) averaged $19,420 per year in early adulthood compared to an inflation-adjusted $21,030 for poorer members of the 1992 cohort. Outcomes also improved slightly for children born to high-income Black families, though researchers noted “noisier,” or less reliable, estimates for this population due to a small sample size.
“What we see are shrinking race gaps and growing class gaps.”
Outcomes showed wide variation by region, with Black Americans making the biggest strides in the Southeast and Midwest — areas traditionally associated with high rates of Black poverty.
“Take where I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan,” offered co-author Will Dobbie, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Poor Black kids born there in 1992 were earning $4,700 more at age 27 than poor Black kids born there in 1978, an incredible improvement in just a few years.”
Meanwhile, white Gen Xers from poorer families averaged $27,680 per year versus $26,150 for millennial peers. The gap between the poorest and richest white people ballooned by 28 percent over the same period, as those born at the top watched their fortunes climb.
Results were particularly stark in a few regions of the country known for prosperity. “Outcomes for low-income white children born in the ’90s from parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, rural New York, and California started to look like Appalachia, the Southeast, and the industrial Midwest did for low-income white children born in the late ’70s,” noted Goldman, now a newly installed assistant professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University.
“This work reinforces the importance of childhood communities for outcomes in adulthood, consistent with our prior findings,” Chetty wrote in an email. “But it shows that it is possible for these communities to change rapidly — within a decade — in a way that has significant causal effects on children’s long-term outcomes.”
$21,030Inflation-adjusted average income for Black millennials at age 27 (vs. $19,420 for Black Gen Xers at same age)
To be sure, vast racial disparities persisted. For Gen Xers who grew up poor, the racial earnings gap between Black and white Americans was $12,994. For millennials, it fell 27 percent to $9,521. In a research summary, modest changes in economic mobility were noted for Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children.
But Black Americans in the younger set had a far better shot at moving out of poverty. Those born in 1978 to families in the bottom income quintile were 14.7 percent more likely to remain in poverty than similarly situated whites. For those born in 1992, the gap fell to 4.1 percent.
As an additional aspect of their analysis, the researchers check their findings against historic rates of parental employment at the neighborhood level. This approach was inspired by the work of Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, author of “When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor” (1996). “It was used as a broad way to measure the health of any given community where kids grew up,” Goldman explained.
The researchers saw that neighborhood employment tracked neatly with emerging race and class differences. “We found a sharp decline in employment rates among lower-income white parents relative to low-income Black families and higher-income white families,” Goldman said.
Declining earnings were hardly the only negative associated with growing up amid low parental employment. In a testament to the power of social connections, places with fewer working parents also saw rising mortality and falling rates of marriage.
Yet this wasn’t a case of opportunity moving from one group to another, since neighborhoods with higher rates of adult employment saw better outcomes for people of all races. “In areas where Black kids did best, low-income white kids and their parents also did better,” Goldman said.
What’s more, the researchers found that moving to areas with strong parental employment was associated with higher earnings in early adulthood. According to Goldman, this was especially true for those who landed in the new neighborhood before the age of 10. “Growing class gaps and shrinking race gaps did not result from unequal access to a booming economy,” he said. “Instead, what matters is how many years of childhood were spent in a thriving environment.”
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French officer rushes wife, young children out of Salonica as Nazis near
In novel rooted in family lore, Claire Messud trails three generations of family with Algerian roots, lives shaped by displacement, war, social and political upheaval
8 min read
Excerpted from “This Strange Eventful History” by Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
French naval attaché Gaston Cassar should never have brought his family from Beirut to his posting in Salonica, but he hadn’t been able to imagine living without them. Lucienne had seemed unafraid, and together they’d chosen the villa to rent, amazed by the space and amenities they could afford, charmed by their gracious landlord, Monsieur Hernandez, a prosperous Jewish merchant who lived with his wife in a mansion not far away. For months, all through the winter, in spite of the faraway war, Gaston had loved walking home each evening along the broad boulevard, away from the glittering seafront to the house where the children played in the afternoons in the shady, fragrant garden while Tata Jeanne, knitting, kept an eye from the open window.
Daily he’d looked forward, as to gifts, to the monkey-limbed leaping embrace of little Denise, her scrawny legs tucked around his waist when he lifted her, her hot, delicate little hands patting his cheeks between kisses, her fine straw-blond hair escaping from its braids to dance around her skull, catching the light. François hovered always shyly behind his sister, his glances hopeful but uncertain: he so powerfully longed for his father’s approval. When he had a good result at school to announce, he drew near, smiling outright, and brushed the dark swath of hair from his eyes. Gaston wanted so much of that boy, for that boy, his son and heir, his own future: already François understood it, and feared disappointing his father; and that fear alone disappointed Gaston. Though even that disappointment was a kind of love.
Gaston loved above all, and looked forward to especially, the moment when he would see Lucienne, his beloved wife, often from behind, either at her desk or standing by the dining table or even at the sink in the kitchen: he would admire the shape of her back, the line of her nape, and would thrill to approach her and rest his hand on the small of her spine, feeling the rise of her buttocks only slightly, the promise of Eros beneath the careful layers of cretonne and silk, the slight swish of the fabric if he moved a finger …
But even then, through those months from September to May, he’d felt dread, in waves. A growing sickness of it. News of the wider world, only ever bleaker, penetrated their enclave: not just Germany’s relentless advances, but also a growing apprehension of the hopeless unpreparedness of the French command. His superior in Beirut, Cherrière, told him in the early spring that the leadership in Paris spoke frankly of the need to compromise if the Germans continued to advance. Even then, the French army anticipated defeat. Gaston’s heart beat even in his fingertips at the memory of Cherrière’s scratched voice, of the weariness, almost blurriness, of his usually tough demeanor — before the French war had even begun. By mid-May, when Gaston received the Romanian consul’s invitation, the news from points north had grown dire: from the initial attack on Belgium and Holland, the Germans had taken only four days to reach northern France and by May 14, they were entrenched there, their sights on Paris.
Claire Messud.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
From early May onward, Gaston focused his dread and distress on the fate of his family. Why, he kept wondering, had he brought them with him to Salonica, instead of parking them in Algiers with his brother or his aunts? The children as well as Lucienne’s invalid sister, Tata Jeanne, who was prone to unforeseeable seizures of daunting severity. He and Lucienne belonged in Algiers; they loved the beautiful city where they’d both grown up, where their parents and grandparents had grown up. They’d been shaped by it, felt it part of them, and though they had nowhere there to live (the navy had kept them on the move since they married), Algiers was the home to which they’d always planned, eventually, to return. If he’d been willing to be separated from his beloved and their children, Gaston could have settled them properly in an apartment there before the world lurched into crisis. But he’d believed he could not live without them — without her, Lucienne. And who could have foreseen, the previous autumn, how quickly the Germans would advance across Europe?
From the first week of May, it was clear that Lucienne, Tata Jeanne, and the children needed to get back to Algeria as quickly as possible, traveling overland by train to France, as far as Marseille, and then boarding the ferry for home. Italy, under Mussolini, prepared to enter the war in alliance with Germany any day; and when that happened, travel between Greece and France would become impossible. The women and children needed to evacuate posthaste.
Gaston, too, wanted to get out of Salonica. Even knowing that France was likely to capitulate, he wanted to be part of the struggle, to fight honorably and, if need be, to die for his country. And at the same time, he wanted nothing more than to board the train with his wife, to feel her body pressed against his side when she tucked her dark head under his chin, and to know that they would be together, inseparable, always.
Lucienne, Tata Jeanne, and the children had departed from the train station near the commercial port late on the morning of May 21. The day was hot even before noon, and in the taxi — crossing town past the vast Jewish cemetery, with its white marble headstones glittering, past the White Tower, that stolid cylindrical blockhouse with its crenellated cap, along the seafront of shimmering, endlessly mobile wavelets clamoring at the sea wall, and on the horizon, like the eye of eternity, Mount Olympus, home of the gods, wreathed in a dispassionate haze — even as Gaston kept one eye on all these things, he gazed also at his wife, Lucienne, trying to memorize her in every detail. She sat quietly beside him, her cheeks flushed, her short forehead beaded from the exertions of departure, her hands in her lap folded around the wrinkled linen handkerchief with which she dabbed, periodically, at her temples or at the corners of her eyes. They traveled alone in one taxi; Tata Jeanne and the children were in another, just behind them. Because of this, in spite of the driver, he reached to stroke her hair, her cheek.
“Aïni,” he said, almost trembling. And then nothing more. All his emotion in that private name. They both knew this was the moment for their real farewell, rather than in the chaos of the station with the children and their aunt, broad-hipped, thick-calved Jeanne all but blind behind her glasses, almost like a third child.
“Have faith,” his wife said, reaching to take his hand between hers upon her lap, an intimacy the driver could not see in his mirror. They both knew that everything from this moment forward was uncertain: when or even whether they would be reunited; where or how a reunion might take place; what might lie in store for them and the children — so young, the children, all promise still. Even their continued existence felt uncertain, and the distance from Salonica to Algiers loomed enormous and perilous, an odyssey.
The station’s bustle was in fact a gift, panic manifest in the pushing crowds, the insistent echoing Tannoy, the belch of the trains’ engines as they clattered down the platform behind the porter, a fat man with voluminous mustaches, who wore his cap on the back of his head, brim skyward, to jaunty effect. The surrounding madness settled Gaston, made him calmer. This, he knew how to do: to project the necessary ease and confidence that was — he so wanted to teach this to his son — the noble falsehood of a leader. He stood in the doorway of their carriage, once the luggage had been stowed (How could they have so much luggage? How would they manage, changing trains? How would they manage at all?): one by one they hugged and kissed him, Denise and Tata Jeanne tearful; François in the guise of petit homme, knowing what his father wanted shook Gaston’s hand and whispered formally, “I’ll take care of everyone, I promise.”
And Lucienne: those eyes that glittered like the Mediterranean. Her smile was sorrowful and loving, and even when he stood outside the train, on the quai, and the children and Lucienne filled the window with their waving, she smiled at him, she smiled for him, the one person who saw him fully and genuinely, to the last she smiled, until he couldn’t make them out any longer.
Excerpted from “Customs and Fashions of the Turks,” Pieter Coecke van Aelst, 1553.
Fogg Museum; video by James Byard/Harvard Staff
Rebecca Coleman
Harvard Correspondent
long read
Exhibit tracing multicultural exchanges over three centuries finds common threads and plenty of drama, from crown envy to tulip mania
When it came to crowns, Sultan Süleyman’s four-tiered marvel put Charles V’s — and even the pope’s — to shame. At meetings with Habsburg ambassadors in the 1530s, the Ottoman leader would place the plumed, jewel-studded helmet in front of him to flex his universal sovereignty.
The sultan’s actions were all too human — a perfect fit with many of the stories behind the featured objects in “Imagine Me and You: Dutch and Flemish Encounters with the Islamic World, 1450-1750,” on view at the Harvard Art Museums through Aug. 18. The diverse cultures in the Low Countries and the Islamic world mesh more than they clash in the exhibit, through fashion, furnishings, and a frenzy for tulips. That’s the point, says curator Talitha Maria G. Schepers, the museums’ Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow.
Curator Talitha Schepers’ dissertation inspired the exhibition, which she named after the lyrics of The Turtles song, “Happy Together.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“In the past 100 years, most exhibitions have focused on fear and fascination, and it’s always Christians versus Muslims, and always war, war, war. That’s not the whole story,” said Schepers, the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow. “There were many more cultural exchanges. So this exhibition does the complete opposite,” focusing instead on trade, travel, and diplomacy.
In a tour of the exhibit, Schepers talked about the people behind the objects, with a focus on their social aspirations. Status-seekers paying the price of a house for a flower; brides boosting their height and prestige by wearing shoes impossible to stand in without servants’ help; an artist chronicling, in a 16-foot frieze, the feasts, funerals, and other scenes of everyday life he witnessed on a trek from Antwerp to Istanbul.
Tulip mania
“Tulipomania is the first speculative craze in Europe, or the first one we know of,” said Schepers.
Tulips originated in Central Asia, then arrived in the Ottoman Empire, where Habsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a keen gardener himself, encountered them. He reportedly introduced them to Europe, laying the groundwork for tulipomania.
A visitor takes in a framed grouping of tulip drawings. A work by Margaretha Adriaensdr. de Heer, the only female artist on the wall, pops out in the center.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Flowers grown in the Dutch Republic took on a new look, with multicolored flamed or striped petals. “The stems get longer and suddenly we have all of these patterns, and that’s because of a virus that was called ‘broken tulip virus,’” Schepers said.
At the height of the speculative craze in 1637 before the market crashed, the price of one tulip bulb fetched 1,000 florin (guilders), the price of a modest house in the Dutch Republic at the time, she said.
Comparison of prices in January 1637 (height of craze)
For 1,000 florin you could buy one tulip bulb or…
A modest house.
Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff; source: Harvard Art Museums
11.587 kilos of rye bread.
13.4 vats of butter.
5,714 pounds of meat.
5,633 pounds of raisins.
Buyers usually ordered the tulips before they bloomed, which caused lawsuits even before the market crash due to the unpredictability of the virus. Imagine paying that kind of money and not getting your preferred color? “There are court cases of people being angry after paying crazy prices but the tulips didn’t look like the ones they wanted,” Schepers said.
Velvet cushion cover, Turkey, c. 1675–1725.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Ottoman textiles from the period also show tulips, including “this gorgeous 16th-century Ottoman cushion cover” (above), which Schepers insisted be displayed as it would have been in the homes of wealthy Ottomans, on a low sofa. It’s rare for the museums to show such items outside a protective case, but the curator said it was important for visitors to be able to experience these objects in their original context.
Antwerp to Istanbul: A visual travelogue, 1533
“In 1533, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, an Antwerp artist, travels to the Ottoman Empire,” said Schepers. “He probably went with Cornelis de Schepper, a famous Habsburg ambassador. We think they traveled together because at that time it was very rare for people to travel to the Ottoman Empire, so if you go with a bigger retinue you get more protection.”
Coecke documented his journey in a 16-foot frieze containing seven scenes separated by decorative caryatids.
‘Customs and Fashions of the Turks,’ scene-by-scene
The frieze begins as the diplomatic retinue sets foot in Ottoman territory. Any diplomatic mission would have been joined by Ottoman soldiers who would safeguard the group until it reached Istanbul. Here, soldiers navigate the mountainous terrain of Slavonia. In the foreground, a soldier gives instructions to a lower-ranking official carrying a flagpole. At lower right, higher-ranking members of the group are already asleep for the night, their turbans resting beside them.
“Customs and Fashions of the Turks,” Pieter Coecke van Aelst, 1553.
Fogg Museum; source: Harvard Art Museums
The retinue continues at the break of day. Several women dressed in traditional Eastern European attire are selling bread and water to the travelers. According to Habsburg ambassador Karel Rym, unmarried Bulgarian women kept their hair very short until their wedding, after which they would let it grow as long as possible. The woman standing at left in the foreground seems to have been married for quite a while, as she has to tuck her long braid behind the sash around her waist to prevent it from trailing.
A procession of packed camels and horses crosses the mountains in the background, while a variety of everyday Ottoman customs take place in the foreground. A group of men share a meal seated on the ground; others are shown greeting each other, buying water from local women, or praying near the water. One man, at far right, can even be seen relieving himself. Prints like this would satisfy audiences in the Low Countries who were curious about everyday Ottoman practices.
An Ottoman soldier at far left directs our gaze as he observes the celebration before him. The French inscription (missing in this impression) specifies that in Macedonia, “The Turkish inhabitants, at the first view of every new moon of the whole year are delighted.” The Ottomans followed the Muslim lunar (Hijri) calendar. Ambassador De Schepper wrote that on July 3, 1533, he witnessed celebrations at nightfall that lasted three days. According to the Hijri calendar, July 3 was the first day of the Eid al-Adha.
We now witness a solemn funeral procession. Children carry saplings that would be planted near the grave. The original French inscription explains that men would climb into these trees every year. The soul of the deceased buried underneath the tallest tree has the greatest glory. Throughout the frieze, several cemeteries are shown in the background. The changing tombstones indicate the traveler’s progress into Ottoman territory: The closer we get to Istanbul, the more Ottoman gravestones (with carved turbans on top) appear.
A circumcision procession is led by men playing the zurna (a wind instrument), davul (drums), saz (an instrument like a tambour), and zil (cymbals), while women and children bring up the rear. According to De Schepper, after their circumcision the boys will swap their conical hats for their first turbans. We have finally reached Istanbul. The background is a view across the Golden Horn to the old city, with the mosque of Mehmed II in the middle and the mosque of Selim I to the right.
Coecke’s journey to Istanbul concludes with a ceremonial procession of Sultan Süleyman — seen here in profile on horseback, close to the right edge of the scene — from the Hippodrome to a mosque, possibly the Hagia Sophia. The sultan’s weekly procession to the mosque was an opportunity to exhibit the military strength and wealth of the palace to foreign visitors. Rather than an accurate topographical view, Coecke gave a composite view of the Hippodrome that allowed him to include more landmark monuments.
“What I love about this is the humanity of the scenes, like this kid is playing the flute,” said the curator, referring to Scene 4, “but this other kid is clearly scared and then he almost sets fire to the rope of whoever’s guarding him. There are lots of tiny details like that in it which makes it very approachable.”
Top that
“Portrait of the Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent,” unidentified artist, c. 1540–50.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“You can see from the print that the real topic is the crown, not the sultan, who is basically almost shrunken underneath it,” said Schepers. “Now the fun fact is that this crown has four layers, so it’s one tier higher than the papal tiara and it is larger than Charles V’s crown, so he’s basically saying, ‘My crown is bigger than yours.’”
According to Schepers, Grand Vizier İbrahim Pasha commissioned the helmet through Venetian merchants to visually legitimize Sultan Süleyman’s claim as a universal ruler. The print, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, is a fictitious representation, she said; the unknown artist likely glimpsed the helmet-crown while it was displayed in Venice before it got shipped to the Ottoman Empire.
“The sultan would have never worn a crown because wearing a crown means you have to take off your turban, and you would never do that as a ruler. But the helmet-crown did exist.” Records of it stop after the 18th century, said Schepers, speculating it “probably got melted at some point.”
Hip saint
Netherlandish artists, like Adriaen Isenbrandt in the oil painting below, often rendered biblical figures in contemporary fashion and interiors to make them relatable, said Schepers.
“You look at this as a woman, you see your clothing, you see your fashion, you see your house, wooden paneling, the stained-glass windows, and you recognize yourself in the scene. You can immediately identify with St. Catherine.”
Not literally, the curator jokes. “This is a mystic marriage. She’s not really getting married to a baby. She’s promising herself to Christianity.”
“The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria with Three Female Saints,” Adriaen Isenbrant c. 1520.
Fogg Museum
“Velvet with Tulips and Carnations in Ogival Lattice,” c. 1550–1650.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
The drapery in the painting has a similar motif to the Ottoman silk velvet placed with it. Europeans considered such textiles luxury goods at the time, Schepers said.
“All of the darker bits,” she added, pointing to the fabric. “That’s actually silver that was tarnished over time, so it would have been way brighter.”
Close-up of “Velvet with Tulips and Carnations in Ogival Lattice.”
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Dressed to impress
In the Ottoman Empire, both men and women wore kaftans, robes that were often handed down to family members and servants, at which point they often were altered to fit the new owner. Schepers points out cinching at the waist of the purple silk satin kaftan on display, as well as its gold and silver metallic swaying vine motif.
Robe decorated with swaying vine motif, 18th–19th century.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Though luxurious, she said, the kaftan was meant to be used. “I love that you can see the wear and tear. You can see some staining from sweat.”
It’s hard to believe the nalıns, or bath shoes, in a case nearby with their tall wooden platform heels inlaid with mother of pearl were ever worn, but Schepers notes use on the leather straps.
Pair of nalıns (bath shoes), 19th century.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
“The height of the shoes is a status symbol. The higher you are, the more important you are because you need servants who could hold you while you were walking. The higher the heels, the more servants you need.”
Clues in crosshatches and ‘Habsburg jaw’
“Charles V,” by Barthel Beham, 1531 (left) and “Portrait of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor,” Haydar Reis, 1566–74. Fogg Museum; Arthur M. Sackler Museum
“To the left we have a portrait by German artist Barthel Beham and to the right we have one from Ottoman artist Haydar Reis, and when you look at this you immediately see similarities between both,” said Schepers. “You can see the same type of fur coat, you can see the same type of hat, the beard.
“This is not a one-to-one copy but we know that Haydar Reis, before he became a court artist, he was also a sea captain who would have had access to European prints of Charles V both when he was stationed in the Mediterranean and at the Ottoman court in Istanbul.
“When you look closely you can see how his face is painted. It looks as if the artist used crosshatching, which is a technique you see in printmaking. It’s not a painter’s technique. So we’re pretty sure that he used a print as an example.
“What I really love about this is that you can encounter a different culture, but you never really get to the nuances. Charles V, because of all the Habsburg inbreeding, couldn’t close his mouth physically, it was always a little bit open. In the Netherlandish tradition of lifelikeness we show him with his mouth open but the Ottoman artist has closed his mouth because it’s polite. It’s such a tiny detail but for me this is glorious.”
Rugs to riches
Prayer carpet detail, 1850-1900.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A prayer carpet lying flat on the floor positioned in the direction of Mecca is juxtaposed with an Ottoman carpet draped over a Dutch-style table.
“Once these carpets in the 17th century were imported to the Low Countries, they were luxury objects. They were no longer used to pray; they were used to show off your wealth and your access to the trade market. You would either hang them on a wall or drape them over a balcony or a table,” Schepers said.
Lotto carpet draped over Dutch-style table.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Research and teaching
“This is a section I’m very proud of because I wanted students and fellows, conservation fellows, museum fellows, to all get involved with this exhibition,” Schepers said about a portion of the exhibit that highlights teaching and ongoing research. She added: “I also want to give them real exhibition practice, so all of the labels here are written by students.”
She called out a label written by Shireen Shah of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
“The Persian,” Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, 1632.
Fogg Museum
“Rembrandt’s understated yet effective hatching technique beautifully captures the range of textures in this man’s clothing. His heavy coat, soft fur cap, worn boots, and stiff cane immediately call their associated scents, sounds, and textures to mind: imagine the crunch of his cane against the rocky ground, the smell of leather emanating from his boots, the warmth of his woolly coat. The feather in his cap is reminiscent of the black egret plumes that adorned the turbans of Safavid royalty and nobility, hence his title ‘the Persian.’ Despite the exquisite rendering of his costume, the figure’s identity is unknown.”
Drawing from the museums’ extensive Forbes Collection of Pigments, Schepers and Celia Chari, Beal Family Postgraduate Fellow in Conservation Science, were able to showcase, in a glass case, samples of paint colors used in the works in the exhibition.
Display of pigments found in the exhibition.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
The cabinet includes an in-situ experiment to better understand the impact of lighting conditions in a gallery setting. Chari wondered whether Reis, in his portrait of Francis I, deliberately used a rare, mineral-based yellow pigment called pararealgar, which turns red eventually as it is exposed to light, for the golden areas of the painting.
“Portrait of Francis I, King of France,” Haydar Reis, 1566–74.
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
Chari is monitoring paint-outs in the cabinet of natural realgar, heat-treated realgar, artificial realgar, pararealgar, and orpiment, comparing how the swatches change over time under gallery lights. This also will help museum staff better understand how long they can safely display works composed of those materials.
Experts who have seen health consequences close-up offer guidelines for summer athletes
When Adam Tenforde made it to the Pac-10 championship as a Stanford cross-country runner a quarter century ago, he went all out in the 8,000 meters despite the Long Beach heat. But he struggled at 6,000 meters. Then he felt lightheaded. Then he woke up near a small tree by the course.
“As a driven athlete, I thought, ‘The race is getting harder, got to keep pushing,’” said Tenforde, who went on to an All-America running career. “My body shut down; it was pretty awful. And apparently, I ran into a tree.”
Tenforde, today a professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of running medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital’s National Running Center, shares the story not as a point of pride, but to offer lessons about running in the summer. First, give some serious thought to running fewer miles than you usually run. Next, listen to your body. If you’re really struggling, slow down. And if you begin to feel dizzy or lightheaded, take a break for a drink and cool down as quickly as you can to avoid heat exhaustion, which can lead to heat stroke, where a person’s natural cooling systems fail and soaring body temperature can cause organ failure and even death.
Another lesson from Tenforde’s running career is that it’s important to give the body a chance to adjust to changing temps. In other words, a run on the first warm day of spring is harder than a July workout under similar conditions. He also stressed that a runner should pay close attention to thirst, which can be an early sign of dehydration. That jibes with advice offered by Harvard College Running Club President Keegan Harkavy ’25, who plans routes around water — both to drink and to cool off with — and takes a cold shower soon after his workouts.
Catharina Giudice, an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said that her department sees a range of heat-related illnesses in the summer, from mild dehydration to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Time is of the essence in heat stroke because the body’s cooling system has broken down and internal temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher begin to alter the structure of proteins.
“It’s going to affect pretty much every organ system at that point,” said Giudice, a trail runner who is also a fellow at the Chan School’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment. “It’s critical that you cool the body as fast as possible.”
Experts say it’s difficult to provide a set temperature above which one should take a break for the day. The cutoff depends heavily on conditioning, acclimatization to heat, the availability of drinking water and shade on the route, the humidity, whether there’s a breeze, even the clothes you wear.
Summer running tips
Start with the expectation of a run that’s slower than usual
Give the body a chance to acclimatize to changing temperature
If you begin to feel dizzy or lightheaded, take a break
Pay attention to your thirst
In fact, according to Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, humans are well-equipped to exercise in the heat. Evolutionary changes — hairlessness, a profusion of sweat glands, and a high-capacity heart — allow us to move and work safely in the hot sun, when many animals rest, he said.
Though humans have the same number of hair follicles as chimpanzees, most of those hairs are microscopic, said Lieberman, whose books include “Exercised.” When it comes to sweat glands, we have between five and 10 million scattered over the skin, 10 times as many as the great apes.
“That means, in addition to basically squirting water all over our bodies, we allow air convection next to the skin, which causes evaporation and conduction of heat, which causes the skin to cool,” Lieberman said.
On the topic of summer safety, Lieberman said that it’s important to note key differences between our running habits and those of our distant ancestors. Persistence hunting, which could cover a great deal of territory, was done at relatively slow speed, interspersed with walking. The goal was not to outpace a game animal, but rather to keep it moving, depriving it of rest and the ability to cool down until it became exhausted.
“We never evolved to stand on a line in the middle of a hot day and run as fast as possible to another line 26.2 miles away,” Lieberman said. “When people did this kind of hunting, they ran nice and slow. They walked half the time and they ran half the time.”
While slowing your pace is an age-old strategy, Lieberman and Tenforde also suggested shifting the timing of runs into the mornings or evenings, a strategy that Lieberman himself embraces when running in Cambridge or while traveling, like on a recent trip to Kenya’s desertlike Turkana region to lecture at a Harvard Summer School program at the Turkana Basin Institute.
“You have to be very, very humble about how dangerous heat can be.”
Catharina Giudice
Most important, experts say, is that runners respect the heat. Athletes can be rigid about training schedules, but inattention to conditions, ignoring bodily signals, and not thinking ahead can cause a worst-case situation.
“Youhave to be very, very humble about how dangerous heat can be,” said Giudice.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Jill Goldstein is a clinical neuroscientist, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the founder and executive director of the Innovation Center on Sex Differences in Medicine at Mass General. She told us what science has revealed about sex differences in the brain.
When we talk about sex differences in the brain, there are a number of things to keep in mind.
First, sex and gender are different. Sex is based on the biology of the impact of sex chromosomes and gonadal hormones on the brain and body, whereas gender refers to the social roles and behaviors of an individual. Second, there are a lot of opinions about sex differences, and these can be informed by many things. The science of sex differences in the brain is built on a strong body of evidence going back decades. The difference in public opinion, on the other hand, can be traced even further back. Then, in the 1960s, there was a lot of discussion about the roles of women in the workforce and otherwise, and there was a fear that any research regarding sex differences in the brain would suggest that men were superior. Ironically, we have found that in many ways women’s brains are more robust. But this line of thinking sets up an unnecessary and false competition that results in anti-intellectual thought and in the omission of important aspects of the conversation, especially when it comes to studying health, wellness, and disease.
Many chronic diseases and disorders affect men and women differently. How might better understanding the brain’s role – including sex differences – lead to more efficacious treatments and help save lives?
So, are men and women’s brains different? The short answer is yes, and this difference begins during fetal development around the start of the second trimester. Sex chromosomes — whether a fetus has XY (for males), XX (for females), or some variation of these — and gonadal hormones drive the regulation of sex differences in development of the body and brain. The so-called organizational effects of hormones on the brain can be retained across the lifespan, although there are many variations on, for lack of a better term, the sexual dimorphisms of the brain. That is, no one who studies the biology of sex on the brain believes there can be only two forms, even though we use the word sexual dimorphisms to indicate specific differences.
While organizational effects of hormones set the stage in fetal development and in puberty, environmental exposures affect the expression of our biology, even though some of the basic biologic differences may be set in early development. This results in more brain variability within sex than there is between the sexes. That is, there are greater differences within women and within men than there are between men and women. However, it is the small differences in the brain that can have important implications for why, for example, we see sex differences in almost every disorder of the brain we know, including depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease. Also, sex differences in the brain vary depending on timing across the lifespan. For example, sex differences emerge when the brain and body are either differentially flooded with gonadal hormones — like in fetal development, puberty, pregnancy — or depleted of gonadal hormones in menopause, when compared with age-matched men. These natural reproductive stages can provide important windows of opportunity to understand how and why we see sex differences in the onset, prognosis, and course of so many illnesses that can lead to differences in treatment response.
Even brain regions in the same woman may activate differently at different points in her menstrual cycle. These so-called activational effects of gonadal hormones demonstrate that the brain acts differently under different hormonal changes. Depending on when you are comparing men to women in a study, this can have an impact on your findings. However, these differences in brain activity do not necessarily lead to differences in behavior. Sex differences in brain activity may produce similar behavior in women and men. For example, when a female is in certain phases of her menstrual cycle, hormones may impact brain activity differently but her behavior or performance on tasks may not differ at all. This variation is one of the reasons sex differences in the brain can be complicated to study. However, with knowledge of sex differences in the brain, one can account for these variations in a study’s design.
In fact, there are reasons it’s so important to continue studying sex differences in the brain and to differentiate these from gender differences. Many chronic diseases and disorders affect men and women differently. How might better understanding the brain’s role — including sex differences — lead to more efficacious treatments and help save lives?
There is still so much to learn. The brain is a versatile organ that changes constantly throughout the lifespan. Understanding its biology is critical, especially for the development of more effective diagnostic tools and therapies that incorporate the impact of sex, leading to the realization of precision medicine.
— As told to Samantha Laine Perfas/Harvard Staff Writer
Sox go with Nobel laureate southpaw to throw out first pitch
Nobel Prize laureate Claudia Goldin was invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Red Sox game, so predictably she did her research.
Since getting the nod in April, Goldin dug out the baseball mitt she first used on her intermural team at Princeton in the 1970s, when she was an assistant professor. She watched countless YouTube videos and enlisted several friends and former students for instruction on form and mechanics.
“I’ve been throwing balls my whole life, but it’s been pitching to a dog with its mouth open 25 feet away. Using a real baseball has more heft,” said Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics.
Goldin throwing the first pitch at Fenway Park.
With Wally the Green Monster.
Meeting members of Red Sox staff.
As a matter of fact, an early throwing session with a former student landed her in the emergency room with a split forehead and a bad bruise. “I had the ball with me because no one could understand what happened,” she said.
Among her most dedicated instructors/cheerleaders was Bridget Long, the Saris Professor of Education and Economics and a former student of Goldin’s, along with her husband, Carl Long. Their teenage sons, both left-handed pitchers, gave Goldin help with mechanics.
Last Friday evening, the left-handed Goldin, wearing 14 on her jersey (for her golden retriever Pika’s age and her own birthdate), took the field 47 feet from home plate. (“I’m not throwing from the mound, which is 60.5 feet,” said the 78-year-old economist.)
Goldin signed a ball for pitcher Liam Hendriks.
She landed a perfect pitch to Red Sox pitcher Liam Hendriks, who asked her to autograph the baseball for him.
“I don’t even remember it,” she said, coming off the field.
But Carl Long was ecstatic. “They might call her in for relief,” he said. The Sox ended up beating the Yankees 9-7 and didn’t need a lefty laureate as a closer.
Why would a busy professor take time to reread a book?
They wade through stacks each year. But here are some that draw them back.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Some read a book only once, but many revisit favorites for comfort, inspiration, and pure pleasure. William Faulkner annually returned to “Don Quixote,” the epic novel by Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Literary critic Harold Bloom said he “endlessly reread Shakespeare.” Stephen King told The New York Times he had read “The Lord of the Flies” by William Golding “eight or nine times,” and New Yorker critic and Harvard professor James Wood finds his way back “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf each year. The Gazette asked five other faculty members about their rereading habits.
Harvard file photo
Evelynn Hammonds
Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies
“The Color Purple” by Alice Walker is the book I always go back to. I read it for the first time when I was in graduate school. I read it in one sitting; I stayed up all night. I was so moved by the letters that the main character, Celie, was writing to God.
Her life was one of violence and trauma, but the two things that were most important to her were the relationship with her sister Nettie and the one with Shug Avery, the blues singer who became her friend and at some point, her lover. The story itself was wonderful, deeply moving, beautifully written, and very evocative.
The main part in the story, where Celie and Shug come together, struck me deeply as a way of representing the truly transformative power of love. Celie lived in a world that was incredibly violent, horrifically abusive, and she triumphs, and how she triumphs is so beautifully rendered.
The story is also a representation of the formidable bonds of womanhood and sisterhood. I always am struck by how those women in the story come together and survive so much, but through it all, they’re bonded to each other. That was something that touched me the first time I read it, and it touches me every time I read it. I try to read it at least once a year. I get something new from it.
I recognize that it is largely a story about the interior lives of African American people, but it’s also a story about how people can be transformed, particularly because of the bonds they share. That’s something that seemed relevant to me this year in which we saw so many divisions across campus and elsewhere. The book reminds me that we’ll get through this and that it will be better, but it means that we must build community and trust in the power of community, and at the end of the day, to really think about the power of love. That is why I turn to it all the time.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Ya-Chieh Hsu
Professor of stem cell and regenerative biology
I’m a huge fan of audiobooks — addicted, in fact! They fit seamlessly into so many activities like commuting, exercising, and doing chores, making “reading” possible and enjoyable no matter how full a day seems. Here are some of my favorites that I think are even better in audio format than in print. I have “read” them so many times, or listened, to be exact.
“Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah is an autobiography about his experiences growing up as a biracial child in South Africa during and after apartheid. It masterfully blends humor and poignancy and showcases Noah’s extraordinary talent as a comedian. This book made me reflect on so many things: privilege, culture, race, injustice, power, humanity, humility, courage, and, above all, love.
“Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” by Elizabeth Gilbert is a book about how to live a creative life. Although Gilbert writes from a writer’s perspective, I find it immensely inspiring for my own scientific endeavors, which are also deeply connected to creativity. One chapter, “Walk Proudly,” resonated with me so deeply that I have shared it with many people and listened to it countless times — it empowers me whenever I need to be brave.
“Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir. In my youth, I dreamed of writing science fiction to combine my love of science and writing. Now I write countless grants and papers instead — a different kind of dream come true, so be careful what you wish for! This is one of my favorite science fiction books, but I shouldn’t say too much to avoid spoilers. I especially enjoyed the conversations between Rocky and Grace. It’s a heartwarming reminder that true communication comes from the heart, not language.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Matt Liebmann
Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology
“Hope for the Flowers” by Trina Paulus was recommended to me by a cousin a while ago, and I find myself rereading it a lot over the years. It’s a very short book and has illustrations, but I find that as I move through life, revisiting it helps me find new lessons in it every time I read it.
It’s kind of an allegory for how to how to live your life. I’m not a big rereader, but because this one is so short I can get through it in a quick amount of time, and it’s so bright and yellow (laughs) I just find myself occasionally pulling it down. It causes me to step back and reflect.
I got to say the same with “Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for a New Millennium” by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I picked it up in my first trip to Southeast Asia in 2000. It was my first exposure to Buddhist thought and philosophy. I picked it up in a bookstore in Bangkok and found it to be simultaneously very enlightening and very profound.
I go back to it because it’s the kind of book where I read a sentence or two, or maybe a paragraph at most, and I must mark the page, put it down and think about what I’ve read. I’ll read it in short doses because I always find new things to think about.
In that book, in particular, the Dalai Lama says that he’s not trying to convert people or demonstrate that Buddhism is the right way; he’s just laying out what he sees as logical ways to live our lives — observations that are often very profound. It helps me think about how the world works and how it should work, and how I could help to make it work better.
Harvard file photo
Diana Eck
Professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, emerita; Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, emerita
I have a favorite list of books that I have “read” more than once, but I confess that I am a listener of audiobooks. I have loved many books in the last year and have relistened to several with pleasure. I started with the Hilary Mantel books that are read and interpreted with such fine expression and voice — “Wolf Hall,” “Bring Up the Bodies,” “The Mirror and the Light.” I listened to the whole series twice.
More recently, I have been reading Abraham Verghese. He himself reads “The Covenant of Water” and hearing it narrated by a Malayalam speaker brings a whole culture to life. I am almost finished with my second reading. Why? It is the intense humanity of the story and the sheer beauty of his voice. Told entirely in the present but spanning generations. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Alejandra Vela Martínez
Assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures (Spanish)
Thinking about this question, I realized that, aside from work, there are few books I return to purely for pleasure. The first ones that came to mind were the “Asterix” and “Mafalda” comics, which I can always revisit briefly and joyfully, making me feel like a child again.
Another book that quickly came to mind is “The Eternal Feminine” by the Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. Technically, it’s a play — the subtitle even calls it a farce — but in reality, it’s somewhat unstageable, requiring a production of at least four hours.
I love the book because it journeys through different moments in Mexican history and highlights female figures, showing how they’ve been subjugated and the discussions that can arise from that. Plus, it’s the last book Castellanos wrote before her sudden death in 1974 while she was serving as ambassador to Israel. The book is fun, and you can start rereading it from any point since each part is fairly independent.
Walking children through a garden of good and evil
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Jamaica Kincaid’s new book presents history of colonialism, identity through plants that helped shape it
In Jamaica Kincaid’s garden, surprises are common. This summer, a Canada lily bloomed by her front door, while dill, tomatillo, and parsnip cropped up in the vegetable garden — all unprompted gifts from past seasons.
Kincaid, professor of African and African American Studies in residence, emerita, walked through the lush beds of plantings at her Vermont, home, snipping scapes off garlic plants for dinner. The Antiguan American author, who once spent half her year in Cambridge, retired from teaching this spring and is now a year-rounder in North Bennington amid the forests, farms, and covered bridges.
“It’s where I feel most at home, really,” she said. “It’s strange, because I grew up in a seascape and now I’m surrounded by mountains. When I’m at the sea I can’t really think, but when I’m at the mountains, I can think.”
Kincaid shares her love of plants and their history in a new book published this spring. “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children,” illustrated by Kara Walker, is an ABC of plants that shaped the world, and their often-brutal colonial history. It’s the first children’s book in nearly 40 years for Kincaid, an award-winning writer whose work encompasses themes of colonialism, identity, and family relationships.
“I wrote the book for the child I used to be and perhaps still am.”
“I wrote the book for the child I used to be and perhaps still am,” said Kincaid, the author of “Annie John” (1985), “Lucy” (1990), “The Autobiography of My Mother” (1996), and “Mr. Potter” (2002), as well as numerous other books, short stories, and essays.
That child learned to read nonfiction books at her mother’s elbow, preferring the dictionary and the Bible to children’s literature. In school, her favorite subjects were botany, history, and geography — three topics she weaves together in “An Encyclopedia.”
As a child in Antigua, Kincaid experienced an island climate dry and prone to drought, but her mother, who came from the more tropical climate of Dominica, had a natural talent for growing plants that Kincaid absorbed.
Today, she said, gardening serves as a way of getting her literary ideas flowing. The writing desk in her Vermont office sits before a wide window that looks out on a magnolia tree and the garden beyond.
Her garden is a patchwork of memories and meaning: two hollyhocks grown from seeds she collected in Ukraine and Israel, a cotoneaster from a visit to China, and a section devoted to Antiguan plants — cotton, sugarcane, banana, cockscomb, and dahlias — which she raises with varying degrees of success in less temperate southern Vermont.
“I didn’t write [my book] to make children interested in gardening, but to be interested in the world,” Kincaid said. “It’s meant to make you love the world. Because I love the world, and the world of the garden in that book.”
“An Encyclopedia” opens in the Garden of Eden (“A Is for Apple and Adam too”), establishing themes of good, evil, and the fall of man, which come up on later pages.
“So much of the garden as we know it, or the vegetable kingdom, is involved in a great violation in our part of the world: the violation of enslaving people and attaching them to plants to yield wealth for somebody.”
“So much of the garden as we know it, or the vegetable kingdom, is involved in a great violation in our part of the world: the violation of enslaving people and attaching them to plants to yield wealth for somebody,” Kincaid explained. “In thinking about the history of Africans in the New World, you can’t help but immediately go to plants. Their presence is associated with cotton and forced labor and eventually they become a commodity like the commodity of cotton and sugar.”
In her book, Kincaid doesn’t hold back from referencing some of history’s darker moments. “B Is for Breadfruit” explains that the tree was introduced to the Caribbean by Capt. James Cook as food for enslaved people. “U Is for Ulmus” describes the elm tree under which William Penn signed a treaty of friendship with the Lenni Lenape Nation in 1682 that lasted only a generation before the Lenape were displaced by European settlers.
“The American Elm was introduced into the American imagination as a plant that represented love and peace,” Kincaid said. “The American Elm began to suffer from a disease, and it’s extinct now. I make the connection that the elm tree, having witnessed the betrayal of this promise, has decided to die.”
During the publishing process, Kincaid was adamant about keeping the phrase “colored children” in the title, preferring it to “children of color” despite it deterring some potential collaborators. However, Kincaid found a kindred creator in artist Walker, who is known for exploring themes of race, identity, and violence, especially via black cut-paper silhouetted figures.
“I would send her my entries, and she would then draw something for it,” Kincaid recalled. “Everything she sent was a delight.”
Kincaid dislikes most children’s books, finding them too simple and patronizing for their young audiences. Exceptions include a few classics such as Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny,” and Beatrix Potter’s “Peter Rabbit.” (Kincaid identifies with Mr. McGregor.)
“Most children’s books are just utter nonsense and really seem designed to blunt a child’s thinking.”
“Most children’s books are just utter nonsense and really seem designed to blunt a child’s thinking,” Kincaid said. “You should tell us about the world. A child should know all of that, because it encourages us as children to seek out the truth.”
Kincaid taught her final course this spring. Retiring, she said, is bittersweet.
“It made me, I think, a better person,” Kincaid said about teaching. “I loved my students. I loved seeing someone flower.”
Kincaid at her desk with a view of her garden.
She pages through the first draft of her book.
A copy of her published book.
Kincaid pages through the book with illustrations by artist Kara Walker.
Kincaid’s immediate plans include writing, reading, cultivating her garden, and following her own curiosity. This summer, she will delve into the history of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, with books on Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and the Portuguese empire. (Also in Kincaid’s summer to-read pile: Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” Sathnam Sanghera’s “Empireland,” and Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch.”)
“In a way, I love the feeling of not knowing, because the pleasure of then knowing what you didn’t know is so amazing,” Kincaid said. “I don’t resent being ignorant because every time the ignorance is erased it’s so thrilling. God knows there’s a lot in an individual that is ignorant, but if you just keep on, you erase a little bit of it every day.”
Consider the ancient history and glory of Olympics (and the modern sneaker deal)
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
In Greece, students find intersection of academics and athletics
Jordyn Duby and James Rozolis-Hill got to try something this summer few College athletes will ever experience — running on the track at the archaeological site at Archaia Olympia in Greece, where the Games first took place more than 2,000 years ago.
“It was honestly surreal,” recalled Rozolis-Hill ’26, an Environmental Science & Public Policy concentrator with a secondary in computer science and a member of the Men’s Water Polo Team. “You’re down on the track looking around and nothing has really changed. It’s still a valley. You’re looking at the same sunsets, the same mountains as the first Olympians.”
The experience came as part of a four-day July intensive co-hosted by the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in the U.S. and Greece at the International Olympic Academy on the Peloponnese, where students delved into studying the original Games, its 19th-century revival, and its influence on modern sport.
Thirty-nine Greek and American students took part in the inaugural Sport and Education Program, done in collaboration with the International Olympic Academy, Region of Western Greece, the University of Patras, and the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport at the University of Texas at Austin.
“It’s an Olympic year, so it’s a great time to be thinking about the history of the Olympics,” said Mark Schiefsky, C. Lois P. Grove Professor of the Classics and director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. “The modern Olympics was an explicit revival of the ancient games, out of a sense of the educational value of sports, so it’s a good example of the way antiquity is received and shapes our contemporary practices.”
“The modern Olympics was an explicit revival of the ancient games, out of a sense of the educational value of sports, so it’s a good example of the way antiquity is received and shapes our contemporary practices.”
Mark Schiefsky
“There are very few programs — and not much scholarship — that get into the detailed understanding of the reception of the classical tradition and how it really did shape modern sport and university sport as we know it,” said Charles Stocking, UT Austin’s Sport and Education Program academic director.
“The idea is to bring together professionals and professors working in the ancient world of sport and those working in the modern world of sport and thinking about that historical connection, and what we can continue to learn from analyzing that discourse,” explained Stocking, who is also an associate professor in both classics and kinesiology and health education.
Morning seminars on topics such as the ancient Olympics, early education. and the modern relationship between the two were followed by tours of museums or ancient ruins.
Faculty included Angela Schneider, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies and a silver medalist in rowing at the 1984 Summer Olympics, and Heather Reid, scholar in residence at the Exedra Mediterranean Center, who qualified for the Olympic trials in cycling in the 1980s.
“That’s been the greatest part — meeting all of these Greek students, who have very different experiences from us, but we immediately connected with them,” said Duby, who is studying molecular and cellular biology with a minor in Classics.
Schiefsky noted ancient athletics surfaced many of the same debates we have today. Plato believed organized sports fostered moral excellence as well as physical strength, but other thinkers, like the physician Galen, argued they had no mental or physical benefit.
Charles Stocking.
James Rozolis-Hill.
Christos Giannopoulos (from left), James Rozolis-Hill, and Jordyn Duby.
Students visit a memorial for Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympic Games.
Still, the gymnasium was an important feature of civic life for many young free men in ancient Greece and the revival of the modern Olympics in 1896 was an attempt at unifying society, according to Schiefsky.
“Claims were made that bringing back sports and reconstituting this kind of public gymnasium would be key toward promoting democracy and civic cohesion in the late 19th century,” Schiefsky said.
Rozolis-Hill found particular interest in a group discussion about how sportsfosters the values of teamwork, drive, and perseverance — which are widely applicable across fields and on the job.
“Playing a sport grants you the opportunity to create that trait in yourself,” Rozolis-Hill said. “We talked about not only that, but how it can apply to your everyday life. Is that application of trait from sport to life a skill in itself?”
Duby recalled a discussion on the value of competition in the age of name, image, and likeness (NIL) financialdeals, a hotly debated topic in modern college athletics.
“In ancient Greece the reason they would compete was for glory. You want to win so you can have glory for yourself and for your city,” Duby said. “I would say I joined the team not for glory, but instead for the joy that it brings me. But now, in the age of NIL deals, there’s a monetary value in becoming an athlete. It’s interesting to see how things have changed.”
Schiefsky plans to develop educational materials that could be used in a future Harvard course on sports and education.
“Being exposed to that long sweep of history, and the fact that in antiquity people were debating many of the same questions — that kind of historical sensitivity is very valuable for people to get,” Schiefsky said.
More money, empowerment — and less chance of domestic abuse
Woman collecting coffee cherries.
Photo courtesy of Deniz Sanin
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Study examines benefits for working women who help produce Rwandan specialty coffee
Economist Deniz Sanin was at Starbucks when a bag of specialty coffee from Rwanda caught her eye.
“I Googled it right away,” she recalled. “It turns out, there’s been a coffee boom in the country.”
Four years later, the Economics Department visiting scholar is finishing up a domestic violence study inspired by that chance encounter. Her research was made possible by the rapid expansion in the 21st century of Rwanda’s cooperative mills, which hire women as seasonal workers to help process coffee cherries. Sanin’s analyses show these wage earners are subject to less abuse by their husbands during the harvest season, just when they’re busy at the mills.
“The results are not all cheerful,” said Sanin, whose working paper is under review with the American Economic Review. “But the good news is, now we can use them to shape policy.”
“The results are not all cheerful.But the good news is, now we can use them to shape policy.”
Deniz Sanin
The development economist brings a longtime interest in women’s issues, particularly outside of wealthier countries like the U.S. She grew up in Istanbul in an environment of “female empowerment,” with an academic/public health expert mother and financial analyst father. The family proved a rarity in Turkey, which has persistent gender gaps in education, by prioritizing their daughter’s schooling.
Sanin dove into the scholarship on domestic violence and women’s financial empowerment while pursuing her Ph.D. at Georgetown University. She found a 2010 study which confirmed higher earnings meant lower rates of domestic violencefor women in California. But in the developing world, research showed the threat of violence can actually increase for women with access to more money — via family resources or anti-poverty programs that offer cash transfers.
“I was heartbroken to learn it can go the other way,” said Sanin, who vowed to find a natural experiment to investigate the benefits of women earning money outside the home.
In late 2019, Sanin was researching the impacts of Rwanda’s 2008 domestic violence law, which criminalized spousal abuse while allowing women to unliterally divorce violent husbands. Then a trip to that Washington, D.C., Starbucks sparked her curiosity about the country’s coffee industry and gradually pieces started to fall into place.
Sanin immediately found a 2011 case study detailing Rwanda’s shift to higher-quality coffee production, with farm communities building more than 200 cooperatives in the East African country between 2002 and 2012. She also learned women traditionally did the cleaning, drying, and sorting of coffee cherries during the spring-summer harvest in home operations.
Meanwhile, researching the 2008 legislation brought Sanin into contact with Rwanda’s newly digitized records on monthly domestic violence hospitalizations. She was already acquainted with the country’s Demographic and Health Survey, a source of robust self-reported data collected every five years on domestic violence, labor market outcomes, household spending, and more.
“All of a sudden, I had my natural experiment,” said Sanin, now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina.
A male coffee farmer in Rwanda, she learned, traditionally sells the family’s yield at a local market. But those fortunate enough to live near one of the growing number of neighborhood mills earn much more because the membership-based entities export to foreign countries.
Wives still had to help their husbands harvest. The facilities, however, needed laborers to help with the processing tasks that hadn’t been mechanized, and women were the obvious choice.
“Since the tasks are female-dominated,” Sanin writes in her paper, “a mill enables the wife in the catchment area to transition from an unpaid family worker in the couple’s plot to a wage worker in the mill for the same tasks as before.”
In other words, the mills doubly tie a husband’s economic interests to his wife’s ability to perform labor. Looking at data as far back as 2005 allowed Sanin to confirm that domestic violence had decreased for couples living in areas served by a newly opened mill. Wives in these neighborhoods became 29 percent less likely to self-report an incident over the previous 12 months.
Mean hospitalizations for domestic violence within the year (women)
Further analysis revealed this was particularly true during the harvest’s June-to-July peak, with hospitals in catchment areas showing a 14 percent decrease in domestic violence patients.
“I was not expecting this,” Sanin said. “When I first requested the data from the Minister of Health, I thought I probably didn’t need the monthly data.”
She then broadened her examination, performing a similar analysis with data on Rwanda’s potato farming regions, where women lack the same opportunities to monetize traditional tasks. “I found no change in hospitalizations in these areas during the potato harvest,” Sanin said.
She also looked at nearby Ethiopia, where social acceptance of domestic violence is high — and divorce remains far more stigmatized. “There was recently a randomized control trial there, with factory jobs randomly given to women,” Sanin said. But within that cultural context, she explained, “researchers did not find an effect on domestic violence.”
Sanin’s paper parses several possibilities for the variations. One is that women with income have increased bargaining power in their marriages. To test this theory, Sanin analyzed self-reported household decision-making, traditionally left to the husband under Rwandan social norms. Women living in the mills’ catchment areas proved slightly more likely to make financial and contraception decisions either alone or jointly with spouses.
A wife’s income could also relieve financial stressors on the couple. Sanin tested this by comparing self-reported monthly household consumption to the domestic violence hospitalization data.
“I find that monthly consumption was higher right after the harvest season relative to the pre-harvest, although the domestic violence hospitalizations were the same before and right after the harvest,” said Sanin, who continued work on the paper as a 2021-22 visiting research fellow with the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program.
Separate analyses were used to test the “exposure reduction” theory (that is, the simple fact that working outside the home means less time with abusive partners). “The majority of the couples here are coffee farmers, but there are some where the wife is a coffee farmer and the husband is a truck driver or construction worker,” Sanin explained. “They plausibly did not see each other during the work hours both before and after the mill opening. But once she started earning more, there was still a decrease in domestic violence.”
The bottom line, she concluded, is that her study shows domestic violence rising and falling according to men’s economic self-interests. “During the harvest season, when a husband’s income is a function of the wife’s labor, it’s really costly for him to incapacitate her,” Sanin said.
But her analysis also points to two conditions necessary for female employment to reduce domestic violence. “You need a context in which divorce is a credible threat, where women can walk out of the marriage,” Sanin said. “And in such a context, it also matters whether the husband derives some kind of economic benefit from the wife’s physical productivity at work.”
Tracing roots of hidden language of an outsider minority
Graduate student aims to update large gaps in research on argot of Irish Travelers
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
The origins of the ethnic language of Irish Travelers, a traditionally nomadic minority, have long been a mystery. Some linguists believe it has ancient Celtic roots, others that it was fabricated by medieval poets or monks, while still others think it’s only some 300 years old, coinciding with the rise of English in Ireland.
Oisín Ó Muirthile finds all these explanations lacking.
“We have this vast range of potential time depth that, for me, was intriguing,” said Ó Muirthile, a Ph.D. candidate studying Celtic languages and literatures and linguistics. He spent the last 10 months based in Dublin on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, researching the roots of the language known as the Gammon or the Cant by its speakers, and called Shelta by academics.
His interest was sparked by the significant lack of updated research. “In terms of linguistic investigations, there haven’t been a lot; maybe a handful,” Ó Muirthile said. “That really intrigued me, academically. I had never encountered this big of a gap that I might be able to contribute to.” But he also hopes his work will prove useful to the Travelers, who fear the erosion of interest in the language among younger generations.
Gammon/Cant is largely a spoken language with little written record (nothing definitively older than 1882) and no conventional spelling system, according to Ó Muirthile.
The process isn’t easy. Gammon/Cant is largely a spoken language with little written record (nothing definitively older than 1882) and no conventional spelling system, according to Ó Muirthile. This is partly intentional, as it is essentially an argot, the private language of a closed outsider community that faced suspicion and bias for centuries.
Ó Muirthile’s source materials are mostly manuscript notes in near-illegible handwriting and crackling field recordings from the 1950s. Another issue, he noted, is that most early collectors were unfamiliar with both Gammon/Cant and Irish, leading to many errors in their documentation.
The vocabulary is largely of Irish Gaelic origin with sounds reordered — what linguists call metathesis, Ó Muirthile explained. For example, the word cailín (“girl” in Irish) is laicín or lackeen in Gammon/Cant, while doras (“door” in Irish) is rodas or ruddus.
Today, the syntactic structure resembles English. For example, someone might say, “The lackeen’s at the ruddus,” meaning “The girl is at the door.” Even so, Gammon/Cant has developed its own unique and distinct character that varies widely among speakers.
Ó Muirthile’s research leads him to believe the language’s origins are “certainly centuries old, likely post-medieval,” though precisely how old is still unclear. Still, he is comfortable discounting monks or poets as the source.
“There’s an idea that you’d need formal literary training to come up with such a complex system. I don’t think there’s any evidence of that,” Ó Muirthile said. “The attested forms I think are quite easily explained with the phonetic form, without recourse to writing.”
Members of the community have increasingly expressed the need for language preservation, though most advocacy groups are focused on more urgent issues such as health, accommodation, poverty, and education.
He also doesn’t believe the use of English grammatical structure suggests the language is relatively modern. Instead, he believes this aspect evolved due to increased English usage among Irish Travelers in the 18th and 19th centuries, similar to the impact on modern Irish.
Today, most Travelers don’t travel due to anti-nomadic laws and instead live largely stationary lives, which many consider forced cultural assimilation. Ó Muirthile described overt ethnic discrimination and social ostracization they routinely face from wider Irish society.
Members of the community have increasingly expressed the need for language preservation, though most advocacy groups are focused on more urgent issues such as health, accommodation, poverty, and education, Ó Muirthile said.
“Some have reported drop-off in language acquisition among the youngest generation, which every Traveler I’ve spoken to says is a shame,” Ó Muirthile said. “The language, of course, is very important but at the end of the day, you need to be alive to have your language.”
Ó Muirthile has been focusing on the densest parts of archival research with the hope of making the information available for future Traveler researchers. Due to the private nature of the community, Ó Muirthile is undecided whether to make public the corpus he has created, but he hopes to make it available to the group after he completes his dissertation.
“Compiling these things and presenting [them] in an academic form is obviously important for academic research, but it doesn’t necessarily translate well into accessible literature,” Ó Muirthile said. “I will continue to discuss with Travelers how it might be turned into something more useful for the community.”
Scientists cautiously optimistic about trial results of new preventative treatment, prospects for new phase in battle with deadly virus
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Researchers may have found a powerful new preventative against the AIDS virus, which has killed more than 40 million people since the epidemic began in 1981.
In late June, a trial of lenacapavir, an existing anti-HIV drug used to reduce infection, produced an astonishing result: None of the more than 2,100 young female participants in the test contracted the deadly virus. The results beat those of drugs currently being used for this purpose: Truvada, on which 16 of more than 1,000 women became infected, and Descovy, on which 39 of 2,100 plus contracted HIV, between 1 and 2 percent of those treated.
Lenacapavir, produced by drugmaker Gilead Sciences, works by preventing the virus from reproducing. Researchers wanted to know whether giving it to sexually active individuals who have not been infected — a strategy known as PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis — might create a hostile environment in the body and prevent the virus from taking hold.
630,000People died of AIDS-related causes in 2022
AIDS deaths peaked in 2004, but the condition still killed 630,000 in 2022, when there were 1.3 million new infections. In 2016, the United Nation’s member states committed to ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Researchers have been unsuccessful so far in developing a vaccine.
The Gazette spoke with Roger Shapiro, professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has worked to fight AIDS in Botswana for two decades, including early trials exploring PrEP as a way to prevent mother-to-child transmission during breastfeeding. Shapiro said some caveats remain about lenacapavir, but the results are very promising.
It is clear from reading news coverage of this HIV drug trial that there’s a lot of excitement around these results. What do you think of them?
I think the excitement is warranted. We have never had a large HIV prevention trial with zero transmissions before, which is such a convincing result. The other exciting aspect of this trial is the convenience and simplicity of dosing the product just twice per year. I think that will be really attractive to people who may have been on the fence about using PrEP before.
Are these drugs different from vaccines, which also prevent infection?
Drugs are different than vaccines, although when used for PrEP they serve the same preventive purpose. Vaccines train our own immune systems to recognize and attack an infection, whereas drugs work to stop HIV from reproducing at the cellular level and need to be re-dosed to maintain activity.
With a drug such as lenacapavir that can stay effective for six months, the patient experience does start to become more similar to a vaccine, with the important difference that it always needs to be re-dosed.
“Vaccines train our own immune systems to recognize and attack an infection, whereas drugs work to stop HIV from reproducing at the cellular level and need to be re-dosed to maintain activity.”
Is there something that you thought most important about this trial that should be highlighted?
The point to highlight is that zero transmission is a novel and important finding — it received a standing ovation at the international HIV conference when it was presented this week. We have known for several years that long-acting PrEP delivered at a clinic setting is very effective, as this was shown in studies using a different HIVdrug called cabotegravir.
But this new study, called PURPOSE 1, really extends those earlier findings for injectable PrEP. The study was large and placebo-controlled, and along with the main efficacy findings, had reassuring safety data.
But there are a few caveats: First, PURPOSE 1, only enrolled cisgender women. There is a companion trial, PURPOSE 2, which will include cisgender men who have sex with men, transgender men, transgender women, and gender non-binary individuals.
The results of that trial are expected in late 2024 or early 2025. So we really don’t know yet whether we will see the same impressive level of protection in those other groups. We also know that these impressive findings occurred in a controlled research setting and may differ in the real world.
Is this potentially the beginning of the end of the HIV epidemic? If so, how long might that take and what would it look like?
I think we are entering a new era where we can expect to drive down transmission to lower and lower levels using a combination of approaches. These approaches include better uptake of testing and treatment, which have been shown to reduce HIV incidence at the population level, as well as PrEP strategies that are more and more effective.
But this only works at scale. We have plenty of work ahead of us to make these approaches affordable and implementable in the places where the need is greatest, which is largely in Sub-Saharan Africa.
“There are still over 1.3 million HIV infections per year — but we now have the tools to really make a dent in these numbers.”
What might stand in the way?
The cost of drugs, for starters. I sincerely hope that lenacapavir will be made available at very low cost for resource-poor parts of the world if it is approved for PrEP by the necessary regulators.There are some encouraging efforts to allow generic manufacturing of this drug for low resource parts of the world, and these need to move forward quickly.
We also need to improve access to HIV testing and linkage to care in hard-to-reach populations, to know who needs to be on treatment and who can benefit from PrEP. And we need simple, community-based implementation strategies to expand access to all of it.
Getting back to whether we might see the end of the HIV epidemic, I think it depends on whether you are asking if we will be able to eliminate all HIV or end its epidemic spread. Humans are complicated. There will always be some who are hard to reach and remain outside of care. And we are still a long way from a one-shot vaccine for HIV, which could ultimately break the cycle of HIV transmission for the next generation.
Until that occurs, our best strategy is to use the amazing new drugs that we have to maximum effect for treatment and prevention and drive new infections to very low levels. This will be no small achievement — there are still over 1.3 million HIV infections per year — but we now have the tools to really make a dent in these numbers. When that happens, we can start talking about the end of the epidemic, while still working toward the ultimate goal of complete elimination.
Is the one-injection-every-six-months treatment model important?
I think so. Many patients really like the current PrEP injections that are once every two months. This strategy removes the need to think about taking a pill each day and can reduce stigma as well. Pushing that out to every six months is almost certainly going to be even better.
For decades, HIV has eluded efforts to control it. What makes lenacapavir different?
We still have a few boxes to check before we can call lenacapavir a game-changer in the PrEP space, but right now it looks very promising. With the right public health messaging and delivery strategies, a highly effective twice-per-year injection to prevent HIV might greatly expand the use of PrEP and drive down new HIV infections. But it needs to be affordable globally, and it needs to be deliverable in hard-to-reach places. Any PrEP strategy, including lenacapavir, will need to be low cost in resource-poor parts of the world to make an impact. I can’t stress this enough.
Cognitive neurologist sees value in age-focused conversations around Biden’s exit, but also a lack of nuance
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
The decision by President Joe Biden, 81, to exit the 2024 presidential race followed months of discussion related to his age and cognitive abilities, including criticism from his 78-year-old Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump. In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, Kirk Daffner, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cognitive neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, shared his reaction to the intense focus on Biden’s candidacy and talked more widely about age and work.
Have we lost an opportunity to shatter stereotypes? Clearly, both Biden and former President Trump — whether you agree with their policies or not — have been performing at a fairly high level.
It’s extraordinary what both the candidates have been able to do in their mid- to upper 70s. It also highlights the fact that our view of who is considered old has changed. When I started to study age-related cognitive changes, the “old” people we investigated were in their mid-60s. Today, people in their 60s tend to be thought of as middle-aged. I’m told that Lincoln considered himself old when he took office, but he was only 52. What was considered old then is radically different from what we consider old now.
“The recent discussion has suggested that there’s a moment when a person moves from being young to being old, implying a sharp dividing line between normal cognitive aging and abnormal, diseased cognitive aging. That is not true.”
Has Biden’s withdrawal had an impact on people you see in the clinic? Is this a hard moment for older people who may be trying to continue in their careers?
This has not been a major theme for patients in the last few days. People talk about it in passing, but they are not bemoaning that it undermines their sense of purpose or faith in their abilities. That said, it is common in my practice to talk to patients about their professional lives or other activities and under what circumstances it makes sense for them to alter what they’re doing. Awareness of the issues facing President Biden can serve as an invitation to all of us to be more proactive, because I don’t think the best time to take up this question is in the middle of a personal crisis. The more we think about these challenges in advance, the more we will be able to plan for and handle them when the time comes. That said, most of us don’t address these really tough questions until they become obvious.
Is denial a major factor?
It varies from person to person. There are definitely people whose work isn’t the centerpiece of their lives and there are others whose work is a vocation, a calling. Work is profoundly tied up with who people think they are. For some, to give up work or to give up certain activities and responsibilities is to lose oneself. That is a scary and painful process.
Denial is something that we all are at risk of experiencing and exhibiting. However — and I’m not talking about any recent or current candidates for president — sometimes the brain processes that are associated with changes in cognition can undermine our ability to have insight into our losses. So, it may not be denial in the psychological sense, but it may be a reduced capacity to clearly see how we’ve changed and where we’re headed.
Are there lessons in the case of President Biden to inform wider conversations around ageism and old-age stereotypes in the U.S.?
This was an opportunity to have a much more nuanced discussion about age, but a lot of the recent discussion has painted these issues with a very broad brush. Old age has been portrayed as a time of frailty, cognitive decline, and dementia, images that have not served us well. If you look at people across the age spectrum, the variability in cognitive abilities increases with age. There are definitely people in their 80s who are as sharp as people in their 50s and perform their tasks and duties on par with them. The recent discussion has suggested that there’s a moment when a person moves from being young to being old, implying a sharp dividing line between normal cognitive aging and abnormal, diseased cognitive aging. That is not true. There’s a continuum between normal and abnormal cognitive aging. As we get older, there’s an increasing risk of developing a whole range of conditions that can impact the brain and cognitive functioning and very few of us reach the end of our lives without having had several of these processes affect us.
Is the idea of “making room for the next generation” a valid reason for someone who still desires to work to step aside?
I don’t think that that particular question is within the purview of the expertise of a cognitive neurologist, but my own sense — after having taken care of many people of different ages — is that there can be a lot of variability in any particular generation’s perspective on the world. It seems wise for our leaders to tap into transgenerational knowledge and wisdom — to surround themselves with people who are older, perhaps wiser, as well as people who are younger and have a different perspective — and not to rely solely on the perspective of one’s own generation.
From left Mitchell Saron, Colin Heathcock, Elizabeth Tartakovsky (top row); Filip Dolegiewicz, Eli Dershwitz (second row); Jessica Zi Jia Guo, Nicholas Zhang, Lauren Scruggs (bottom row).
Photos courtesy of International Fencing Federation; photo illustration by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff
First-year fencer makes history as member of all-Harvard squad in Paris
Eight members of the U.S. and Canadian fencing teams competing in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris have ties to Harvard, including all four members of the U.S. men’s saber squad. It’s the first time in Olympics history that an entire squad is from the same college.
“It really puts into perspective how quickly things have developed here in an exciting way,” said Daria Schneider, head coach of the Crimson’s men’s and women’s teams, which won the NCAA National Championship last March for the second time in the program’s history. “I’m really proud of that achievement. I wanted to make this a place where people could come pursue World and Olympic teams.”
Lauren Scruggs ’25 and Elizabeth Tartakovsky ’23 will compete on the U.S. women’s team, and Jessica Zi Jia Guo ’27 for Canada. Nicholas Zhang ’28 is also fencing for Canada.
On the U.S. men’s saber squad, former Crimsons Eli Dershwitz ’19, Filip Dolegiewicz ’23, and Mitchell Saron ’23 join College first-year Colin Heathcock. In March, they previewed their talent, winning gold at the Saber World Cup in Hungary.
Heathcock, 18, has also produced individual memorable moments on the international stage in the buildup to his Olympic qualification. In January, he took first place at the Men’s Saber Grand Prix in Tunisia, his first gold medal at the top-flight senior competition.
Colin Heathcock.
Photo courtesy of USA Fencing
“During the 2020 Olympics, I never thought I would be able to qualify for 2024 after seeing all those amazing fencers,” said Heathcock, who began fencing at age 8. “I was just trying to be better every tournament, taking it one step at a time. It means a lot to have this opportunity, and my main goal is to fence my best at the highest level.”
Schneider describe Heathcock as “a unique combination of grounded and aspirational.”
“He’s so willing to spend time and lock in on the details,” she said.
Born in Beijing, Heathcock moved to the Bay Area in California when he was in elementary school. He’d tried several different sports when his father signed him up for fencing lessons after seeing a local advertisement. His enthusiasm was immediate.
“The sport has endless possibilities,” Heathcock said. “I wanted something fast and furious, which is why I took up saber. It’s different from every other sport. There’s so many things you can do. There’s no boundaries.”
“The sport has endless possibilities. I wanted something fast and furious, which is why I took up saber. It’s different from every other sport. There’s so many things you can do. There’s no boundaries.”
Colin Heathcock
Heathcock credits his teammate Dershwitz, a soon-to-be three-time Olympian, with helping him adjust to competition at the global level.
“Eli is one of my idols in fencing,” Heathcock said. “He’s always positive. Sometimes we have bad matches, bad days, but he’s always been there, holding the torch up and motivating us.”
“Eli is so uniquely passionate about both individual and team fencing, such an unselfish leader,” Schneider said. “It is so rare to see someone who is such a good individual fencer be able to inspire and drive a team in the way he has.”
Now on the Olympic stage, Heathcock feels ready to take advantage of the incredible opportunity.
“We’ve all been training so hard for this moment,” Heathcock said. “I hope to give it my all and have fun at the highest level at the most important competition of my life.”
For updates and a full roster of Harvard athletes and alums at the Olympic and Paralympic Games, visit Harvard at Paris 2024.
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University Disability Resources celebrates Disability Pride
Investments and realignment of resources create greater access for Harvard community members
Nicole Rura
Harvard correspondent
3 min read
As the nation marks Disability Pride Month, University Disability Resources (UDR) is highlighting an array of new accommodations and services — and how community members can access them.
One of the biggest changes: In the past year, UDR hired two American Sign Language interpreters, one of whom also uses British Sign Language.
“Our focus is to ensure people feel welcome and included around disability, and to create a sense of community. We can do this in many ways, including by making sure that when members of our community attend events, they are able to participate with no barriers,” said Kate Upatham, senior director of UDR. “These two new interpreters will be an important resource for student organizations, faculty, and staff, to assure that there is no disability-related barrier to participation.”
Expanding access, removing barriers
Last year, UDR provided about 800 consultations to students, staff, faculty, and researchers. Topics included reasonable accommodations for community members with disabilities; resources for accessible and inclusive events; accessibility of spaces; tips for effective communication; and guidance around service and emotional support animals.
This spring, the department began offering a new app, Aira, which provides free, on-demand visual interpreting for blind and low-vision people. Students can sign up for Aira’s new beta Access AI, a chat feature that lets users upload an image and receive a detailed AI-generated description, ask follow-up questions, and receive validation of the responses from a human visual interpreter.
Members of the Harvard community will learn more about these and other resources at UDR’s third annual Disability Pride event, 4-6 p.m. on Thursday at Science Center Plaza. The event will feature free ice cream and cookies, accessible games, disability trivia, a “Try your hand at ASL” activity with one of Harvard’s new interpreters, free “Celebrate Disability Pride” T-shirts, pet therapy, and music.
Information will also be available about a new fund offered to student groups, departments, and other Harvard community members who are holding events and receive requests for unanticipated accommodations costs. Most accommodations are free and the UDR team can help identify appropriate options for most circumstances, and can bridge the costs for outlier situations.
UDR also helps support the student-led, University-wide celebration recognizing graduates with disabilities, for which 155 graduates registered this year.
Accessibility, aligned University-wide
This month, UDR also moved from under Harvard’s Human Resources to reporting to Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri Charleston. The Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (OEDIB) and the Office for Community Conduct (OCC) also report to Charleston. The UDR staff and the office’s physical location on the Smith Center’s sixth floor will remain unchanged.
“Human resources has been an amazing home for us,” said Upatham. “By aligning UDR with the OEDIB team and reporting to the chief diversity and inclusion officer, we’re saying to the people whom we work with that disability is an important and valued part of the diversity that Harvard embraces, and that our work at UDR is aligned with the other diversity and inclusion work at the University.”
“When we think about UDR’s work, it’s not just about providing one-to-one accommodations,” Charleston said. “It’s also about increasing the visibility of disability as a facet of diversity, strengthening the sense of pride and the culture that members of our community who have disabilities bring with them. UDR’s work is culture-shifting, it’s awareness-raising, it’s community-building, and those are all things that are in line with the mandate of OEDIB and OCC.”
Study links irregular sleep patterns with higher disease risk
BWH Communications
3 min read
Getting consistent sleep could help stave off Type 2 diabetes, new research suggests.
A team led by investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed the sleep patterns of study participants over seven nights and then followed them for more than seven years. The researchers found those with the most irregular sleep patterns had a 34 percent higher chance of developing diabetes. The findings were published in Diabetes Care.
“Our study identified a modifiable lifestyle factor that can help lower the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes,” said lead author Sina Kianersi, a research fellow in the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Type 2 diabetes affects close to half a billion people worldwide and is one of the top 10 leading causes of death and disability. The number of people with the disease is expected to more than double to 1.3 billion by 2050.
1.3 billionPeople worldwide are expected to have Type 2 diabetes by 2050
The new study analyzed accelerometry data from more than 84,000 participants in the U.K. Biobank Study. Participants were an average age of 62 years (57 percent female, 97 percent white) and were initially free of diabetes. They wore accelerometers — devices like watches that monitor 7½ years, tracking diabetes development mostly through medical records.
The study set out to investigate two key questions: first, to discover whether irregular sleep durations may promote diabetes development through circadian disruption and sleep disturbances; second, to explore whether this association varies across genetic predispositions to the condition.
The investigators found that more irregular sleep duration was associated with higher diabetes risk after adjusting for a wide range of risk factors. This association was more pronounced in individuals with longer sleep duration and lower polygenic risk score for the disease.
The data revealed that compared with participants with regular sleep patterns, those with irregular sleep (where day-to-day sleep duration varied by more than 60 minutes on average) had a 34 percent higher risk of developing diabetes. The risk decreased, yet persisted, even after accounting for lifestyle, co-morbidities, family history of diabetes, and obesity indicators.
There were some study limitations. Certain lifestyle information used in the research was collected up to five years before the accelerometer study began. This might have affected the accuracy of the results. Also, the assessment of sleep duration based on seven days may not capture long-term sleep patterns. Lastly, study participants were mainly healthy, older, and white, and may not represent outcomes for more diverse populations.
The researchers plan to study participants from younger age groups and with diverse racial backgrounds. They are also interested in exploring the biological reasons why sleep irregularity increases the risk of diabetes.
“Our findings have the potential to improve diabetes prevention on multiple levels,” said Kianersi. “Clinically, they might inform better patient care and treatment plans. Public health guidelines could promote regular sleep patterns. However, more research is needed to fully understand the mechanism and confirm the results in other populations.”
Authorship: In addition to Kianersi, Brigham authors include Heming Wang, Tamar Sofer, and Susan Redline. Additional authors include Raymond Noordam, Andrew Phillips, Martin K. Rutter, and Tianyi Huang (formerly at Brigham and Women’s).
Disclosures: Phillips has received research funding from Versalux and Delos, and he is a director and founder of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD.
Funding: This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant number R01HL155395) and the UKB project 85501. Kianersi was supported by the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number: 24POST1188091).
Danielle Allen is more worried about identity politics and gaps in civic education than the power of delegates
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
After weeks of turmoil in the Democratic Party over the electability of incumbent Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president announced Sunday that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race, a decision that he said was in the best interest of the party and the country.
Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to head up the party’s ticket, a move that was quickly followed by a surge of public support from hundreds of Democratic lawmakers, as well as numerous governors once thought to be potential Harris rivals for the nomination. Grassroots donors gave nearly $50 million in 24 hours to Act Blue, a major fundraising site for the Democrats.
The party plans to pick its nominee in an online vote the first week of August. Though Harris appears to dominate the field — on Monday it was reported that she had clinched enough delegates to secure the nomination — some have called for a competitive process to choose a new candidate ahead of the Aug. 19-22 convention.
The Gazette spoke with Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School, about the political moment we’re in and what it tells us about the health of American democracy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
We’re in the midst of some dramatic changes that have significant consequences for the country. How are you looking at this moment?
I think probably if we really zoom out from a broad historical perspective, then what matters is that this is a time of incredible social, economic, and political transformation in the world. In that context, pre-existing governance patterns will come under strain, and that strain will force change. And that’s basically what we’re watching. We’re watching both parties try to cross a bridge from the political-economic world that defined the ’90s and early 2000s to a political-economic world that has been dramatically reorganized by tech.
You recently wrote in The Washington Post that the country needs to change how we channel our disagreements and that elected officials are rarely rewarded these days for embracing the better angels of their nature. President Biden said he believed it was in the best interest of the party and the country to withdraw. Does that upend the dynamics you wrote about?
I don’t think it does. I think he did the right thing and I’m grateful to him for doing the right thing. It was an important gesture, but it’s pretty far removed from the fundamental dynamics of how our legislators interact with each other when they’re at the negotiating table.
Support has coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor on the ticket. Before the president’s withdrawal, some had called for an “open” process, saying it would be unfair to simply “anoint” someone before the convention without giving others an opportunity to compete. What’s the best way to ensure this nominating process is seen as open and fair?
The simple fact of the matter is that we are currently in a competitive process. And that competitive process started the moment that President Biden said that he was dropping out. From that moment forward, anybody could put up their hand. This is currently an open competitive process with a dominant competitor, Harris, and no one else yet who has been willing to step up, except for Marianne Williamson.
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The delegates who previously pledged to Biden are free to switch their votes to someone else before the convention. They don’t have to consider anyone else who may get the required signatures, and they will determine who is ultimately the nominee, not primary voters. Does that undermine the notion that the way the party chooses presidential candidates is truly small-d democratic?
All those delegates were elected in a democratic process, so they actually represent us voters. They were elected in congressional districts all over the country in a public process that anybody in the party could participate in. So, in that regard, to the extent we have a problem, we have a civic education problem. We don’t have a deep enough shared understanding about all these processes.
Different states have different rules for how delegates can be reallocated and some of this is inarguably new terrain. Should that variation affect people’s perceptions of how transparent and/or equitable the process is?
I don’t think so. This country’s a federal union of states, all of which are, as per the Constitution, guaranteed a republican form of government. It is possible, in fact, to run republican forms of government — that is to say, constitutional democracies for free and equal self-governing citizens — in a multiplicity of ways. That is again why civic education is so very, very important. Every one of us needs to understand the structure of our national constitutional democracy. But we also need to understand the structure of our state-level constitutional democracy or republic or commonwealth. That’s the single greatest weakness in all of this, the fact that civic education has not delivered that knowledge about the basic apparatus of our government to so many Americans.
So public perceptions about what’s fair or unfair come from a lack of knowledge about how the process works, not from some systemic unfairness?
Correct.
“If you pay close attention to the Republican side, you’ll see that there’s plenty of debate and dissent and disagreement over there, as well.”
The debate over Biden’s candidacy has roiled the Democratic Party for the last several weeks. That’s in contrast to what appeared to be a highly unified Republican Party during their convention last week. Is the party turmoil and debate a sign of American democracy’s dysfunction or its robustness?
I think the fact that the people’s opinion ultimately won the day is a sign of health for American democracy. We should all be glad to see it. The only way you get the people’s opinion to help steer is to actually permit debate. So I think this has all been very positive. If you pay close attention to the Republican side, you’ll see that there’s plenty of debate and dissent and disagreement over there, as well. Check out The Wall Street Journal’s coverage in the days after the convention. There were all kinds of counter opinions going all over the place, lots of business-side concern about where the agenda is going, concerns of conservative Christians about the change in the abortion platform, and so forth.
Harris would be the first Black woman to be a party nominee for president, and the first with Jamaican and South Asian immigrant parents. She also has a chance to be the first woman president. How do you see these biographical facts affecting the race?
I think it’s time for us to stop counting firsts. We’re at the point in the life of this country where everybody’s going to be a first in some kind of way on some kind of dimension, and it’s time to really focus on the question of the person’s vision and what are they going to bring to the table to deliver on that vision? And that’s where we should put the focus of our analysis and our attention. That’s what people generally want. I think we are struggling to break out of a world where we start by analyzing everything in identity boxes. I think a lot of people are tired of that and are ready to break out of it.
For many of us, summer is the slow season, when the days are long and the nights are soft — the perfect time to reach for our to-read lists. Perhaps you like to stake out a spot on a beach or lakeside, armed with an old favorite or a new curiosity.
If you’re wondering what to read next — a sweltering summer romance to help you simmer down, a travelogue to travel with, a hard-boiled mystery to escape into, or a historical-political treatise to perhaps change your outlook — consider these recommendations from Harvard Library staffers.
Titles available through Hollis contain links.
“The Friend Zone,” “The Happy Ever After Playlist,” and “Life’s Too Short” (three-book series)
Abby Jimenez Romantic comedy, fiction
To be honest, these were the first books in a very long time that made me legitimately laugh out loud. Abby Jimenez writes with a flair that is just captivating and truly draws the reader into the story. I couldn’t put these books down. Laughter and tears and, oh, the romance! I really hope these become movies some day!
— M.J. Grein, senior administrative coordinator at Countway Library
An intriguing book about providing people with a moment of joy while securing it for yourself at the same time. All set in the extremely stressful world of New York restaurants, this book is part of the readings for [Associate Director for Access Services] Steve Beardsley’s team meetings. It also influenced, and is featured in, the TV show “The Bear.” Through real stories of various restaurants, the book illustrates the distance a person can go to make a simple, standard, transactional relationship into something wonderful for all parties. A highly entertaining and a fun read.
Irish writer Dervla Murphy traveled alone to many non-Western countries, almost always by bicycle. She lived willingly with hardship and privation: intense cold and heat; fleas; unreliable food supplies; poor road conditions or no roads; no doctors, no laundromats, and no bike mechanics. In “Full Tilt” and other books, she took me to places I’ll never visit and shared experiences I’ll never have, as many great books do.
— June Rutkowski, cataloger at Harvard Library Information and Technical Services
“The Power Broker” is an exquisite tome of investigative journalism that illuminates the foundation of today’s intertwined crises of urban transportation and land use. Caro chronicles the catastrophes that have befallen New York (and the nation) thanks to the precedent set by Robert Moses’ monumental 40-year reign over city and state governmental agencies. Moses’ insistence that the ends justify the means and his disregard for anyone else’s lived experiences provide urgent reminders that institutional decision-makers must prioritize social infrastructure alongside other goals.
— Alessandra Seiter, community engagement librarian at Harvard Kennedy School
“Bookshops & Bonedust”
Travis Baldree Fantasy, fiction
Viv, the newest member of the Rackam’s Ravens adventurer company, just knows she’s going to be an integral part of the team — up until the point when she barely survives the first battle. She’s now in for weeks of boredom in a sleepy inn in a small town. Good thing there is a bookshop! This is a great choice if you are looking for a fun read, a bit of adventure, fun characters, and a summer romance.
— Debbie Ginsberg, faculty services manager at Harvard Law School Library
Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards Autobiography, music, nonfiction
The autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and avant-garde jazz saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill is an extremely readable and hard-to-put-down memoir. As expected, one learns of the many influences that led to Threadgill’s unique and instantly recognizable music. What makes this memoir unique from other autobiographies of jazz musicians are the nearly 100 pages devoted to Threadgill’s experiences as a Black infantryman in the Vietnam War; these memories are raw and vividly told.
Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa; illustrated by Kasia Babis Graphic nonfiction
Since it’s an election year — a beach read on a very serious topic. A graphic historical-political treatise, “Dictatorship!” provides insights into how democracies slide into authoritarianism, how dictators gain and maintain power — but with the kind of satirical irreverence that makes reading about a weighty and depressing subject seem almost enjoyable. But be forewarned: You may look at the world through different eyes after this.
— Daniel Becker, reference, collections, and instruction librarian for the Botany Libraries
“Listen for the Lie”
Amy Tintera Mystery, fiction
I don’t normally read murder mystery novels, but this was chosen by my book club and I was hooked from beginning to end! The sarcastic humor of the main character lightens the tone and prevents the story from getting too dark. I read this book but others who listened to the audiobook said it was really well done.
— Hannah Hack, administrative coordinator at Harvard University Archives
In what may be the best book I’ve read all year, “Shubeik Lubeik” follows the path of three wishes, sold by a man who would prefer it if wishes did not exist at all, across a fantastical Cairo as they link Aziza, Nour, and Shokry across generations, classes, and beliefs. While the interwoven story is powerful, it is really Nour’s struggles with depression and the role a powerful wish might play in “fixing” it that I can’t shake from my mind. All of the visual metaphors are apt, but the way that Deena Mohamed uses words — words that pour out uncontrolled and hang in the air as if they hold real, physical space — that is something unique that I hope other cartoonists find ways to embrace.
— Matthew Noe, lead collection and knowledge management librarian at Harvard Medical School
This book takes the tired conventions of the hard-boiled detective noir and revives them by centering the story on Sister Holiday, a queer, tattooed Catholic nun with a checkered past, while she investigates a series of arsons and associated murders centered on the convent school where she lives and works in modern-day New Orleans. The mystery itself is compelling, but it was the idiosyncratic and morally complex set of characters that really drew me in. This is the first of a new series, and I’m intrigued to know what comes next.
— Rachel Greenhaus, library assistant for printed and published materials, Schlesinger Library
Since seeing Deb Chachra in conversation with Sara Hendren at Harvard Book Store, I haven’t stopped talking about this book with anyone willing to listen! Chachra trains your eye to see the largely invisible infrastructure that underlies our everyday lives, and since she lives in Cambridge many of the book’s examples are set in the Boston area. She emphasizes how the design of infrastructural systems often negatively impacts the most vulnerable members of our society. Most importantly, she makes clear that another world is possible — we can design equitable infrastructure, for ourselves and for the generations to come.
— Chelcie Juliet Rowell, associate head of digital collections discovery at Harvard Library
I cried both times that I read this book, once with my eyes and once with my ears, but they weren’t wretched tears. Rather, I felt like I was coming apart and being put back together in a different configuration. It’s a space opera with complicated timelines, but don’t be put off if you’re not a regular science fiction reader. It’s a story of deradicalization, and healing from religious trauma, and embracing your unrecognized queerness, and coming to fiercely believe in a different social contract based on community care, rather than the social contract of individual might you were raised to enforce.
— Chelcie Juliet Rowell, associate head of digital collections discovery at Harvard Library
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history, Will Hunt embeds himself with those who explore natural and constructed worlds below. Interesting and exciting, “Underground” mines theories as to why some love the deep while others avoid it. A memorable read.
— Colin Lukens, senior repository manager, Office for Scholarly Communication
David Hepworth explores popular music and musicians from 1971, positioning that year as the zenith of album-based rock and when the genre became self-aware. Funny, a bit gossipy, well-researched, and beautifully organized, Hepworth is a peerless historian of rock and roll’s adolescent period. Added bonus: It will inspire your playlist for the entire summer!
— Colin Lukens, senior repository manager, Office for Scholarly Communication
I recently went to New Orleans and wanted to read more about the city, so I picked up “Nine Lives.” This fascinating book follows nine people living in New Orleans from very different walks of life. The book spans the period of time between Hurricane Betsy in 1965 through the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Each person chronicled shows a different facet of New Orleans culture and how resilient people and communities can be.
Tom Hubbard and Forrest Sincoff Gard co-teach a class called “The Randomizer” that features six spinning wheels to influence student work — mixing up their clay, tools, and techniques.
Photos and video by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Stephanie Mitchell
Harvard Staff Photographer
5 min read
‘Randomizer’ gets creative gears spinning in ceramic studio
Working with clay requires taking risks. A roulette-style game called The Randomizer is helping students avoid the kind of overthinking that can stifle creativity.
Decorated with a rainbow and LED lights, the new apparatus, whose home this summer is the entrance to the Harvard Ceramics Program, is not a tool for physically shaping clay, but more a tool for the mind. “Where all your clay dreams come true,” said ceramics instructor Tom Hubbard, laughing.
The idea for The Randomizer, part game show, part improv comedy, came to Hubbard after seeing a slot machine-inspired contraption on the Food Network’s “Tournament of Champions.” He immediately saw how the tool could be applied to the ceramic studio, and enlisted fellow ceramicist Forrest Sincoff Gard, whose work centers around games and play. The two set out to design a co-taught class where the wheels took control, turning out random assignments.
Suzanne Osorio (center) and classmates react to a spin revealing the week’s challenge, which includes a wild card “one tool” restriction.
Hubbard speaks to the class.
Directives are outlined on a whiteboard.
Gard demonstrates at the wheel using his one tool, a throwing rib.
Hubbard constructed the Randomizer — “it’s a total DIY job” — with Sonotubes used for pouring cement footings, bearings, wooden dowls, and critically, flappers to create the characteristic clicking noise of a roulette wheel. He and Gard next set out to define the six categories — clay, method, object, style, surface, and wildcard — and compiled long lists for each category including such parameters as terra cotta, coil, sculpture, playful, underglaze transfer, and “add a spout.”
The first class broke the ice with a speed challenge featuring four randomized factors to complete during a two-hour block. That allowed the students “to come up with an idea and act on it and not overthink it,” said Hubbard. The spin produced a doozy of a challenge — porcelain, slab construction, sculpture, historic. “And there were no tears, there was no moaning or groaning. People just got on with it.” The initial class was so popular, Hubbard and Gard scrapped the plan for longer-term projects, and the speed challenge became the norm for every class.
The Randomizer leads the way, and the co-teachers pull on their collective knowledge to guide the students through each challenge with advice and demonstrations. The summer class, conceived as a trial to be offered again during the fall semester (registration opens at 2 p.m. on July 24), has 13 participants, a mix of Harvard affiliates that includes staff, retired faculty/staff, a graduate student, and members of the Boston area community.
“I was excited … to get people out of their comfort zones and really get people to try new things they wouldn’t normally do,” Gard said.
Gard (left) and Hubbard check in during class.
Badriyyah Alsabah tries out a sponge as the only tool.
Suzana Lisanti throws an impressively large vessel with only a wooden rib.
Osorio attaches a handle to a bottle form.
The Randomizer seeks to elicit the kind of bravery exhibited by students new to the art. As Hubbard put it: “I’ve seen people in beginning classes who are touching clay for the first time, to see the fearlessness that they have, and I think we sometimes lose that. Hopefully, this brings a little bit of that back.”
With more than 20 years at the program, Suzana Lisanti, a student and instructor (she teaches wood-firing workshops), enjoys the spontaneity. “I had to get over the concept that I had to have finished products all the time.” For the first challenge, she made a whale that led her down a new path. “I discovered I’m interested in doing whales. It wasn’t a passion before, and then after class, I remade it.”
Gard’s wheel-thrown vessels are on display.
A student wedges brown stoneware.
Detail of wheel work.
Jennifer Engel throws at the wheel.
Gard (left) and Lori Moreau work at the wheel.
During the final review, Megan Christian comments about the week’s challenge and the work produced.
Thrown pots by the entire class are placed on the worktable to review.
Engel jokes around while speaking about the week’s challenge.
Christine Kyl talks about the completed work alongside the rainbow-decorated Randomizer.
On a recent visit to the class, The Randomizer spun “brown stoneware,” “potter’s wheel,” “vessel or utilitarian,” “industrial style,” “surface texture,” and a challenging wild card — to use only one tool. Student Badriyyah Alsabah said, “One of my favorite parts is the immediate moment after all the choices are revealed, and everyone’s looking at each other, ‘What do we do now?’”
For this particular challenge, the wild card “one tool” instruction was the topic of discussion, and students were divided between selecting a sponge or a throwing rib. The constraint sent the potters into creative spaces, solving problems, changing techniques, and adapting tools.
“I’m just grateful to have the ability to explore with clay and have a really good laugh,” Alsabah said. “It’s the class I’ve loved the most.”
Between bright light and a good mood, plenty of sleep
Brigham and Women’s Communications
2 min read
Researchers outline path to lower risk of depression
Why might more time in the sun boost a person’s mood? A new study led by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggests that sleep may hold the key. The study, which included more than 6,600 participants, found that participants who spent more time in bright light had more regular sleep, and that more regular sleep was associated with lower depression symptoms and lower odds of mild or severe depression. Results are published in JAMA Network Open.
“Getting consistent, regular sleep has wide-ranging effects on our health,” said co-author Susan Redline, the Peter C. Farrell Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior physician in the Brigham’s Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders. “Future studies examining bright light therapy should not overlook the role sleep regularity may be playing in influencing mood and depression symptoms.”
The study, which was led by first author Danielle A. Wallace, also of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, used data collected from 2011 to 2014 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The team investigated whether bright light exposure (at a level generally equivalent to daylight exposure) was associated with depression symptoms, and, if so, whether the sleep-regularity index (a measure of the consistency of day-to-day sleep schedules) explained this association. Bright light and sleep regularity were measured using a wrist-worn device.
“We found that greater time spent in bright light was modestly associated with lower depression symptoms and that sleep regularity partly explained this association,” said Wallace. “Higher Vitamin D was also associated with greater bright-light exposure and greater sleep regularity, but not with depression symptoms.”
The authors noted that the findings are limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data, and therefore causality cannot be determined. For example, depression symptoms may influence time spent outdoors and bright-light exposure. Future research should follow participants over time to evaluate the role of sleep regularity in the relationship between light exposure and mood.The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health.
What the judge was thinking and what’s next in Trump documents case
Obama-era White House counsel says key point in Nixon decision should have ended inquiry
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.
Smith’s team charged Trump with illegally retaining classified material after leaving the White House, including national security documents, and obstructing efforts by the government to retrieve them. The case was seen by many as the strongest of the major criminal cases against the ex-president, who appointed Cannon. Smith plans to appeal the ruling.
W. Neil Eggleston served as counsel to President Obama and is now a lecturer at the Law School. He offered his analysis of the Cannon ruling and weighed what’s next in the case in a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.
Cannon ruled that the special counsel was appointed improperly. What was her legal reasoning?
It’s a mashup of statutory analysis and two constitutional principles — the Appointments Clause and the Appropriations Clause. She looks at the provisions in the order appointing Smith that set forth the statutory basis for that appointment. She also looks at the statutes and concludes that the statutes do not authorize the attorney general to appoint a special counsel. She focuses on the fact that Smith was not a Department of Justice employee or officer at the time of the appointment — he was working at The Hague. It’s not clear to me why that matters, because today he’s a Department of Justice official. She infuses the analysis with lengthy discussions of the Appointments Clause and the Appropriations Clause.
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How would you characterize the decision?
In my view, her reading of the statutory provisions is quite stingy. Two other district courts and the D.C. Circuit have considered this issue — the legality of the special counsel — and they have all rejected it. Cannon is the only judge to find the appointment invalid. The D.C. Circuit has twice rejected a challenge to the use of special counsels — during the Iran-Contra investigation and during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Trump. Judge Dabney Friedrich of the District Court in D.C., who is a Trump appointee, tossed aside a similar challenge without a lot of effort in a fairly short opinion in a case involving Mueller, who oversaw the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia similarly tossed this issue aside in a case that also involved Mueller. So, the other courts that have looked at this issue have had no trouble with it and have ruled contrary to Cannon.
“I’ve never seen a district court conclude that a portion of a Supreme Court opinion is not binding; that was a first for me.”
What are the regulations under which special counsels are appointed?
Special counsels have been around for decades. From the 1970s until the late ’90s there was the independent counsel statute, which provided for a much more independent special prosecutor than what Attorney General [Merrick] Garland authorized in this matter. The Supreme Court upheld the statute in Morrison v. Olson, but it expired in 1999. After its expiration, DOJ implemented its own regulations providing for the appointment of special counsels who possess functions similar to U.S. attorneys. In 2020, in an Appointments Clause case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Supreme Court essentially reaffirmed Morrison v. Olson as a valid exception to a general rule about appointments.
What surprised you most about the decision?
One very surprising thing is how Cannon deals with the Supreme Court precedent in United States v. Nixon. There’s a sentence in that 9-0 opinion which resolves this issue entirely. The sentence says that Archibald Cox, who was one of the prosecutors of Nixon, was appropriately appointed pursuant to the statute. And you would have thought that would have ended this inquiry. Cannon does something I think I’ve never seen a district judge do before, which is that she looks into the history of the Nixon case, decides the issue wasn’t particularly briefed, and as a result determines that a sentence in a Supreme Court opinion that was decided 9-0 was, in fact, “dicta,” which means that it is not binding in subsequent cases as legal precedent. And as a result, she as a district judge was entitled to disregard it. I’ve never seen a district court conclude that a portion of a Supreme Court opinion is not binding; that was a first for me.
In my seminar at Harvard Law School, I teach that portion of the Nixon opinion, and the beginning of it is essentially whether the matter is justiciable and whether the case is properly in the court, partially because it’s an intra-branch fight — it’s two parts of the executive branch that are litigating against each other. It was important to the court to point out that the special counsel was validly appointed and validly in the court, because if they thought he had not been, then the matter would not have been justiciable. The entire first part of the Nixon opinion is really about justiciability.
Cannon was appointed by Trump in 2020. Some observers say that judges shouldn’t be allowed to rule on the person who appointed them. What is your opinion?
That does not trouble me at all. Presidents appoint a lot of judges who then go off and make all sorts of decisions. This comes up in the administrative law context all the time, where district judges and appeals judges must rule on presidential policies. I don’t think most people think that the fact that they’ve been nominated by the person whose policy they’re now reviewing creates an appearance of impropriety. There is a lot of criticism about the way Cannon was handling the matter. I would not go so far as to say that she should not have taken the matter due to an appearance of impropriety.
Smith has said that he’s going to appeal. Can you talk about his likely strategy and whether the case might end up before the Supreme Court?
Smith’s appeal is going to be based on the issues we’re talking about. He’ll say that the judge’s reading of the authorizing statutes is wrong, and that in fact, the attorney general is entitled to appoint non-DOJ personnel to be special counsel. That’ll be the principal argument. Smith will also argue that the infused atmosphere of the Appointments Clause and the Appropriations Clause really has no place in the discussion. It’s a question of whether the statute permits it or doesn’t permit it. He’ll also raise the notion that essentially Nixon has already decided this case.
An appeal in the 11th Circuit would take roughly a year to decide. If Trump is elected president, after his inauguration he will certainly order the Department of Justice to dismiss the federal cases against him. The Department of Justice would then dismiss those cases and there would not be an appeal.
If Trump is not elected, there’s a strong chance that the 11th Circuit will reverse Cannon’s decision. Whichever way the 11th Circuit ruled, I suspect the issues would then be decided in the Supreme Court. I’m not going to predict what the Supreme Court would do.
Brian Lee to step down as VP for alumni affairs and development
Photo by Rob Greer
6 min read
‘Champion of Harvard and our mission’ will depart at end of calendar year
Brian K. Lee, who has served as vice president for alumni affairs and development since 2018, will retire at the end of the calendar year, Harvard announced on Wednesday.
“For the past 25 years, I have been privileged to lead alumni affairs and fund-raising efforts of three outstanding institutions, and serving Harvard has been the high point of a deeply gratifying and rewarding career,” Lee said in a message to alumni affairs and development staff. “[N]ow is the time for me to make room for other goals and to be more present and available to my family and friends, whose patience, understanding, and unwavering support have made my life’s work possible.”
Interim President Alan Garber praised Lee’s ability to put connection — to people and to Harvard’s mission — at the heart of his work. “Brian is a champion of Harvard and our mission,” Garber said in a message to University colleagues. “Since 2018, our community has benefited tremendously from his ability to connect individuals and their interests to our institution and our aspirations, even in the face of unprecedented challenges. There are, of course, the outstanding acts of generosity enabled by Brian’s leadership, but what I most admire is his commitment to articulating our values and how they guide our efforts to seek support of our teaching and research.”
Lee brought significant fundraising and alumni relations experience to his role, having previously led advancement functions for Tufts and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In announcing Lee’s appointment at Harvard, then-President Larry Bacow noted his “extraordinary ability to bring together people in support of higher education,” and his “especially strong record of supporting and advancing institutional goals with a combination of creativity, insight, and thoughtfulness.”
“Brian is a champion of Harvard and our mission. Since 2018, our community has benefited tremendously from his ability to connect individuals and their interests to our institution and our aspirations, even in the face of unprecedented challenges.”
Interim President Alan M. Garber
During Lee’s tenure, Harvard saw significant increases in annual fundraising and increased engagement among alumni. The University also established major initiatives — including efforts focused on financial aid, life sciences, climate, as well as artificial and natural intelligence — fueled by philanthropy from Harvard alumni and friends.
Lee took office as vice president at the conclusion of a five-year capital campaign that raised $9.62 billion, including $1.3 billion to support and expand financial aid. With increased engagement from supporters and alumni, he built a fundraising program that would yield four of Harvard’s top six fundraising years of all time.
Under Lee’s management, Harvard’s alumni affairs and development office also added focus to improving collaboration to enable greater impact for cross-School and University-wide initiatives. Working with then-Provost Garber to strengthen and communicate the University’s gift policies, he also streamlined processes in Harvard’s development organization and convened and chaired the Council of Fundraising Deans to boost support for University-wide priorities.
“Through our work together on the Gift Policy Committee, I gained a greater appreciation for the judicious perspective Brian brings to all he does, not focused on any one path but on the horizon — and what may lie just beyond it,” said Garber. “These instincts are complemented by a seemingly unlimited capacity to listen closely and generously, with his many interactions rooted in a genuine interest in people and what matters to them.”
Engagement from alumni and participation in Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) events and activities also increased and evolved under Lee’s leadership. In the past year, the HAA saw record numbers of alumni participating in programs ranging from Harvard Alumni Day and Harvard and Radcliffe College reunions to events around the globe, such as Global Networking Night and conversations with Garber in London, Washington, and Miami. Alumni also joined virtual events on topics ranging from happiness to democracy to climate change to civil discourse on campus.
“Brian has been wonderful to work with,” said Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93, current president of the Harvard Alumni Association. “He is thoughtful and dedicated to higher education and to working with the wide Harvard alumni community wherever we are around the world. I look forward to our collaboration over the next six months. I wish him and his family the best in their future adventures.”
Before Harvard, Lee was vice president for development and institute relations at Caltech, where he played a key role in launching the Breakthrough Campaign, the largest in the institution’s history, which raised more than $3 billion. Prior to his time at Caltech, Lee spent 26 years at Tufts University, ultimately serving as senior vice president for university advancement, where he developed a comprehensive alumni relations and engagement program and worked closely with the Tufts alumni association.
Lee has also served as the chairman of the board for the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), a global nonprofit dedicated to educational advancement through work in alumni relations, communications, development, marketing, and advancement services. He was selected by peers to serve on the international CASE Europe board.
“With attention and care, Brian has shaped the careers of countless colleagues, expanding his circle of influence to institutions across the country and around the world,” said Garber. “I have enjoyed getting to know and collaborating with someone who is so perfectly suited for his chosen profession, doing his very important part to advance the University’s mission.” As Lee departs at the end of the calendar year, Garber shared that the search for the next vice president of alumni affairs and development will begin soon, and that advice and nominations regarding the search may be sent, in confidence, to vpaadsearch@harvard.edu.
Fiona Coffey named director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard
Innovative and accomplished leader, believes in integrating arts into nontraditional spaces, disciplines
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Fiona Coffey, a creative producer, global theater historian, and accomplished administrator dedicated to making the arts accessible, will become the new director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard, Danoff Dean of Harvard College Rakesh Khurana announced Wednesday.
Coffey will take the directorial helm Aug. 5, succeeding Jack Megan, who stepped down in June after 23 years as director.
“With Fiona’s track record of innovative leadership, we can look forward to a future where the arts continue to be a central and transformative element of the Harvard experience. Her leadership will sustain current efforts and drive new initiatives, fostering creative expression and engagement across the College, University, and beyond. I am eager to see her impact on the next generation of College students,” Khurana said.
Coffey comes to Harvard from Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, where she has been associate director and curator for performing arts since 2018 as well as a visiting assistant professor in the theater department.
“I am so excited and energized, ready to get to work,” Coffey said. “I’m thrilled to help continue the OFA’s legacy and to lead the team forward, building on all of the incredible work they are already doing.”
Coffey holds an B.A. from Stanford University, a master’s degree in Irish Drama and Film from Trinity College in Dublin, and a Ph.D. in theater and performance from Tufts University. Her scholarship centers around Irish drama, specifically women dramatists and theatrical responses to the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. She is the author of “Political Acts: Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012” (2016).
At Wesleyan, Coffey’s responsibilities included producing the visiting guest artist series and a season of public shows in music, dance, theater, and interdisciplinary arts. She also produced and curated long-term residencies, bringing artists to campus to collaborate with faculty and students. Her teaching repertoire included courses on theater history and arts administration.
“I don’t see art as being on the periphery or as supplemental to higher education, I really view it as essential to a holistic liberal arts and science experience,” Coffey said. “Creative research and arts practice are rigorous forms of scholarship and knowledge-production and are on par with the research and learning that is happening in some of our traditional classroom spaces.”
Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said, “Whether in the art studio or at the lab bench, creativity drives our academic mission forward. I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Fiona to the vibrant, interdisciplinary environment of Harvard, of which artists and art-making are an essential part.”
Coffey currently serves as co-president of New England Presenters, a regional membership organization providing support to arts organizers. In recent years she also helped produce touring projects for several dance organizations, including Chicago-based Era Footwork Collective and Toronto-based inDANCE.
A priority for Coffey is ensuring that arts are accessible to students regardless of their prior experience or chosen area of study, and she believes in integrating arts into nontraditional spaces and disciplines.
“The arts are often on the forefront of important political and social change, and when we bring artists into conversation and into research with non-arts disciplines, we’re able to address the most complex, challenging problems in new ways that can shift people’s thinking around an issue,” Coffey said. “Artists have an essential role to play in helping humanity move toward a more just and equitable world, and I believe artists’ ability to vision a different reality than the one we live in now is necessary for human progress.”
Recommendations from three Harvard economists, including Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
The power of money is lost on no one but still a universal source of frustration, folly, and confusion — at kitchen tables, in boardrooms, among voters and the leaders who want their votes. To help make sense of dollars and cents, we asked three Harvard economists to recommend some favorite books on the subject.
Harvard file photo
Jason Furman
Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School/Department of Economics
“Money” Jacob Goldstein
“An entertaining history of what money is — and what aspired to be money but turned out not to be, often at a great loss to those who bet on it.”
“The Future of Money” Eswar S. Prasad
“The most reliable economic account of cryptocurrencies, providing a particularly balanced account of the pros and cons of central banks’ developing digital currencies to replace or complement traditional money.”
“Money Mischief” Milton Friedman
“The leading postwar proponent of monetarism wrote scholarly books about money that were more important but probably not more entertaining.”
“The Price of Peace” Zachary D. Carter
“Two-thirds of this book is a magnificent biography of John Maynard Keynes that does a good job explaining his important and wide-ranging thinking on how money affects the economy more broadly — not to mention issues of war and peace. The last third is about economic policy after the death of Keynes and is less reliable and nuanced.”
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Kenneth S. Rogoff
Professor of Economics and Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics
“The Ascent of Money” Niall Ferguson
“Ferguson weaves the development of debt and finance through history and people, from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern global financial bank. As entertaining and eloquent as it is insightful, Ferguson’s breadth of knowledge across disciplines is remarkable, and the writing has wit and humor that is often sorely lacking in this space.”
“The Only Game in Town” Mohamed A. El-Erian
“For those who find central banking mysterious, El-Erian’s book gives an in-depth look at how, during the extended period of political paralysis that set in after the global financial crisis, central banks engaged not only in monetary policy but quasi-fiscal policy. With hindsight, it is clear that the effects of these efforts were often wildly overblown — so-called quantitative easing now appears to be largely smoke and mirrors — but nevertheless a very concise and eloquent exposition of the challenges and issues.”
“Ben Franklin: An American Life” Walter Isaacson
“A sweeping view of Franklin’s life, it also explains how he was way ahead of his time in bringing the newfangled invention of paper currency to the colonies, earning a living as the official money printer for both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Money has always been at the cutting edge of technology, just as it is with digital currencies today. Among his many other skills, Franklin was also, by all accounts, the best chess player in North America in his day.”
“The Curse of Cash” Kenneth S. Rogoff
“I would be remiss not to mention my own book on the past, present, and future of coinage, currency, and digital currencies. A guiding theme is how— although innovation in transactions technologies almost invariably emanates from the private sector — in due time the government invariably regulates and often appropriates, whether it be the electrum coins of ancient Lydia or the flying money of ancient China that eventually morphed into the tree-bark money Marco Polo discovered upon arriving in the Yuan dynasty. The book suggests that the same trajectory awaits today’s digital currencies.”
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photograher
Claudia Goldin
Henry Lee Professor of Economics; Lee and Ezpeleta Professorship of Arts & Sciences
“The Forgotten Financiers of the Louisiana Purchase” Larry Neal
“Lots of intrigue, fascinating finance — should be a PBS special. We think of a land purchase of that scale as a diplomatic issue, but the United States had to pay for it. How did they do it? Through the Barings, a banking family that, for a while, was more powerful than the Rothschilds.”
“Career and Family” Claudia Goldin
“The book concerns the increased desire of college-graduate women across the past 120 years to achieve both family and career — the great strides that have been made, but also how the quest has often been stymied by the economic marketplace.”
The answer to your search may depend on where you live
Researchers find ‘language bias’ in various site algorithms, raising concerns about fallout for social divisions among nations
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Michael Puett (left), Queenie Luo, and Michael D. Smith.
Photo by Grace DuVal
A Chinese-language Google user types in “Buddhism” and launches a search. A French-language user searches the same term, as does an English-language user. Will all three get the same results? New Harvard research says not necessarily, finding online search responses can vary significantly and even conflict depending on the topic and language of the query.
The variation is a result of a hidden “language bias” embedded in the search algorithms of Google, ChatGPT, YouTube, and Wikipedia, says Queenie Luo, who studies artificial intelligence ethics and early Chinese history and is co-author of a paper with her Ph.D. adviser, Michael Puett, the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, and Michael D. Smith, former dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences who now teaches at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).
That bias, they contend, distorts users’ understanding of search topics by limiting their exposure to a full range of information and viewpoints and raises questions about larger implications for relations between nations and peoples.
The Gazette spoke with Luo, who earned a master’s degree from SEAS in data science in 2023, about language bias in searches and the potential social and political harms that can arise from this hidden filter in major search platforms. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You tested a number of search terms, but the paper focuses on two that are extremely complex and abstract, Buddhism and liberalism. What did you find on Google?
Buddhism is a global religion that has developed distinct cultural traditions in different language communities worldwide. Chinese Buddhism is very different than Japanese Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, and Vietnamese Buddhism. Essentially, Western Buddhism has evolved into another branch of Buddhism over the past two centuries.
Our research found that when searching for Buddhism-related phrases on Google using different languages, the top-ranked websites tend to reflect the dominant Buddhist tradition of the query’s language community.
“Our research found that as Google and most online platforms use search language as a significant filter, different language users end up reading highly distinct information online.”
The general assumption among internet users is that they can access global information through search engines, with Google often perceived as providing objective, unfiltered results. However, our research found that as Google and most online platforms use search language as a significant filter, different language users end up reading highly distinct information online.
Such problems aren’t just limited to Buddhism-related queries, but extend to a wide range of topics, such as liberalism and international trade policy. For example, if you search liberalism using English on Google, you tend to get very positive views about liberalism and nearly no references to neoliberalism. The concepts of free market, human rights, and equality tend to be strongly emphasized in English-language search results.
However, if you switch your search language to Chinese, Google’s top-ranked search results on liberalism tend to benegative and frequently connect it to neoliberalism. Similarly, when you ask Google, “What constitutes good economic policy” using a European language like Italian or French, the top-ranked websites tend to emphasize aspects such as protective market economy, but the top-ranked websites would instead focus on “free market economy” or “limited government intervention” when you search using English.
These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive but can be contradictory based on context.
What about other platforms people use to search, like ChatGPT?
Things changed with ChatGPT. As ChatGPT is predominantly trained on English-language data, it always presents the Anglo-American perspectives by default. The version integrated with Bing behaves similarly to Google in that it searches into websites in the query’s language and summarizes the main content for you.
Wikipedia and YouTube are two major platforms featured prominently on Google. We found that language bias also exists on these two platforms. For example, if you search on Wikipedia using English about Buddhist meditation, the English article gives you an overview of world traditions of Buddhist meditation.
But if you switch to the French article, it includes a section of “neuroscience and Buddhism” that does not exist in articles in other languages. This difference could be partly due to the influence of the French monk Matthieu Ricard, who has participated in a series of neuroscience experiments to demonstrate the benefits of meditation and attracted a lot of attention in the French-speaking community.
Language bias becomes more dramatic on YouTube because YouTube videos tend to provide highly concentrated and focused information on one narrow aspect. For example, when searched using Japanese, the top-ranked videos include Buddhist music performed by a Japanese monk, whereas the English videos teach users about the wisdom of the Buddha. The impressions that different linguistic users get from watching these videos are very different.
So users are steered to different information and only shown the prevailing views of the search language, and not getting a global picture of the query topic?
“We use the fable of the blind men and the elephant to describe this phenomenon, that each language community is like a blind person touching a small portion of the elephant while believing they have seen the whole.”
Exactly. Such filtering effect can be neutral or useful for utility-based questions, such as visa requirements. However, it can pose a significant threat to our society on sensitive and complex topics like liberalism and international trade policy. Unlike math or computer science, which have definitive answers, complex topics demand diversity and mutual debate.
We use the fable of the blind men and the elephant to describe this phenomenon, that each language community is like a blind person touching a small portion of the elephant while believing they have seen the whole.
As Google’s ranking algorithm is designed to capture the “common case” and majority’s interests while also filtered by language, English-language users typically get positive views about liberalism while Chinese-language users get criticisms of it through Google.
Over time, such technology serves as a facilitator for social division. Mutual engagement is no longer possible because each language community sees different facts.
What factors are driving this?
There are many factors that contribute to the existing pattern. First, using the language filter is an algorithmic choice. Without a good translation system, users cannot read information written in other languages, so the language filter serves a practical function. However, now with machine translation, the language filter might not be necessary.
Second, language is intrinsically tied to culture, history, and group identity, so any concept that is expressed through a certain linguistic system is inseparable from its cultural roots. On concepts surrounding Buddhism and liberalism, different language corpora do exhibit very different opinions and perspectives.
And thirdly, the extent of discrepancy across different language searches varies depending on the topic you’re searching. For example, on topics like “Jacobean matrix,” we did not observe precipitable differences across languages. “Jacobean matrix” is a relatively new and very technical term, and has a well-defined mathematical definition, so when you’re searching this term across different languages, you don’t see much difference.
Scientific, mathematical, and technical terms, especially recent technical terms, as they have well-defined definitions, tend to have consistent interpretations. However, for terms that have a longer history, like Newton’s First Law, the top-ranked websites often include a lot of historical narratives surrounding these topics
Why is language bias showing up in AI-powered searches?
As mentioned earlier, current large language models are mainly trained on English-language data and always follow the Anglo-American perspectives by default.
There are many layers of technical issues that contribute to such problems. The first layer is with the imbalanced training data. The second layer has to do with debiasing techniques, “alignment,” and human review. Biases in existing training data are unavoidable — issues with gender bias and racial bias are very common in AI models.
However, as biases embedded in complex topics like liberalism and Buddhism haven’t caught much attention within the AI community, people haven’t started testing and working on such issues. So, most large language models currently follow the dominant and most popular perspectives in their training data, which happen to be the Anglo-American views. Fortunately, these issues can be mitigated in ways similar to how gender and racial biases are addressed.
In the paper, you warn that such language bias creates “a strong, invisible cultural barrier that has important sociopolitical implications for bridging divides.” Can you explain?
“As people continue being reinforced by the dominant views in their own language community while believing they have seen the whole, this technology is not serving us well as a communication mediator. “
The general internet user tends to attribute authority to Google and believe Google’s search results are neutral and objective, especially compared with social media platforms. They are not aware of the skewed perspectives they get from Google.
As people continue being reinforced by the dominant views in their own language community while believing they have seen the whole, this technology is not serving us well as a communication mediator.
The danger lies in the long term. On sensitive and complex topics like what constitutes a good market economy, if one side is reinforced with the idea that a free-market economy is good while the other side is constantly fed with the advantages of a protective market economy, it can be quite challenging for both sides to reach consensus.
The language filter on the internet sets a strong barrier that prevents us from mutually understanding each other while reinforcing our existing beliefs without hearing the other side.
What can users or even the tech companies do to minimize the effects of language bias in online search?
From a user perspective, you can use Google Translate and translate your search phrase into different languages and then use the translated phrases to search and translate them back to your own language. However, these actions can be so costly to the user.
From the technical aspect, there are many ways to minimize language bias if the goal is to help users to access information from different language corpora. First, adopting a recommendation system — [that would work] like Amazon’s shopping recommendation — can help users get exposed to alternative opinions out there. Right now, the“related search” in Google search is not helping because those related search suggestions are suggesting the majority’s view within the same language.
Second, the recently rolled-out Google AI Overview has the potential to overcome language barriers. As it is searching and summarizing content for users, it can identify a spectrum of viewpoints from their entire repository, regardless of language, and then summarize and translate the main points back to users, helping users to break down the language barrier.
Exhibit on MBTA Red Line honors work of woman astronomer whose work paved path for modern astrophysics but remained hidden in her lifetime
Artist Ligia Bouton first learned about astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt during a 2019 tour of the University’s famed Plate Stacks, which house more than half a million historical glass-plate negatives and spectral images of the night sky.
Leavitt was among the nearly 150 female scientists who catalogued the images during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, working as “astronomical computers” at the Harvard College Observatory. She became the first to devise a way to effectively measure distances to remote galaxies after noting specific star luminosity patterns. Leavitt’s contributions, which paved a path to modern astrophysics, went largely unsung during her lifetime, due to her gender as well as her untimely death from cancer at 53.
Leavitt’s story stirred Bouton, who seeks to infuse appropriated historical narratives, particularly forgotten histories of women, into her sculpture and photography. And it resulted in a new exhibition that pays homage to the researcher whose work has proved crucial to scientists seeking to determine the size and scope of our universe.
“I think about how different time periods affected women’s ability to do their work, and what kinds of obstacles they faced.”
Ligia Bouton
“I think about how different time periods affected women’s ability to do their work, and what kinds of obstacles they faced,” said the Mount Holyoke College professor.
“25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt,” opened this summer at the temporary entrance to the northbound Red Line MBTA station at Kendall/MIT in Cambridge. The dynamic, lenticular photographs depict the periodic luminosity of 25 Cepheid variable stars that Leavitt first used to ascertain galactic distances.
Writing in a 1912 publication, Leavitt detailed her discovery that Cepheid stars — captured on glass plate photographs still housed at the Harvard College Observatory — pulsed in a predictable way. She documented a relationship between the size of each star and how quickly it pulsed, leading to the first system for measuring far distances in the universe.
The legacy of Leavitt’s discovery is immense, according to the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “Leavitt’s Law,” as her findings became known, were ultimately used by Edwin Hubble to prove that the universe is made of multiple galaxies. It is still used today to track the expansion of the universe and to establish relative distances to new galaxies, black holes, and supernovae.
Thom Burns, curator of astronomical photographs at the Plate Stacks, worked with Bouton and colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics on supporting materials and is organizing a free artist’s talk with Bouton on July 24. Center for Astrophysics Director Lisa Kewley wrote accompanying text that now hangs alongside the pieces.
“This installation has not only given an opportunity to share the amazing story of Leavitt, but also showcases the wonderful artistic skill and vision that Ligia Bouton has,” Burns said in an email. “She has created a series of these changing stars that captivate the public, create wonder, and even gets the busy commuter to take a moment to appreciate a pioneering woman of the past and to imagine what other secrets the universe holds.”
The “25 Stars” exhibition made its debut in Copenhagen in 2023. Bouton later proposed it to the MBTA, she said, because she wanted it shown in the city where Leavitt had lived and worked. The sense of motion in the portraits also felt in line with the bustle of commuter traffic, Bouton said.
Each piece now hanging at the busy T stop was created by layering multiple photographs of hand-blown glass objects. In lenticular printing, a lens is applied to the surface of a digitally manipulated photograph to produce the illusion of movement when it is viewed from different angles.
The star “portraits” contain images ranging from body parts to insects to plants, representing aspects of Earthly life. Bouton honored Leavitt’s research in each individual work by incorporating the number of photographs corresponding to the number of days it takes a particular Cepheid variable star to dim from brightest to smallest. The largest pieces contain 30 photographs, for 30 days.
Bouton hopes her art will bring exposure to the extraordinary legacy of scientific discovery Leavitt left behind.
“I hope it’s just sort of weird and wonderful enough that it either catches people in a different way, or maybe they will become a little bit interested and find out about her,” Bouton said.
The installation will be on display for about 18 months. Project sponsors included the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, BXP, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Mount Holyoke College, Visual Studies Workshop, Cambridge Arts, Mass Cultural Council, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.
Anastasia Berg ’09 and Rachel Wiseman say many women in the 21st century increasingly are asking themselves: Do I even want children? That is the main question at the heart of their new book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.” The book seeks to explore all of the factors — historical, societal, and financial — that have led to the present moment.
The Gazette spoke with Berg, now an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Irvine, and an editor for The Point magazine, to share her insights into the history and philosophy of this question. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You write that “the age of maternal optimism has ended.” What do you mean by that?
In the book, we’re interested in addressing the kinds of concerns, anxieties, and lines of reasoning people encounter when they’re considering whether or not they should have children.
We look at material concerns, like the difficulty of finding romantic partners with whom to start a family. We look at ethical concerns, like climate change. But we also look at concerns that women (in particular) feel, which are often the types of feminist concerns reconciling the demands of motherhood with female empowerment and a woman’s desire to lead a fulfilling life.
“But one thing that everyone could really agree on was that ultimately, the choice of whether to have children was something women should make completely on their own.”
There’s a history of very lively debates within feminist theory and practice about the role of motherhood in women’s lives. We see that in the ’60s and up to the ’80s we had a real contest of divisions — with anti-motherhood camps on one side and on the other camps who wanted to reform the institution and practices of motherhood so they could once again be a legitimate source of meaning and value in life.
But one thing that everyone could really agree on was that ultimately, the choice of whether to have children was something women should make completely on their own. So they said, “We’re going to stop arguing about this in public,” and that’s where that line comes in: In a feminist context, celebrating the virtues of motherhood became no longer possible and no longer welcome.
It seems in the last few decades we’ve gone from a situation where women felt compelled to want and have children to one where they now feel some pressure to consider not having children at all. What are some of the factors in that transition?
Many people today say things like, well, the opportunity costs of having children have risen. But children didn’t use to be seen through the lens of opportunity cost at all. Children were understood as part of the very framework of human life, which was understood as essentially generational; a person understood that they have a past, and they will have a future, and they will (probably) take direct part in creating the next generation.
It was the kind of thing that you did, no matter the risk or the cost. And so the radical change today is that we look at having children as a project among many projects. We can ask questions about it the same way we ask about career choice or travel plans.
And it’s not just a choice among choices. In our more recent imagination it is very much a life-ending choice. There’s a narrative that for parents, especially for women, parenthood is something that is completely shattering of their identity. It will transform you, and you will become a completely different person than you were before, losing everything that you held dear, and that you won’t be able to do anything that you care about ever again. Part of that has to do with the fact that we’re having children later, when we’re much more established in our identities.
Do you think this transition of viewing children as a “project” is a positive or a negative development?
Great question. I don’t think we can simply go back to a time where the choice to have children is one that’s kind of obvious. But what I see today, and what we try to diagnose in the book, is that it’s very hard to make this choice because there are all sorts of social issues that are contributing to that choice being made for us.
Some people have the tendency to say, “Oh, well, people used to feel like everyone was doing it, so they had to, so they weren’t free. But today is different, we have choice, and we use it freely.” But there’s so much about the way that we go about thinking about having kids that makes us unfree.
I’ll give an example. We take it for granted that in every arena of our lives, there are milestones and standards of readiness that we have to hit and achieve. We have to spend our entire 20s chasing fulfillment and self-accomplishment. We have to establish ourselves professionally, in our careers and financially.
Romantically, we have to not just find somebody who we think would be a good fit to have a family with, but also test the waters through long dating, moving in together, then we get married, then we spend some time “just us,” and only then can we even start thinking about having kids.
And so what happens today is that it’s not just that people are having children later, it’s that they’re thinking about children so late that for many people, especially women, the choice is made for them. Because if you’re only authorized or legitimized to think about kids when you’re in your early 30s, it can take years. By the time you’re trying to have a child, you may find that you’re having fewer kids than you would have wished or not having any at all.
That “standard of readiness,” as you put it, seems to be a moving target. Is that contributing to the complexity of conversations around parenthood?
Oftentimes when people describe us millennials, they tend to say we’re immature. They’re looking for us to grow up; we’re dithering.
And there’s a perspective from which millennials can actually be viewed as too mature. Because when you look at what it means for millennials to be ready to have a family, you see that they have incredibly high standards regarding what it means to be sufficiently ready.
From that perspective, they refuse to be frivolous; they refuse to take the risk. What we’ve seen by talking to hundreds of millennials is they believe they must guarantee a standard of living that is equal or higher for their children than what they had. They must first meet their own independent standards of success.
And personally, there’s this narrative of, “I don’t even know who I am. How can I have kids?” Something that’s forgotten a lot of times in these conversations is that you will change a lot whether or not you have kids.
You mentioned the common conception that when people have kids, they will lose themselves. Why is that a scarier reality to face today than for previous generations?
I don’t think it’s a reality at all. Here’s something that we can certainly learn from the past: Having children was understood as much more continuous with your life. I think today we are tempted to frame the vast changes that having children no doubt introduces to our lives as an identity break, or as a kind of rupture.
Now, the reasons for this are multifaceted. We tend to think about the things that matter to us in terms of identity, and we’ve lost other conceptual frameworks for doing that. I think we also want to see women’s experiences for all their challenges and obstacles, so we find ourselves affirming a script of saying motherhood is a complete transformation. Oftentimes that makes the decision to have children much more anxiety-producing.
In the conclusion of the book, I talk about how the script of a motherhood being a transformative experience, particularly in the sense of it annihilating your identity, didn’t apply to me. And what’s amazing to me was how many women felt liberated by having somebody say that they were happy to see this perspective represented.
People are really wrestling with this paradox of parenthood, which is that it can be both wonderful and terrible.What advice do you have for people who are currently asking themselves these big questions?
I would say I have two bits of advice. The first is to free people to be asking the question of children all the time and in the kind of setting that would allow them to really take hold of their destinies.
I think the question of whether we should have children raises a profound philosophical human question of the value of human life. This is not a book that’s trying to get you to have kids. It is a book that hopes to encourage you to think about it a little earlier than you would otherwise think about it.
And it also encourages conversations with others. So many people who we talked to said that when they’re dating, they’d bring up the question of children a few years into the relationship. That’s a recipe for disappointment for a lot of people, because at this point, you’re very much committed.
The second piece of advice is to not approach the question of whether to have children by coming up with a pros and cons list. And let me say something that I find freeing: There’s more pain and difficulty and challenge and obstacles than there is fun. Start from that perspective. There’s something liberating about it.
Once we put aside the pros and cons list, we can ask the question of the shape we want our lives to take, and what kind of contribution we want to make to this project of human life. We could be great uncles and aunts and godparents; we could be teachers; we could be artists; we could be pursuing intellectual life.
And we can also choose to take a direct part in ushering in the next generation, bringing light into the world, nurturing and educating it. For me, that is what I would encourage people to consider when they’re asking this question, should I or shouldn’t I have children?
You won’t even know you’re exercising, but your body will
If you can’t replace channel surfing with real surfing, housework will do, says study focused on healthy aging
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Put down the clicker. Pick up a broom.
New findings, the latest to emerge from the long-running Nurses’ Health Study, show that even light physical activity, including housework, increases one’s odds of healthy aging, defined as reaching 70 free of mental health issues, memory issues, physical impairments, and chronic disease.
The research team, made up of investigators from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and institutions in China and Austria, studied 45,176 people over 20 years, using TV watching as a proxy for sedentary behavior. They found that every increase of two hours of daily TV cut the chance of healthy aging by 12 percent. By contrast, two hours of light physical activity led to a 6 percent increase.
6%Boost in chance of healthy aging for every two hours of light physical activity
It’s well-established that physical activity reduces the likelihood of early death and that vigorous exercise boosts the odds of healthy aging. Researchers behind the new study wanted to explore the impact of light physical activity.
The team cited several potential mechanisms for TV’s negative effects. Prolonged sitting, they say, causes cellular and molecular responses that impair skeletal muscle function and mitochondrial activity. Skeletal muscles, in turn, play important roles in glucose metabolism, while excess sitting has been shown to reduce insulin sensitivity, disrupt sugar and fat metabolism after meals, increase inflammation, and affect blood flow to the brain.
The work is particularly important today, the team says, because technology has changed the nature of both work and leisure for many Americans. People are less active than previous generations throughout the lifespan and tend to move even less as they age. Data from the study highlighted the extent of the problem, with just 8.6 percent of participants achieving healthy aging by the end of the 20-year follow-up period.
The research also confirms earlier findings indicating that watching TV is particularly damaging to health. The research showed that even substituting other sedentary behaviors like a sedentary job, driving, or a home-based sedentary activity improved the odds of aging healthfully over TV watching. Even substituting sleep, for those who get seven hours or less per night, increased the odds of healthy aging.
The good news is that improving one’s odds of aging healthfully doesn’t have to involve an exercise plan, as almost any light activity helps.
“These findings indicate that physical activity need not be high-intensity to potentially benefit various aspects of health, which has especially important public health implications, as older people tend to have limited physical ability to engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity,” the authors wrote. “Given the strong association observed between sedentary lifestyle and healthy aging, public health campaigns to promote health should not only promote increasing physical activities, but also decreasing sedentary behaviors, especially prolonged TV watching.”
The research was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Jesse McCarthy sees Black authors during Cold War philosophically opting for none of the above, and improvising their own way
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Legendary jazz musician Miles Davis, who brought introspection to the more frenetic bebop style, was known for turning his back to the audience while playing, as if pulling into his own world to work out his musical ideas.
Jesse McCarthy noted a similar inward turn in Black writing during this same period. It was an observation that gave the associate professor of English and African and African American Studies a “logical touchstone” for his new book, “The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War” — its title inspired by Davis, whose records include “Blue Period” (1953), “Blue Moods” (1955), and “Kind of Blue” (1959).
“There is a long tradition of binding Black literary expression to its musical counterpart,” he wrote.
McCarthy saw in the writing from 1945 to 1965 a marked shift as Black authors battled contradicting political ideologies — American liberalism versus Soviet communism — neither of which represented or served their needs.
This is particularly evident in Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1953 novel “Maud Martha,” according to McCarthy. The tale traces the coming of age of its titular heroine, a Black working-class girl growing up in Depression-era Chicago with its day-to-day racial, class, and gender prejudices and limitations.
“Yet Maud is principally characterized by the qualities of her imagination and the independence of her intellectual life,” McCarthy explained. “That doesn’t mean that Brooks is inattentive to the social realist elements that condition her existence. She is, but Brooks does not allow those aspects to upstage our interest in the avowed autonomy of Maud’s interior life, her imagination, and her intellectual ambition.”
“There is a long tradition of binding Black literary expression to its musical counterpart.”
Jesse McCarthy
He said, “The emphasis that novel places on Maud’s subjectivity, the intensity with which it’s committed to it, but also in which it seems to believe in it as a source of resistance, is a characteristic quality of Black writing in this era, which is reimagining a form of political resistance, and trying to capture certain kinds of consciousness, affects, and attitudes, that have emerged precisely from those elements of lived experience that the political ideologies on offer could not account for.”
“The Blue Period” emerged from McCarthy’s dissertation work as a graduate student at Princeton University. While there, he noticed that accounts of African American literary history — including the Harlem Renaissance, Popular Front, and Black Arts Movement — fail to account for what was going on during a crucial period following the end of World War II.
“When we turn to this era and look for representative Black writers, we always turn to the same one or two figures,” McCarthy said, noting that Ralph Ellison’s writing dominates the area of study. “I really wanted the book to allow us to see how rich and varied this period is with your lesser-known writers, who nonetheless produced really interesting and, in many cases, unjustly neglected work.”
The 1930s saw a surge of global interest in communism, including among Black writers. Many of them, such as Édouard Glissant, Vincent O. Carter, and Paule Marshall, were nurtured or at least inspired by the organized left and by the ideals of the Communist Revolution, he noted.
“Many people saw it as the only alternative to fascism, which was on the rise in Europe. That meant that you had an entire generation of Black writers who were cultivated on the left socially,” McCarthy said. “They also were drawn to the ideology of the left because it offered a way to think about racism, primarily through the lens of class.”
The popularity of communism in the United States crumbled following World War II amid the rise of communist states across Eastern Europe, China, and Cuba. During the Cold War, Americans on the left felt obliged to either align themselves with the nation’s brand of liberalism or Soviet communism, a choice many Black writers found impossible.
Writer Richard Wright became deeply disillusioned with the Stalinist drift of the Communist Party. However, the “Native Son” author felt he couldn’t fall back on the American liberal position, “especially as a Black writer with a social and militant consciousness, from his point of view, America doesn’t represent freedom any more than the tyrannical Soviet Union,” according to McCarthy.
Increasingly, Black writers found themselves “interested in trying to think about what it would mean to write from a position that sees both of these alternatives as radically insufficient,” McCarthy noted.
This led them to experimentation with tropes of “retreat, themes of alienation, and an emphasis on the exploration of states of interiority and dissident consciousness” as they sought to reimagine what a relationship to radical politics might look like.
McCarthy concludes “The Blue Period” by asking what it means to write for a future world, a question McCarthy suggested could find echoes in aspects of the current political atmosphere in the U.S.
“One of the structuring principles at play here for these writers is what it means to write in a time that feels like a historical impasse,” he said. “When none of the politics that are available to you match your aspirations and don’t fit into your conceptions of who you are, to live and write from a position without any horizon of hope — something of that is with us again.”
Jennifer O’Connor appointed vice president and general counsel
Distinguished legal practitioner, whose career includes public service at White House and with federal agencies, to join Harvard on July 29
5 min read
Jennifer O’Connor, whose career includes service as legal and strategic counsel inside the White House and with several federal agencies, will become the University’s new vice president and general counsel on July 29, interim President Alan M. Garber announced on Wednesday.
O’Connor, a 1987 graduate of Harvard College who was born in Cambridge, is currently Northrop Grumman’s vice president of technology and information law and policy, a group she helped create within the company. In this role, she leads and advises on complex legal issues related to AI, cybersecurity, emerging technologies, data access and protection, and more.
“Widely admired among her colleagues for her collaborative style, strategic insight, and dedication to public service, [O’Connor] brings with her an abiding commitment to Harvard and its mission,” Garber said in a message to the Harvard community announcing the appointment. “I am confident that her unique combination of talent and experience will serve the University well at a pivotal moment for higher education.”
As vice president and general counsel, O’Connor will lead the Office of General Counsel, which provides support to the University’s Schools, divisions, and departments on an extensive array of legal matters.
“Widely admired among her colleagues for her collaborative style, strategic insight, and dedication to public service, [O’Connor] brings with her an abiding commitment to Harvard and its mission.”
interim President Alan M. Garber
“I am thrilled to be returning to Harvard, a place that has had such a profound influence on my life since I arrived as an undergraduate,” O’Connor said. “I am grateful to [interim] President Garber for his confidence and to have this opportunity, along with the amazing team in the Office of General Counsel, to support and advance the vital mission of this University and the groundbreaking work being done by students, faculty, and researchers across so many areas that will have a meaningful impact in our world today and long into the future.”
O’Connor has held legal and strategic counsel roles in various federal government offices and agencies. In 2016, she was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate as general counsel for the Department of Defense. She held that post through the end of the administration. Before joining the Defense Department, she served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy White House counsel. In that role she managed litigation strategy and congressional investigations and risk management. Her work also included a focus on national security, immigration, and foreign policy.
Prior to joining the White House staff, she served as special counsel at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, managing investigations focused on the launch of Healthcare.gov. She worked previously as counselor to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, where she provided strategic advice to the commissioner during a period of critical challenges and transitions.
In the private sector, O’Connor was a partner from 2006 to 2013 at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she was also an associate from 2002 to 2006. Prior to this position, she served as a litigation associate at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin and Baker Botts, and was a law clerk for the Honorable Judith Rogers in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
O’Connor served in various appointed positions in the federal government before joining the private sector, including as deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor and in the White House as special assistant to the president in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff and Office of Cabinet Affairs. She also served as a deputy director in the Office of Management and Administration.
O’Connor received her A.B. from Harvard College in 1987 and an M.P.A from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in 1993. In 1997, she earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was on the editorial board of the American Criminal Law Review and served as a teaching fellow in legal writing. She is a member of the Law and National Security Advisory Committee for the American Bar Association, a member of the Department of Defense Advisory Committee on the Investigation, Prosecution and Defense of Sexual Assaults in the Armed Forces, and is part of the board of directors for Blue Star Families.
In announcing O’Connor’s appointment, Garber expressed his appreciation to Eileen Finan for her work as interim general counsel since March 1. “I am immensely grateful for Eileen’s counsel, dedication, and wisdom over these past months, which we will continue to benefit from as she resumes her role as a University attorney.”
O’Connor is succeeding Diane Lopez, who retired at the end of February after serving as vice president and general counsel since 2019 and completing 30 years of overall service to the University.
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
The Business School’s Michael I. Norton has explored the influence of social norms on individual choices in his research and in the books “Happy Money” and “The Ritual Effect.” We asked him about the process behind personal preferences.
Our preferences vary from category to category. Music preferences are developed in the teen years. Typically, people think whatever music they were listening to from age 16 to 20 is the best music automatically, because that’s when they were forming their identity. But your favorite car brand doesn’t develop until you’re out there shopping for cars. So when the thing hits you that you need in your life, you start to develop preferences at that time. At the same time, your parents’ preferences massively influence your own, like the brand of spaghetti sauce you use is highly correlated with the one your parents used.
We like to think that our attitudes lead to our product choices, which is true sometimes, but it’s also the case sometimes that the product choices lead to the attitudes after the fact. And we’re not really aware of when that’s happening to us. For example, everyone in Manhattan has their opinion about the best pizza place. And it turns out that it’s almost always within walking distance of where they live. So is it the best pizza place? Or did they randomly end up in that spot?
We like to think that our attitudes lead to our product choices, which is true sometimes, but it’s also the case sometimes that the product choices lead to the attitudes after the fact.
It’s totally clear that it’s pretty random, but that’s not how we think about what we like, because we think we like what we like, and we come up with reasons after the fact.
Wine connoisseurs, for example, will try to drink every wine to develop their palate. So you could say, well, if you develop expertise, then you’re more likely to have it be your true preference. But it’s still out of a set. And things like the price of a wine dramatically influence your views. So even with drinking all the wines, you’re still getting all these signals about how good it is.
Online, it’s easier than it used to be for companies to figure out our personalities and target consumers based on that. We tend to think of our social media as reflecting who we are, which means it’s very different if a brand pops up on your Facebook or Instagram page, because you are more likely to think, “Oh, I like this part of who I am.” Whereas if I just throw something randomly at you on the radio, well, “Hold on a second, maybe that’s not something I like, it’s just because I happen to be listening right now.”
One of the things that AI can do is pull out associations that you wouldn’t otherwise pull out. Marketers already knew that if you were buying hot dog buns, you were probably also interested in hot dogs. But there are things that are correlated with each other for a reason we can’t necessarily put our finger on, but that can be pulled out of the data. And that means that we’re getting more and more personalized ads and brands thrown at us.
To like something organically, without influence from companies or your social network, is really hard to do. You’re going to see what your friends wear — they don’t have to say, “Buy this brand,” but you’re going to see it and you’re exposed to it. The fact that fashion differs from country to country is because you look locally and you pick something out of the set that’s there.
We are able to segment down to very specific preferences and it’s much easier to have subcultures than it used to be, but that’s still a community and we reinforce each other. Even with something like “normcore,” dressing normal and boring is an aesthetic. You’re still choosing pants from a retailer and in the end, you are reflecting your preferences and something about yourself.
At the same time, so many categories are different group to group. We share this one with our parents, and we share this one with this other set of people, and then everybody’s still drinking bottled water from the same three brands. So it’s not types of people who all buy the same things. It’s really across product categories and across people. We have all these different identities that we’re expressing in all sorts of different ways.
As for how our tastes might change, economists would think of it in terms of switching costs. So is it easy or hard to change the preference. For example, going from a PC to a Mac, you can do it obviously, they’re both computers, but there’s some switching costs, because it’s a different interface and you have to relearn something. Whereas with shirts, I know how to put all the shirts on. So switching costs to another brand are very, very low. I might as well jump over to another brand, or pizza, or whatever it might be. But things where it’s hard to move from one to the other are where people are more likely to stay where they are.
An evening of stars, solar flares, and agujeros negros
Photos by Scott Eisen
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Harvard College Observatory hosts inaugural Spanish-language night
Ten-year-old David Castro really enjoyed it all, but his very favorite part was when Center for Astrophysics researcher Ernesto Camacho Iniguez talked about gravitational waves and agujeros negros — black holes.
About 50 people of all ages participated in the night of celestial education and group stargazing on June 27 at the observatory, which is part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
The observatory has begun offering public observation nights through its array of professional-grade telescopes after a yearslong, pandemic-related hiatus, said Philippe Reekie, communication and outreach specialist at the Center for Astrophysics.
The crowd heard talks by Camacho Iniguez and Tatiana Niembro Hernández, a Center for Astrophysics solar physicist, before heading to the roof after sunset.
Along the way, participants passed the towering Great Refractor, Harvard’s historic 15-inch refracting telescope installed in 1847 that was once the largest in the world. (The telescope still functions, but its dome does not, precluding its use.)
The event was created to serve the large Spanish-speaking community of Cambridge and Boston. While most observation nights are conducted in English, Reekie also aspires to offer future events in other languages besides Spanish. The night was proposed and co-organized by Andrés A. Plazas Malagón, an astrophysicist affiliated with Harvard and Stanford who also served as host and emcee.
Although no planets were visible during the gathering at the observatory, viewers did locate stars Vega and Arcturus.
The observatory has “a very rich and proud history of diversity,” Reekie continued. “Part of our mission is public engagement, and to highlight people who are underrepresented, particularly in science.”
Though the weather held up and the night was mostly clear, the sky didn’t quite cooperate; no planets were visible during the gathering. Viewers did get help training telescopes on the Ring Nebula, and stars like Vega and Arcturus. The latter appeared as a bright snowball when viewed through the Clark Telescope, Harvard’s largest fully operating rooftop instrument.
The night kicked off with a talk by Niembro Hernández describing her research in coronal mass ejections — large expulsions of plasma from the sun. In an interview after her talk, Niembro Hernández said she immediately replied “yes” to Reekie’s email seeking Spanish-speaking astronomers for the event.
A graduate of National Autonomous University of Mexico, Niembro Hernández said introducing nonscientists to astrophysics is a way of expressing gratitude for her past opportunities. “I want to share what I’ve learned. I love science a lot. If you have a bad professor, you will hate science. So I just want to give back.”
Niembro Hernández was followed by Camacho Iniguez, who offered a crash course in black hole characteristics and detection, complete with a tabletop demonstration of how the extraordinary mass of a black hole bends the “fabric” of space and time. He shared why his field of study gives him a thrill:
“Para mí, la astronomía es muy importante por algunos hechos — entre ellos, que somos polvo de estrellas. Este hecho me parece fascinante. Porque todos los átomos de nuestro cuerpo … todo fue cocinado en el interior de una estrella hace miles de millónes de años.”
[“To me, astronomy is so important for a number of reasons — among them, that we are stardust. This fact is fascinating to me. All the atoms in our bodies … we were all created in the interior of a star, thousands of millions of years ago.”]
Guatemala native Madelin Nova works at the observatory and encouraged friends to attend. “As someone with no prior knowledge of astrophysics or scientific terms, it was very easy to understand,” Nova said. “The best part was just how interactive it was, and how willing everyone was to ask questions.”
The revival of observatory nights is only the start. Reekie and others are hard at work on plans to increase regional K-12 school visits and to engage with other, local astronomy groups. Other possibilities for outreach include bringing telescopes into rural schools.
For HCO executive director Purvang Patel, it’s all good. He said creating a welcoming environment for scientists and casual enthusiasts alike is a key goal.
“We are not only preserving the legacy of the [observatory], but also ensuring its relevance and accessibility for future generations,” Patel said.
Researchers discover microscopic ‘brain thesaurus’ that lets neurons derive meaning from spoken words
MGH Communications
4 min read
Using a novel technology for obtaining recordings from single neurons, a team of investigators at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital has discovered a microscopic “thesaurus” that reflects how word meanings are represented in the human brain.
The research, which is published in Nature, opens the door to understanding how humans comprehend language and provides insights that could be used to help individuals with medical conditions that affect speech.
“Humans possess an exceptional ability to extract nuanced meaning through language — when we listen to speech, we can comprehend the meanings of up to tens of thousands of words and do so seamlessly across remarkably diverse concepts and themes,” said senior author Ziv Williams, a physician-investigator in the Department of Neurosurgery at MGH and an associate professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. “Yet, how the human brain processes language at the basic computational level of individual neurons has remained a challenge to understand.”
Williams and his colleagues set out to construct a detailed map of how neurons in the human brain represent word meanings — for example, how we represent the concept of animal when we hear the word cat and dog, and how we distinguish between the concepts of a dog and a car.
“We also wanted to find out how humans are able to process such diverse meanings during natural speech and through which we are able to rapidly comprehend the meanings of words across a wide array of sentences, stories, and narratives,” Williams said.
Using this new technique, the investigators discovered how neurons in the brain map words to meanings and how they distinguish certain meanings from others.
To start addressing these questions, the scientists used a novel technology that allowed them to simultaneously record the activities of up to a hundred neurons from the brain while people listened to sentences (such as, “The child bent down to smell the rose”) and short stories (for example, about the life and times of Elvis Presley).
Using this new technique, the investigators discovered how neurons in the brain map words to meanings and how they distinguish certain meanings from others.
“For example, we found that while certain neurons preferentially activated when people heard words such as ‘ran’ or ‘jumped,’ which reflect actions, other neurons preferentially activated when hearing words that have emotional connotations, such as ‘happy’ or ‘sad,’” said Williams. “Moreover, when looking at all of the neurons together, we could start building a detailed picture of how word meanings are represented in the brain.”
To comprehend language, though, it is not enough to only understand the meaning of words; one must also accurately follow their meanings within sentences. For example, most people can rapidly differentiate between words such as “sun” and “son” or “see” and “sea” when used in a sentence, even though the words sound exactly the same.
“We found that certain neurons in the brain are able to reliably distinguish between such words, and they continuously anticipate the most likely meaning of the words based on the sentence contexts in which they are heard,” said Williams.
Lastly, and perhaps most excitingly, the researchers found that by recording a relatively small number of brain neurons, they could reliably predict the meanings of words as they were heard in real time during speech. That is, based on the activities of the neurons, the team could determine the general ideas and concepts experienced by an individual as they were being comprehended during speech.
“By being able to decode word meaning from the activities of small numbers of brain cells, it may be possible to predict, with a certain degree of granularity, what someone is listening to or thinking,” said Williams. “It could also potentially allow us to develop brain-machine interfaces in the future that can enable individuals with conditions such as motor paralysis or stroke to communicate more effectively.”
Paper authors Mohsen Jamali is supported by CIHR, NARSAD Young Investigator Grant, and Foundations of Human Behavior Initiative, Benjamin Grannan is supported by NREF and NIH NRSA, Arjun Khanna and William Muñoz are supported by NIH R25NS065743, Angelique Paulk is supported by UG3NS123723, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and P50MH119467, Sydney Cash is supported by R44MH125700 and Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, Evelina Fedorenko is supported by U01NS121471 and R01 DC016950, and Ziv Wiliams is supported by NIH R01DC019653 and U01NS121616.
Symposium examines science, outlines opportunities to tackle mental health crisis
Lori Shridhare
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
Arthur Brooks likes to give students in his popular Harvard Business School class on happiness a quiz: Why are you alive? For what would you be willing to die?
“I tell students that the way to pass the following quiz is to have answers; the way to fail the following quiz is to not have answers. I’m not going to tell you what the right answers are. They’re your answers,” said Brooks, professor of management practice at HBS, as he opened a recent symposium on happiness and leadership.
Brooks’ query on core values reflects widely accepted happiness research, which finds that meaning and purpose are hallmarks of a happy life, one filled with a sense of well-being. The principle dates back to Aristotle’s reference to eudaimonia, or having a “good spirit,” and was one of the theories discussed at the event hosted by Brooks’ Leadership and Happiness Laboratory.
The June 20-21 symposium drew 200 in-person attendees, with another 1,000 online, and included administrators, business leaders, military personnel, elected officials, and students. The purpose was as direct as the mission of the lab, which “believes that all great leaders should be happiness teachers.”
Brooks, who is also the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, said many of the speakers had inspired and mentored him in his own work, notably psychologist Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology.
Another influential figure was Tal Ben-Shahar ’96, Ph.D. ’04, a co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy, who taught two of the largest classes in Harvard’s history, Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership. Ben-Shahar discussed the genesis of developing a curriculum on happiness and his work designing the first master’s degree in happiness science for Centenary University in 2022.
Yale professor Laurie Santos’ course on happiness is considered the university’s most popular course.
The popularity of such university courses, which have been made freely available through platforms such as HarvardX and Coursera, has skyrocketed in recent years, as symposium speaker Laurie Santos ’97, A.M. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale, discovered. Her course on happiness, launched in 2018, became the university’s most popular course in more than 300 years, with almost one in four students at Yale enrolled. The goal of her classes is to reduce unhappiness and increase happiness, which was inspired during her time as Stillman Head of College.
In this role, Santos learned firsthand about mental health issues plaguing college students, including academic stress, depression, anxiety, and suicidality. Yale students reported that they “put on a happy persona to hold things in until they crack and break” and that “it takes a real crisis for us to actually admit something is wrong,” Santos said.
Debunking the myth that happiness science is about enforced positivity is one of the goals of her course. “I think students expect all positive psychology to be akin to what they these days call ‘toxic positivity’ — the idea of ‘happy all the time, stay positive, think happy thoughts.’ I think this is what a lot of Yale students fall prey to unnecessarily.”
Other speakers included Lisa Miller, whose work and research as a Columbia psychology and education professor focuses on the value of a spiritual life. She detailed findings on the role of spirituality as protective against a number of deleterious conditions: 80 percent protective against substance dependence and abuse, 60 percent against major depressive disorder, and 50 percent to 80 percent against suicidality.
Financially, those who make $75,000-$96,000 in the U.S. are happiest, but “once you get beyond having your basic needs met, you can make millions, and you’re not much happier.”
Robert Waldinger, Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Robert Waldinger, who directs the 86-year-old Harvard Study of Adult Development, shared study findings that having basic needs met — food, shelter, healthcare — is critical for happiness.
Financially, those who make $75,000-$96,000 in the U.S. are happiest, but “once you get beyond having your basic needs met, you can make millions, and you’re not much happier,” he noted.
Waldinger, who is also a Zen priest, addressed the epidemic of loneliness, which impacts one in three or four people in the U.S. and other developed countries, with a trend upward in developing countries as well, according to a Meta-Gallup survey.
Integrating lessons learned from Eastern spiritual traditions and Western scholarship in leadership, Hitendra Wadhwa, professor of practice at Columbia Business School, spoke about the importance of accessing one’s core self.
Wadhwa, guided by the teachings of Yogananda, the Indian mystic and spiritual teacher, emphasized that the wisdom of good leadership can be found from within.
“Your inner core is that space within you from where your best self arises, where your highest potential resides,” he said. “When you’re at your core, you’re beyond ego, beyond attachment, insecurities — and you get your life’s most beautiful work done.”
The symposium’s final presentation turned toward criticism of the discourse on happiness, highlighting research that investigates the limits of happiness measurements and definitions as outlined in positive psychology.
Owen Flanagan, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Duke University, outlined other ways for measuring happiness, including objective well-being, pointing to many important leaders who lived lives of service and meaning that were not necessarily focused on happiness.
“Happiness can’t be everything,” he said. “It’s not the summum bonum,” or singular good.
Flanagan pointed to luminaries and change leaders such as Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi. He noted: “The first thing that would come to our minds is not that they were happy; it’s that they were good people. They lived really important, purposeful, and meaningful lives.”
And when it comes to public policy, Flanagan said the focus “is on human rights and sustainable development, so that everyone can live the kind of life Aristotle thought was possible for us: a life in which we can discover our talents — and then you can worry about other things, such as people’s psychological states.”
Alzheimer’s study finds diet, lifestyle changes yield improvements
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
New intensive regimen upends prior results, but researchers say larger, longer trials needed
Tantalizing new research suggests intensive diet and lifestyle changes may not only forestall cognitive decline related to Alzheimer’s disease but possibly bring some improvement to those in early stages.
The small, limited study varied from earlier findings, which concluded a healthy lifestyle could lower risk but showed little promise in reversing damage. That result had co-authors on the paper, published in June in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, tempering excitement with caution.
“To get significant results on these cognitive tests in just 20 weeks, in just 50 patients, only altering lifestyle, to be very honest was just shocking to me, but shocking because it says maybe this matters,” said senior author Rudolph Tanzi, Harvard Medical School’s Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Child Neurology and Mental Retardation, and co-director of the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease. “But I’m the first to say that it’s a small study. It was only 20 weeks, so let’s not jump to any conclusions. But boy, what a great start.”
Steven Arnold, professor of neurology at HMS, Massachusetts General Hospital’s E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Science, and senior author on the paper, said the findings showed promising results but cautioned against “overinterpreting” them and advised against making wholesale diet and lifestyle changes based on this study alone.
“I think this is a well-done study. It needs to be bigger. It needs to be longer,” Arnold said. “I want people to be intrigued and enthused by its findings, but not overinterpret them because more data is needed.”
The trial took an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, pulling together an array of interventions that individually have been seen to lower risk. In addition to their comprehensiveness, researchers said the interventions were also intensive. That is a possible reason, they suggested, their results varied from earlier studies that employed more moderate interventions.
The study’s 51 subjects, whose average age was 73.5, were in the initial stages of Alzheimer’s disease. and all had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or early dementia. Twenty-six were randomly assigned to the intervention group and 25 to the control group.
Interventions
Lifestyle followed by study participants in the intervention group
All meals plus snacks for subjects and their spouses were delivered to their homes.
The vegan regimen, which was not calorie-restricted, was augmented by supplements believed to support cognition, including omega 3 fatty acids, curcumin, a multivitamin, vitamins C and B12, magnesium L-threonate, coenzyme Q, a probiotic, and lion’s mane.
Participants did 30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily and strength training three times a week.
For stress reduction, subjects meditated, did yoga poses, stretching, and breathing exercises in a daily hour led by a stress management specialist.
Subjects participated in an hourlong support group three times a week led by a mental health professional.
Over 20 weeks, those in the intervention group were asked to eat a strict vegan diet, with all meals plus snacks for subjects and their spouses delivered to their homes. The regimen, which was not calorie-restricted, was augmented by supplements believed to support cognition, including omega 3 fatty acids, curcumin, a multivitamin, vitamins C and B12, magnesium L-threonate, coenzyme Q, a probiotic, and lion’s mane.
Those interventions were coupled with 30 minutes of aerobic exercise daily and strength training three times a week. For stress reduction, subjects meditated, did yoga poses, stretching, and breathing exercises in a daily hour led by a stress management specialist.
To boost social support, subjects and spouses participated in an hourlong support group three times a week led by a mental health professional. In all, subjects received 12 hours per week of professional support — delivered via Zoom — for the lifestyle interventions.
“In my heart of hearts, I think there is something real here.”
Steven Arnold
“In my heart of hearts, I think there is something real here,” said Arnold, who is also MGH’s head of translational neurology and managing director of its Interdisciplinary Brain Center. “If you do significantly change the metabolic, inflammatory, vascular milieu of the body and the brain, that is good for our brain function. And this diet, exercise, stress reduction/socialization intervention may work as well or better than some of the drugs we use for Alzheimer’s disease.”
To establish a baseline and gauge progress, participants took four standard tests used to measure cognitive performance in FDA drug trials. The results varied by test but generally showed the intervention group improved or stayed the same while the control group stayed the same or worsened. On the Clinical Global Impression of Change, for example, 10 — more than 40 percent — improved after 20 weeks, seven were unchanged, seven worsened slightly, and none worsened moderately. Among the controls, by comparison, none improved, eight were unchanged, and 17 worsened slightly or moderately. Two other tests showed that the intervention group improved on average, while the control group worsened. The fourth test showed both groups doing worse, with the control group worsening significantly more.
Researchers, who hailed from institutions in the U.S., U.K., Finland, and Sweden, also examined participants’ blood and microbiomes. One biomarker, called pTau 181, showed little change between the controls and the intervention group, but researchers found improvements in another marker, which measures the ratio of two forms of the amyloid beta protein, which forms plaques in the brain that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers found improvements in another marker, which measures the ratio of two forms of the amyloid beta protein, which forms plaques in the brain that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.
Measures associated with cardiac and metabolic health like cholesterol, A1c, hemoglobin, and others also improved. The intervention group’s microbiome shifted, with populations of beneficial bacteria increasing and those thought to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease decreasing. In addition, there was a dose-response effect in both biomarkers and cognitive tests, with the degree of change positively associated with adherence to the lifestyle interventions.
The work received financial support from more than two dozen private foundations and charitable funds and comes at a moment of optimism about Alzheimer’s disease. After years of failed drug trials that had researchers questioning whether they really understood the disease, a drug called lecanemab gained FDA approval last year after a study of 1,800 people over 18 months showed it to be the first treatment to slow progression in those in early stages of the disease.
Tanzi and Arnold acknowledged their study’s relatively small sample size was a shortcoming but said the its design as a randomized controlled trial, considered a scientific gold standard, was a strength. The trial was designed to be multimodal, but the fact that so many different lifestyle factors were at play made it difficult to tease out the effect of each, said Tanzi, who is also the director of MGH’s Genetics and Aging Research Unit and its Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health.
The next step, he and Arnold said, would be a larger study to see whether the results are replicated. Arnold said that among questions such a trial would answer is whether subjects would stick with such an intensive intervention over the long term.
Conduct of the trial was significantly affected by the pandemic. Enrollment, which occurred between 2018 and 2022, was still underway when COVID-19 hit in early 2020, curtailing enrollment, which originally had targeted 100 participants. The need for distancing forced researchers to shift sessions to online, which may have altered the effect of the social support sessions. It did, however, allow expansion of the study population from a single site in San Francisco to others around the country, including Massachusetts General Hospital.
“This should be looked at as a pilot study, but the pilot data are significant and strongly suggest that lifestyle intervention was effective,” Tanzi said.
Martin Puchner is using chatbots to bring to life Socrates, Shakespeare, and Thoreau
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Making education accessible to a wider range of students is the driving force behind many of Martin Puchner’s projects.
It’s why, in the mid-2000s, he took on the daunting task of editing the vast “Norton Anthology of World Literature,” which is used to introduce college students in classrooms around the country to classic texts.
It’s also the reason he now experiments with building customized AI chatbots, allowing students to speak directly with famous figures from history, such as Socrates, Shakespeare, and Thoreau.
Puchner sat down with the Gazette to talk about the anthology, which published its fifth edition this month with a new feature that provides different translations of text for students to compare — including one done by AI technology. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is it like to edit an anthology that encompasses such a vast range of global literature?
No one is trained in literature on that scale. In retrospect I’m amazed how little emphasis on that big picture is placed in education. But it allows you to see patterns and developments that you’re not able to see if you look at literature, culture, history in chunks of 100 or 200 years. For me it’s just been completely life-transforming. Everyone who first encounters such an anthology, including teachers, will say, “There’s so much in here I didn’t even know existed.” Since this is for American students, it’s a way of learning about the rest of the world. There is some American literature in here too, and some English literature, but the emphasis is on everything else.
“I thought, ‘I wonder what happens if I can use the dialogic form of the chat to access dialogic philosophers like Socrates?’”
Customized AI chatbots allow you to converse with historical figures, based on their words and ideas.
This anthology includes more material from oral storytelling traditions from Africa and the early Americas, tell me about that.
We started to think more intentionally about how to include oral literature, including Native American literary traditions, African literary traditions. We’d always had texts in the anthology that had been transmitted orally before they were written down (for example, the West African “Epic of Sunjata”), and we always had a cluster of fairy tales and folktales that were written down in the 19th century. But we didn’t really think systematically about it — we tried to do that this time, especially with respect to chronology. An anthology is organized mostly chronologically by when something was written down, but that doesn’t work very well when something has been transmitted for centuries and may be written down as an afterthought or by an anthropologist. We decided, at least in the thematic clusters, to mash up the texts that were written down in a given period with others that were written down later but that had an interesting thematic connection.
Tell me about the new “Translation Lab” feature in this edition.
Translation is a fascinating topic, because that’s what makes world literature flow. No one knows all these languages. That means if you want to do big-picture or cross-cultural reading, you have to do it in translation. Sometimes that’s treated as an embarrassment — scholars in comparative literature can be very snooty about that — but there’s an amazing amount of insight you can get out of good translations. It’s also cool to see how different translators approach that from different angles. Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is a modernist poem, it’s extremely obscure, it’s very difficult, including in the original German. We have a bunch of translations: One of the translations is by the wife and co-founder of Norton, our publisher, another is by myself, one is by Google Translate. I thought that would encourage students to think about what goes into translation. We encourage students to try out their latest translation software and see how these different machine translations handle difficult metaphors.
You have been creating customized AI chatbots that personify historical figures like Socrates, Aristotle, and Confucius. What inspired you to create these?
We interact with AI through dialogue. Thinkers in antiquity, Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, lived in literate societies, but none of them wrote a single word — they insisted on live dialogue, particular styles of question and answers. When they died, their students wrote down their words and invented these philosophical dialogues. I thought, “Interesting that there’s a new form of dialogue that’s emerging through these chat bots, I wonder what happens if I can use the dialogic form of the chat to access dialogic philosophers like Socrates?” You upload a defined data set — let’s say the Platonic Dialogues — and then you generate instructions. Through trial and error, I figured out how to shape that combination of data set and instructions so that you can talk to Socrates. In the instructions, there’s a lot of, you know, “Don’t do this,” “Don’t do that.” You basically have to define what it means to be Socrates and speak. Because Socrates hadn’t written down his dialogues, I had to say, “Refer to the dialogues,” but say, “In a conversation later recorded by my student Plato, I observed …” I wanted it to be concrete and give actual quotations from the text and their answers. It’s fun to chat with these figures. I think you actually really learn something from them.
So how worried or optimistic are you about AI’s potential to impact the humanities?
Silicon Valley is so futurist in its predictions, I admit to being sometimes susceptible to that, just because almost everyone else in the arts and humanities is so knee-jerk against all of that. But I am aware that the utopian promises have not always come to pass and that’s certainly going to be the case with AI as well. Technologies are tools and it’s good to learn how to use them well. They have their possibilities, and they have limitations. I think people feel a lot of fear; we have all these science fiction scenarios in our minds that are often paired with a kind of contempt. “This is all it can do?” “This is not real art.” I think we need to move beyond that, I really do.
Elderly may harvest benefits from the attitude alone
Maya Brownstein
Harvard Chan School Communications
3 min read
Don’t limit it to Thanksgiving. Conscious gratitude may help older adults live longer, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Prior research has shown an association between gratitude and lower risk of mental distress and greater emotional and social well-being. However, its association with physical health is less understood,” said lead author Ying Chen, research scientist in the Department of Epidemiology. “Our study provides the first empirical evidence on this topic, suggesting that experiencing grateful affect may increase longevity among older adults.”
The study was published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry.
The researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study to assess levels of gratitude and mortality among 49,275 older women. In 2016, participants, whose average age was 79, completed a six-item Gratitude Questionnaire in which they provided scores to agree or disagree with statements such as “I have so much in life to be thankful for” and “If I had to list everything that I felt grateful for, it would be a very long list.” In 2019, the researchers followed up to identify deaths among the study population, noting all-cause mortality as well as specific causes such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, neurodegenerative disease, infection, and injury. They observed 4,608 deaths over the course of the study period; of the specific causes studied, cardiovascular disease was most common.
The study found that participants whose Gratitude Questionnaire scores were in the highest tertile had a 9 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality over the following four years than those who scored in the bottom tertile. Gratitude appeared protective against every specific cause of mortality studied, most significantly against cardiovascular disease.
According to the researchers, to most accurately quantify gratitude’s impact on mortality, the study took a “conservative approach” in controlling for sociodemographic data, health history, and lifestyle factors, including things such as social participation, religious involvement, and optimism, which often overlap with gratitude.
“Prior research indicates that there are ways of intentionally fostering gratitude, such as writing down or discussing what you are grateful for a few times a week,” said Chen. “Promoting healthy aging is a public health priority, and we hope further studies will improve our understanding of gratitude as psychological resource for enhancing longevity.”
Other Harvard Chan authors were Olivia Okereke, Henning Tiemeier, Laura Kubzansky, and Tyler VanderWeele.
The study was funded by the Templeton Foundation (grant 61075) and the National Institutes of Health (grant CA222147).
Francine Prose’s memoir trails fleeing 26-year-old novelist to S.F., her attraction to deeply troubled, fading counterculture hero
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
One rainy night in the winter of 1974, Francine Prose found herself in a Buick speeding through the dark streets of San Francisco. Driving was Tony J. Russo, a troubled anti-war activist who, about two years earlier, had been indicted and tried for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Prose, then 26, recalled Russo always drove with manic intensity, making sharp U-turns and checking his rearview mirror, as if monitoring whether he was being followed.
Prose, who met the whistleblower at a friend’s poker game, would spend many nights careening with Russo around the hilly city, listening to his stories about injustices he had witnessed in Vietnam and at RAND Corporation, where he’d once worked. The pair were mismatched in many ways (he was 10 years older), but he exuded charisma and was “antiwar royalty.”
Prose, a graduate of Radcliffe ’68 and Harvard A.M. ’69, wrote about her strange, ultimately disastrous semi-romantic relationship with Russo in the just-published “1974: A Personal History,” covering a transitional period for the nation and herself.
“He could have had this amazing career as an aeronautical space engineer or analyst and completely gave it up because he’d gone to Vietnam and seen what was going on over there,” recalled Prose, now 77. “I was very drawn to people who were willing to risk something for something they believed in.”
“One of the reasons that a person winds up writing a book is because there’s something that they can’t get out of their heads.”
Francine Prose.
Credit: Frances F. Denny
A Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, Prose has written more than 20 works of fiction, including “A Changed Man” and National Book Award finalist “Blue Angel,” as well as scores of nonfiction books and essays. The new book is her first memoir. Surprisingly, Prose says it only occurred to her to write about her experience with Russo about three years ago, at a friend’s suggestion.
“One of the reasons that a person winds up writing a book is because there’s something that they can’t get out of their heads,” Prose said. “One detail of him going to this cafeteria and eating breakfast sausage and berry pie was completely engraved on my memory. I started thinking, ‘If it’s so real to me and so clear to me, maybe it’s something that I should write about. And maybe it’s about something that’s bigger than what happened to me.’”
Prose’s book includes flashbacks to gritty 1960s Cambridge, where she lived with her first husband after graduating from Radcliffe College. An English major, she remembers her undergraduate years fondly. “You can spend four years reading Victorian novels, hanging out with your friends, and smoking weed, and you’ll do pretty well,” she recalled wryly.
She was politically active, making antiwar posters and attending demonstrations at the State House. In 1969, her peers occupied University Hall to protest the war in Vietnam.
But post-graduation, her marriage quickly unraveled and her graduate studies in medieval English literature at Harvard proved the wrong fit. Subsequently, her mental health took a downturn, and she escaped to San Francisco.
“I’m very sympathetic to my students who are about to graduate,” Prose said. “You’re about to have a life — then maybe you do, and maybe you don’t.”
Prose’s personal story is inextricable from its backdrop of the early ’70s, a time when young Americans, in Prose’s words, “realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen.” Events like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the first moon landing, and Nixon’s resignation help set the scene.
“We really believed that things could change for the better,” Prose said. “We believed that we could end the war in Vietnam. The [Black] Panthers were very present and visible so we believed that there could be some end to institutional racism. We believed that there could be something closer to income equality. And then it changed.”
The Pentagon Papers, published in The New York Times in 1971, revealed the U.S. government’s deception about its involvement in Vietnam. Russo’s friend and former colleague Daniel Ellsberg ’52 stole the papers, and the two men copied them using a Xerox machine at Russo’s then-girlfriend’s workplace.
Prose said motivation for the memoir came partly from wanting to correct the record on Russo, once renowned as a heroic activist but now remembered more as a secondary Xeroxer. Even his 2008 obituary in the New York Times called him “a shaggy-haired, countercultural, unemployed policy wonk.”
“He talked Ellsberg into or gave him the nerve to leak the Pentagon Papers. He found the photocopy machine. He made this thing happen,” Prose said. “You can imagine him shaking Ellsberg out of whatever sensible doubts he might have had and pumping energy into their situation. But Ellsberg was very commodifiable. He had beautiful suits, and he had a great haircut, and he was handsome. Tony was much, much more politically radical, so he became a drag on the defense.”
In a scene toward the end of the book, their relationship careening toward collapse, young Prose fled as Russo spiraled into a public mental breakdown in front of news media. Prose said she only realized the full depth of her guilt, about not staying to help Russo, as she tried to write the scene.
“I wasn’t quite as nice a person as I had remembered myself being,” Prose said.
Prose says she feels far removed from the girl she was then, who she writes was “at once so uncertain and so sure of herself, so terrified and so brave.”
“I keep telling myself so much of the book is about being young,” she said, “and how different it is.”
Amid surging early onset rates, Harvard experts say cost, effectiveness, equity must be considered, along with other ways to evaluate
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Medical and public health professionals are seeing a worrisome trend of rising early onset rates for certain cancers and wrestling with what the most appropriate response might be.
In April, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered the recommended age to start breast cancer screening to 40 from 50, citing high mortality and a rising incidence among U.S. women age 40 to 49 for the change. Data showed a 2 percent annual increase in diagnoses from 2015 to 2019.
Colorectal cancer has tracked a similar, perhaps even more worrisome, trajectory in recent years. It has seen an even steeper rise of early onset cases, up 15 percent among those age 40 to 49 between 2000 and 2016. The second deadliest after lung cancer, it kills more people than breast cancer — an estimated 52,550 in 2023.
The Gazette asked colorectal cancer experts at Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospitals whether the colorectal cancer screening age should be lowered to 40 from the current 45.
‘Many of the younger patients are being diagnosed in their late 20s to 30s’
Ted Hong, professor of radiation oncology, HMS; director of the Gastrointestinal Service, Radiation Oncology Department, Mass General Cancer Center
This is a complicated issue. While there is clearly a dramatic rise in colorectal cancer in young patients, it’s not clear that 40 is the correct age. Many of the younger patients are being diagnosed in their late 20s to 30s and moving the screening to 40 may not capture this group of patients, while dramatically increasing cost and utilization. Ultimately, other tests, be it blood-based or stool-based, to direct younger patients at risk to earlier colonoscopy are needed.
‘Early screening involves risks and additional upfront costs’
Tyler Berzin, associate professor of medicine, HMS; director of the Advanced Endoscopy Fellowship program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
It would be a “not yet” for me right now. In the last couple of decades there has been a nearly 50 percent increase in colorectal cancer diagnoses in individuals under the age of 50. An increase like this can’t be due to genetic factors, which don’t change in the population over that period of time, so the rise in early onset colon cancer is likely related to various environmental and lifestyle risk factors: the types of foods we consume, alcohol use, and obesity, among many other considerations.
Colorectal cancer is now the top cause of cancer death in men under 50 and the second-leading cause in women under 50. Compared to most other types of cancer screening, where the aim is to catch cancers at an early stage, we have a unique advantage in colon cancer screening because we can identify and remove theprecursor lesions — colon polyps — many years before they actually turn cancerous. For this reason, it does make sense to ask the question of whether to recommend earlier screening to identify and remove precancerous polyps before the currently recommended screening age of 45 (for average risk individuals).
There is no doubt that moving the colon cancer screening age to 40 would catch and prevent a few more cancers. But early screening involves risks and additional upfront costs and may shift how we allocate resources. For instance, in some areas of the country with relatively few gastroenterologists, there are already long waits to get in for colonoscopy screening.
The reality is we’re still not doing nearly a good enough job getting most 45-year-olds or even 50-year-olds, screened for colon cancer, and we do a particularly poor job for disadvantaged and vulnerable groups — including the uninsured and underinsured. So changing the colon cancer screening age to 40 can’t be considered in isolation. We have to balance a variety of health care access and cost considerations to determine if it’s the right move for average risk individuals in the U.S.
‘If there was a biomarker to identify risk, this would help us understand who to screen early’
Aparna Parikh, associate professor of medicine, HMS; medical director, Center for Young Adult Colorectal Cancer at Mass General Cancer Center
As an oncologist who sees largely young patients, my bias is to screen earlier. But we have to be mindful of the population-level implications of continuing to lower the screening age. Ideally, we start to understand the drivers and which younger individuals may be prone to develop CRC in order to offer early screening to the right patients. If there was a biomarker to identify risk, this would help us understand who to screen early. Many of my patients are in their 20s and 30s. Expanding the screening eligible age may be a good space for stool- and blood-based screening and risk stratification to get the right people to colonoscopies efficiently.
‘Adherence to screening remains low in the U.S.’
Marios Giannakis, associate professor of medicine, HMS; gastrointestinal oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Early onset colorectal cancer, defined as colorectal cancer diagnosed in individuals younger than 50 years old, is a rising epidemic. In recognition of this, several major organizations and societies have adjusted the recommended screening age for colorectal cancer. For example, the [Preventative Services Task Force] now gives a Grade B recommendation for screening individuals ages 45 to 50 versus a Grade A recommendation for those ages 50-75, and the American Cancer Society (ACS) a qualified recommendation versus a strong recommendation for older individuals. These guidelines instruct physicians to recommend screening to their eligible patients.
It is also true that early onset colorectal cancer affects numerous individuals younger — and sometimes much younger — than age 45. Whether to further reduce the screening age for the general population is a complex decision that these bodies and societies think carefully over, examining not only the incidence of early onset colorectal cancer, but the available resources and cost to society and patients of a more expanded screening program.
It would be a little presumptuous for one — including an expert — physician to assume this role. What has become as clear as the rise in early onset colorectal cancer is that adherence to screening remains low in the U.S. and that underserved populations are particularly vulnerable. Thus, thinking about equitable access to the currently recommended care and advancing the scientific mission of understanding the etiology of early onset colorectal cancer in order to identify those at the highest risk and tailor prevention and screening may well be a more sustainable long-term solution.
‘Only those with the means to afford it would take part’
Shuji Ogino, professor of pathology, HMS; professor of epidemiology, chief of molecular pathological epidemiology in the Department of Pathology, Brigham & Women’s Hospital
It depends. First, we need to have and evaluate more data on comparative effectiveness analyses of costs and benefits of setting universal screening start age at 40 versus 45 years. It is unlikely that a universal colonoscopy start age of 40 years will be cost-effective. Fecal occult blood testing may be more cost-effective, but it has some degree of false-positive findings, which necessitates additional tests (that may be unnecessary to begin with). Thus, we need more research in this area.
It can be possible that, based on genetic and life-course risk factor profiles, screening start age could/should be tailored. However, we lack comprehensive information on effects of various genetic, life-course risk factors and their interactions at this time. Ideally, one can start colonoscopy screening at age 40 years or even younger. However, such a practice will increase health disparities and inequities, as only those with the means to afford it would take part. We could not rely on financially unsustainable universal insurance coverage for universal screening starting at a young age.
‘Focus more on identifying the underlying causes’
Andrew Chan, Daniel K. Podolsky Professor of Medicine, HMS; professor of immunology and infectious diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; director of cancer epidemiology, Mass General Cancer Center
To address the unprecedented increase in incidence in colorectal cancer diagnosed before the age of 50, it would be tempting to simply lower the age at which we begin screening to 40 years. However, we must also consider the tremendous resources that would need to be devoted to such an effort. Such a major broadening of the eligibility for screening would likely be an insurmountable cost to the healthcare system and divert attention from other important needs. Instead, I would argue that we should focus more on identifying the underlying causes of this rise in early onset cases so that we can focus on efforts to eliminate or reverse them.
One of the DRCLAS art loans, “Entrance to Women’s Bathroom” by Boston photographer Jim Dow, is on display at the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies loaning pieces from collection to areas around campus to widen exposure, spark reconsideration
The Mahindra Humanities Center’s Plimpton Room — a classic Harvard space with an ornate fireplace, beautiful wood detail, and imposing large table — is now home to two striking photographs of bathrooms in Argentina.
The brightly colored, modern images by Boston photographer Jim Dow stand out amid the muted Colonial Revival design of the room.
“You have those pieces in a very formal room, these two super contemporary pieces showing public bathrooms in Latin America. There’s a contradiction, a very interesting tension in the room now with those pieces,” said Marcela Ramos, arts program manager at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, which acquired the pieces following a special exhibition.
The display in Plimpton is part of a three-year art-loan program launched by the DRCLAS in May. A dozen pieces from its collection of Latin American artwork, including sculptures, photos, and paintings, have found new homes across campus, introducing them to new audiences and possibly inspiring viewers to see the works, their new contexts — and themselves — in a fresh light.
“Artwork from Latin America is as rich and vibrant as any,” said Bruno Carvalho, interim director of the Mahindra Center. “Artists working in Latin America draw from local realities as well as traditions far afield.”
A mixed-media portrait of Mao Zedong by Peruvian artist Alfredo Márquez is featured in the History of Art and Architecture Department.
“Cascaron Nº 4” by James Amaral is on display at the Barker Center.
A second portrait of Mao Zedong by Márquez at the Weatherhead Center in CGIS North.
Carvalho and his team at the Mahindra chose four pieces, including a bronze sculpture by California-born Colombian artist James Amaral and the Dow photos.
Other DRCLAS artwork has been loaned to the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the faculty offices in the Department of the Classics and the Science Center, Harvard Art Museums, and the History of Art and Architecture Department.
“Loan programs allow art to circulate and to come alive in different spaces, and through interactions with a wide range of people,” Carvalho said.
Ramos said that the inaugural year of the art-loan program aligns perfectly with DRCLAS’ mission to promote the work of Latin American artists, thinkers, and creatives. For years the center amassed artwork from exhibitions, collectors’ donations, and acquisitions. “This was a way of having our permanent collection on view permanently outside [of DRCLAS] and not having it in storage,” Ramos said, noting that similar issues happen at a bigger scale at museums.
The collection includes Peruvian Fernando de Szyszlo’s mixed media “Mesa Ritual,” Chilean Mario Navarro’s Chromogenic print “Engine,” Mexican American Jesus Leuus’ acrylic “La Familia,” and other Latin American artists. While this is the first time the center is loaning a significant portion of its artwork, it previously donated 14 pieces to the Harvard Art Museums.
Three mixed-media portraits of Mao Zedong by Peruvian artist Alfredo Márquez are reminders of both the power and danger during periods of authoritarian rule.
Márquez was sentenced to 20 years in prison during the administration of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s after creating a silk-screen pop print of the Chinese communist dictator. Fujimori, who was locked in an armed conflict with the Maoist Shining Path insurgents, dissolved congress and took over the judiciary to consolidate authority against opposition.
Márquez was pardoned in 1998 after serving three years in jail. His artwork now hangs in the Weatherhead and the History of Art and Architecture Department.
“I hope the art makes people slow down, perhaps noticing something they hadn’t seen, or enabling their minds to wander in unforeseen directions,” Carvalho said. In addition to loaning the art, DRCLAS will also include QR codes that will take visitors to a website highlighting the center’s programming.
Ramos hopes that the loan program will allow wider audiences to appreciate Latin American art, while also encouraging other centers to do the same. “I would love to be somewhere on campus and see works from another center, so there’s a multicultural exchange through the arts,” she said.
Construction begins on A.R.T.’s new home in Allston
Credit: Dematerial
6 min read
David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance to include interconnected, adaptable multiuse spaces
Construction has begun in the Allston neighborhood of Boston on the new home of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University.
A building to foster groundbreaking performance, public gathering, teaching, and international research, the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance was designed by Haworth Tompkins (architect and design lead) and ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge (architect of record) in collaboration with theater and acoustic consultant Charcoalblue. Shawmut Design and Construction is the project’s construction manager.
“It is thrilling to see the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Performance & Creativity begin to rise at 175 N. Harvard Street,” said Diane Paulus, the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the A.R.T. “Our new home will provide many exciting new opportunities for the A.R.T. to use the galvanizing power of theater to bring people together and build community. I’m grateful to our generous supporters, our brilliant, innovative partners, and to Harvard University for helping us reach this milestone.”
The Goel Center will contain interconnected, adaptable multiuse spaces designed to support creativity and embrace future change. It will include two flexible performance venues — the West Stage, where large-scale productions will be produced, and the versatile and intimate East Stage.
In addition, the center will house light-filled, state-of-the-art rehearsal studios and teaching spaces, a spacious public lobby, and an outdoor performance yard to host ticketed and free programming. The facility will also include dressing rooms, technical shops, and administrative offices for the organization, as well as a café.
The A.R.T.’s new home has been conceived and will be programmed to center community. It will be open to all during designated hours of operation, offering free Wi-Fi, food and beverage service, public restrooms, gathering spaces, indoor and outdoor public art and performances, and room rentals.
Designed with a blend of environmental and social strategies to minimize embodied and operational carbon, maximize well-being, boost biodiversity, and enhance resiliency, the Goel Center will embrace the University’s ambitious sustainability priorities.
The building is designed to achieve the Living Building Challenge core accreditation from the International Living Future Institute in recognition that it will give more to its environment than it takes. Conceived through core principles of openness, artistic flexibility, collaboration, sustainability, and regenerative design, it will be constructed with laminate mass timber, reclaimed brick, and cedar cladding to minimize its lifetime carbon budget.
The building’s chilled water, hot water, and electric utilities will come from Harvard’s new lower-carbon District Energy Facility. It will capture additional clean energy from rooftop solar panels and leverage natural ventilation to reduce energy usage and enhance occupant comfort. Additionally, a green roof and extensive plantings will aid stormwater attenuation while increasing biodiversity and occupant well-being.
The center is the first building in the U.S. to be designed by U.K.-based Haworth Tompkins, Architects’ Journal 2022 and 2020 AJ100 Practice of the Year and winner of the Royal Institute of British Architects 2014 Stirling Prize for its design of Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England. The award is presented to the architects of the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year.
The A.R.T. selected Haworth Tompkins for its experience with sustainable design and urban development, as well as approaches to democratizing the theatergoing experience and the role that theaters can play within their communities.
“Theater is about exploring our shared humanity in a space where people of all backgrounds come together and are invited to open their hearts,” said Haworth Tompkins Director Roger Watts. “Through an inspiring and collaborative design process, our building aims to extend that open invitation to Allston and the wider world, and to provide a framework that supports the expansion of creative practices within a radical yet simple architecture of adaptable space, natural tactile materials, fresh air, and light.”
“From our earliest meetings, we have collaborated to create a series of spaces that are flexible, scalable, technically sophisticated, and, most importantly, welcoming and democratic to the audiences and artists who will inhabit them,” said Owen Hughes, director of theater and acoustic consultant Charcoalblue.
“Working with Harvard, the A.R.T., and our design partners on this important community space draws on two of ARC’s core values: our passion for arts and culture and our commitment to providing carbon-neutral design. We look forward to opening night of the new center, and to continuing our creative collaboration with all those involved in bringing this inclusive new space to life,” said Philip Laird, principal at ARC.
“We are honored to be leading the construction of the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance,” said Kevin Sullivan, executive vice president of Shawmut Design and Construction’s New England region. “This project exemplifies our deep commitment to the community. By prioritizing environmental sustainability and adaptable design, we are building a vibrant hub for creativity and connection that will serve the local area for years to come. Our shared goal of minimizing embodied and operational carbon, maximizing well-being, and enhancing resiliency ensures that this center will not only be a beacon for the arts but also a pioneering global model for sustainable construction.”
“This state-of-the-art building will bring us into a future full of creative potential,” said Interim Harvard President Alan Garber. “David and Stacey stepped forward at an important moment for the A.R.T., giving generously not because of the strong foundation that already exists but because they see what is possible. The incredible community their vision sustains and expands will have a profound effect on arts and culture throughout our region.”
“The David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance will be a leading model for the next generation of cultural architecture through its adaptability and responsiveness to our goals for sustainability,” said A.R.T. Executive Director Kelvin Dinkins Jr. “We look forward to audiences accompanying us on this journey to completion, and we are excited to welcome them to our new home pulsing with creative energy and community as we launch A.R.T.’s next chapter.”
Construction of the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance will continue into 2026. Audiences are invited to follow the process on A.R.T.’s social media channels and its website.
AI, new technologies, and ‘courage to fail’ mark IT Summit
Tech leaders encourage culture of innovation
5 min read
The “relentless” pace of technological change and how Harvard’s IT workforce can embrace both creativity and failure to foster a culture of innovation loom large for those in the field, so they were the primary themes of the University’s 11th annual IT Summit, hosted by its CIO Council on June 6.
More than 1,000 Harvard staff and faculty gathered for a day of panels, networking events, and an afternoon keynote address from Sarah Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies. The event also featured more than 40 staff-led breakout sessions showcasing the breadth of new technologies being explored and implemented across Schools and disciplines at Harvard.
Stu Snydman, associate University librarian and managing director, library technology, HUIT (from left); Beth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School; Dan Hawkins, CIO, Harvard Divinity School; Emily Bottis, managing director, academic technology, HUIT; Meena Lakhavani, CIO, Harvard Kennedy School.
Unsurprisingly, given its near ubiquity in technology discourse over the past year, generative AI was a frequent topic. In her opening remarks, Klara Jelinkova, vice president and Harvard’s chief information officer, praised University IT staff for “rising to the occasion” to quickly provide tools and support for community experimentation with generative AI. Referencing Lewis’ 2015 book, “The Rise,” Jelinkova characterized this era of rapid technological development as one of “uncertainty” in which “the willingness and the courage to fail, to be wrong, to shift gears and to engage in dialogue and disagreement” will be key to Harvard continuing to lead in the successful adoption of new technologies.
In a morning panel, technology leaders discussed the balance between innovation and operations while spotlighting how Harvard’s CIO Council supports the missions of both individual Schools and the University at large. Emily Bottis, managing director for Academic Technology at HUIT, said Harvard’s IT structure enables innovative uses of technology to be trialed in disparate fields before being brought to the center and distributed widely. She cited Teachly — a software tool developed within Harvard to help faculty teach more inclusively using data — as an example.
Kennedy School CIO Meena Lakhavani highlighted the University’s AI working groups and “sandbox” environment as an example of central coordination providing frameworks and tools in which Schools can innovate. Beth Clark, CIO for Harvard Business School, mentioned “tutorbots” — AI chatbots trained to give students information on specific classes or course materials — as a way different pedagogical styles can be exchanged between IT teams to assess scalability.
Tutorbots were among the many AI-related topics featured in the breakout sessions, alongside presentations on how AI might be used to enhance campus sustainability, workplace productivity, course evaluations, IT service desk support, and many other facets of higher education. Staff assembled in classrooms across the Cambridge campus to hear updates on new systems such as Harvard’s Learning Experience Platform (LXP), a platform for delivering asynchronous and blended learning that emerged from a 2022 report from the Future of Teaching and Learning Taskforce, and the new HarvardSites website publishing service. And IT teams shared their expertise in tutorials on topics encompassing digital accessibility, using design and data to enhance user experiences, navigating compliance and resourcing discussions, exploring open-source solutions, and many more.
Along with excitement about the potential of AI, its rapid emergence has also raised significant concerns about cybersecurity. In a “speculative voyage into the future,” Michael Tran Duff, University chief information security group and data privacy officer, predicted that while it’s likely we will see a rise in cybercriminal activity aided by the use of generative AI, the eventual deployment of AI-enabled vulnerability assessment and “personal AI assistants” to block social engineering attacks, coupled with cybersecurity measures such as a transition to passwordless logins, could lead to significantly fewer incidents.
Concluding the day’s events in Sanders Theatre, Lewis encouraged the audience to reconsider their definition of failure as they strive for innovation. Drawing on themes and research from “The Rise,” she shared examples of celebrated innovators throughout history whose progress was frequently halted by failure. Rather than seeing failure as a negative comment on themselves, their abilities, and their identities, said failure can be used as feedback: valuable information that’s part of the process of finding solutions.
Lewis also offered advice on how organizations can create environments in which failure and risk-taking is made safer, such as creating time and space for employees to experiment, and reducing the stigma of seemingly outlandish ideas (which may later be hailed as innovations). Responding to an audience question, Lewis likened failure to a New England winter: It may feel interminable as it happens, but, “Just as the seasons change, there is always the possibility for spring.”
Presidential task forces deliver preliminary recommendations to Garber
Co-chairs of initiatives to combat anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias and antisemitism outline recommendations for near-term action — with final reports expected in the fall
Andrea Perera
Harvard Correspondent
long read
From the Eliot House tower, a canopy of foliage frames the Mac quad and Lowell house. On the left is Kirkland House and the Malkin Athletic Center. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
File photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The two presidential task forces focused on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias and antisemitism have delivered their preliminary recommendations to Harvard’s interim president, Alan M. Garber. The recommendations focus on 13 thematic areas where the University can act soon.
In a message sharing the preliminary recommendations with the Harvard community, Garber wrote: “We must strengthen our ties with a sustained commitment to engaging each other with tact, decency, and compassion. Our learning cannot be limited to purely academic pursuits if we hope to fulfill our responsibilities to one another and to the institution that is our intellectual home.”
“I am profoundly grateful to [the co-chairs of the task forces] Ali Asani, Jared Ellias, Wafaie Fawzi, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Derek Penslar for their candor, thoughtfulness, and, most important, their optimism. The work ahead of us will require a concerted effort. As both task forces work toward final recommendations, their preliminary recommendations offer a path forward. We will commence detailed review and implementation of the shorter-term recommendations over the summer. Those that are longer-term will be developed, refined, and implemented in due course.”
The Gazette sat down with the five co-chairs of the task forces to learn more about the recommendations and what the co-chairs learned in a combined 85 listening sessions with close to 900 members of the Harvard community this spring.
Each co-chair spoke about the immense responsibility they felt while navigating the collective grief and pain on campus after the attack of Oct. 7; the ways that different communities experienced bias, hatred, exclusion, and fear; the values Harvard community members shared; and their joint effort to model collaboration and dialogue across the two task forces.
The preliminary recommendations “provide an opportunity to share with the community what the effort has been up to, regain some trust, and show that these task forces are actually acting in a way that the community expects,” said Fawzi, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and professor of nutrition, epidemiology, and global health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Memos from each task force outline the preliminary recommendations and serve as a prelude to the final reports from the task forces, which are expected to be delivered to Garber in the fall semester. The co-chairs have shared the preliminary recommendations with the deans and with the Corporation. The University administration is working with the Schools to implement the recommendations throughout campus.
The task forces will work through the summer to further refine some of the recommendations, assist in the development of programs, and position the University for a better fall semester.
“The situation over the past year has been quite grave, and unless we take significant steps forward by the beginning of the coming academic year, we could be in a position similar to last year, which we want to prevent,” said Derek Penslar, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Common themes
While each task force reported hearing very different experiences from community members, some common themes emerged. These included the feeling that the University has fallen short of its stated values, specifically those that celebrate diversity while respecting differences.
Asani, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said that seeking to understand different identities and perspectives is not just core to Harvard’s values, it is core to what a university education is supposed to provide.
“Intentional engagement with diversity is a very important skill that all our students should have, regardless of what School they attend. Not having those skills and the tools to engage has serious consequences for our world as it leads to polarization,” Asani said. “It’s recognizing difference and respecting it, but at the same time acknowledging that there are shared values that we as a community hold.”
Time and again, the co-chairs returned to the idea that a university should provide its students with the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate an increasingly complex world and that this is the very mission of Harvard — to bring together a diverse community whose members challenge and teach one another about new and sometimes conflicting ideas.
“We have to return to our foundational principles as an educational institution and recognize both the potential that we have, but also the inherent limitations as a university that’s in the business of admitting students, teaching them, and giving them a degree,” said Jared Ellias, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Scott C. Collins Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “We must also appreciate that the global ambitions of the University mean that we’re going to bring together a gigantically different group of people where what they have in common is their excellence. And we’re going to, hopefully, let them meet each other, form meaningful friendships and relationships, and then help them become leaders in the world that they’re going to graduate into.”
Teaching students doesn’t mean sugarcoating conflict among current peers and instructors, and future colleagues, neighbors, and friends, Ellias said. “I think we have to start being more intentional in saying that we aren’t going to agree with every idea that everybody has, and we’re not going to agree with every version of the world that people might want to create.”
For the co-chairs, this focus on thoughtful and constructive debate felt like a natural and first-order recommendation from a group of faculty focused on educating future world leaders.
“As a university, we should be focusing on what we do best. We do research. We teach. We enable each other to have serious, substantive, and constructive conversations on all issues,” said Khwaja, co-chair, Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School. “In many ways, what we’re responding to is both what we’re hearing our community say, but also what we feel the University can and should actually effectively deliver on as well — which is to create a safe and supportive space to learn, educate, and grow.”
The co-chairs from both task forces said they meet regularly to coordinate efforts and share what they’re hearing from Harvard students, staff, and faculty. While they see commonalities, they also recognize that the communities they represent have some very distinct needs.
Recommendation highlights: Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias
The recommendations of the Task Force to Combat Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias focus on seven core areas:
Safety and security
Recognition and representation
Institutional response
Freedom of expression
Transparency and trust
Relationships among affinity groups
Intellectual excellence
Ali Asani.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Wafaie Fawzi.
Photo by Harvard Chan School Communications
Asim Ijaz Khwaja.
Photo by Martha Stewart
The recommendations emphasize the need to create a safe environment for community members by expanding protective and counseling services and publicly denouncing and helping mitigate the consequences of various forms of harassment, including doxxing.
The task force also made recommendations to address the perceived lack of recognition felt by members of the community on issues they care about. This includes an expansion of the name of the task force itself to add a focus on anti-Palestinian bias experienced both by Palestinian members of the Harvard community and by those who ally with Palestine. The suggestion to rename it the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias was made in response to numerous reports from these individuals on campus about how the Palestinian identity has often felt “erased” or unrecognized.
“While Palestinians face Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism like other groups, they hail from a variety of religious backgrounds and also encounter unique challenges stemming from their status as Palestinians seeking national rights,” Fawzi said. “Highlighting anti-Palestinian bias would also promote inclusiveness of the voice of a large segment of our community that considers themselves allies of Palestinian aspirations, including South Asians, African Americans, whites, and other groups.”
The task force also recommended a Harvard-wide audit of academic resources related to Islam, the Middle East, and Palestine studies, as well as Arab, Middle Eastern, and Islamic studies across the University’s faculties.
“Teaching and research in these areas are critical to understanding the historical and contemporary challenges and opportunities facing these communities and to enabling constructive dialogue on the problems and on potential solutions,” Fawzi said. “We have consistently heard an immediate need for expanding curricular offerings related to Palestinian studies and seeking to recruit tenure-track faculty to enable this effort.”
According to the task force, many Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian Harvard affiliates also said they felt unsafe physically and in terms of their careers as students, faculty, and staff in expressing their opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“It’s clear that the issues and constraints around free speech have weighed heavily and directly impacted many in the community. They feel not only have the University and Schools often fallen short in protecting these values, but have also sent mixed messages about upholding them,” said Khwaja. “We are looking forward to the efforts of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group and hope that they will be supported by our findings about how consequential these values are to the sense of safety, well-being, and effective discourse an academic community should have.”
The task force called on the University and the Schools to reaffirm their commitment to free expression and open debate while also ensuring that their policies on protest and dissent are clear to students upon their return in the fall.
“The University and Schools need to clearly communicate their policies on protest and dissent and clarify any ambiguity about them. Doing so will also allow us to collectively and constructively deliberate on what should be considered as legitimate and permissible protest and what is not. It will also help clarify procedural fairness and perceptions of equity, especially if such policies are seen to disproportionately apply to some groups or differ from past practice,” Khwaja said.
Recommendation highlights: Combating Antisemitism
The task force on combating antisemitism focused their memo on six areas for immediate action:
Clarify Harvard’s values
Act against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate
Improve disciplinary processes
Implement education and training
Foster constructive dialogue
Support Jewish life on campus
Jared Ellias.
Photo by Jessica Scranton
Derek Penslar.
Photo by Robin Levin Penslar
The memo asks the University to take action against the derision, social exclusion, and hostility that Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel community members have experienced. Penslar said that the administration, faculty, and staff need to establish norms of civil engagement, communicate those norms to students, and practice them themselves.
“Training for instructional staff and at student orientation programs must clarify the difference between a challenging classroom atmosphere, which is healthy and constructive, and a threatening one, which is toxic,” Penslar said. “Guidelines for co-curricular organizations and residences should stress the importance of inclusivity, however contentious conversations within them may be.”
The task force also calls for greater antisemitism awareness training as part of the University’s efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and belonging. For example, the task force suggests offering anti-harassment training for students that includes examples of antisemitism and ensuring that orientation programs for new students include antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias in broader discussions of oppression and injustice.
“Our students are certain to encounter peers from backgrounds that they know little about,” Ellias said. “We want Harvard to tell our new students from day one, you are here to be with each other. We do not expect you to recognize all the ways you might offend each other, but we do expect you to be generous with each other, assume good intentions, and listen to what your fellow students say to you.”
What’s next
Some common recommendations emerged from both task forces related to everyday activities that many Harvard affiliates might take for granted. These include creating new calendars with information about Jewish and Muslim religious holidays (and those of other groups), reviewing accommodation policies, and improving kosher and halal food offerings in the dining halls.
“All of our students deserve convenient access to tasty and nutritious food. Depriving religiously observant students of that access is a violation of the most basic standards of equity. The same is true for denying students reasonable accommodation for religious holidays,” Penslar said. “So long as Harvard does not provide these forms of accommodation, it is signaling that religiously observant Jewish and Muslim students are not welcome here. That is a terrible message, and I am confident that it is not one that this University would ever endorse.”
And, finally, in an atmosphere rife with offensive and hateful social media posts and doxxing trucks circling campus, both task forces endorsed more deliberate — albeit more challenging — formal dialogues, such as high-profile talks and even in-classroom discussions between individuals who disagree respectfully and productively.
It’s these kinds of efforts that the co-chairs hope the University will pursue long after their final reports are delivered in the fall.
“One of the main reasons for conflict around the world is the inability to engage with and understand difference,” Asani said. “We should aspire to provide every student who is graduating from Harvard with the tools to engage with and understand all kinds of difference and in so doing enable them to make a positive difference in the world.”
AI, new technologies, and ‘courage to fail’ mark IT Summit
Tech leaders encourage ‘sandbox’ environment
Tim Bailey
HPAC/HUIT Communications
5 min read
The “relentless” pace of technological change and how Harvard’s IT workforce can embrace both creativity and failure to foster a culture of innovation loom large for those in the field, so they were the primary themes of the University’s 11th annual IT Summit, hosted by its CIO Council on June 6.
More than 1,000 Harvard staff and faculty gathered for a day of panels, networking events, and an afternoon keynote address from Sarah Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies. The event also featured more than 40 staff-led breakout sessions showcasing the breadth of new technologies being explored and implemented across Schools and disciplines at Harvard.
“The willingness and the courage to fail, to be wrong, to shift gears and to engage in dialogue and disagreement” will be key to Harvard continuing to lead in the successful adoption of new technologies.
Klara Jelinkova
Unsurprisingly, given its near ubiquity in technology discourse over the past year, generative AI was a frequent topic. In her opening remarks, Klara Jelinkova, vice president and Harvard’s chief information officer, praised University IT staff for “rising to the occasion” to quickly provide tools and support for community experimentation with generative AI. Referencing Lewis’ 2015 book, “The Rise,” Jelinkova characterized this era of rapid technological development as one of “uncertainty” in which “the willingness and the courage to fail, to be wrong, to shift gears and to engage in dialogue and disagreement” will be key to Harvard continuing to lead in the successful adoption of new technologies.
In a morning panel, technology leaders discussed the balance between innovation and operations while spotlighting how Harvard’s CIO Council supports the missions of both individual Schools and the University at large. Emily Bottis, managing director for Academic Technology at HUIT, said Harvard’s IT structure enables innovative uses of technology to be trialed in disparate fields before being brought to the center and distributed widely. She cited Teachly — a software tool developed within Harvard to help faculty teach more inclusively using data — as an example.
Summit panelists included Stu Snydman, associate University librarian and managing director, library technology, HUIT (from left); Beth Clark, CIO, Harvard Business School; Dan Hawkins, CIO, Harvard Divinity School; Emily Bottis, managing director, academic technology, HUIT; Meena Lakhavani, CIO, Harvard Kennedy School.
Kennedy School CIO Meena Lakhavani highlighted the University’s AI working groups and “sandbox” environment as an example of central coordination providing frameworks and tools in which Schools can innovate. Beth Clark, CIO for Harvard Business School, mentioned “tutorbots” — AI chatbots trained to give students information on specific classes or course materials — as a way different pedagogical styles can be exchanged between IT teams to assess scalability.
Tutorbots were among the many AI-related topics featured in the breakout sessions, alongside presentations on how AI might be used to enhance campus sustainability, workplace productivity, course evaluations, IT service desk support, and many other facets of higher education. Staff assembled in classrooms across the Cambridge campus to hear updates on new systems such as Harvard’s Learning Experience Platform (LXP), a platform for delivering asynchronous and blended learning that emerged from a 2022 report from the Future of Teaching and Learning Taskforce, and the new HarvardSites website publishing service. And IT teams shared their expertise in tutorials on topics encompassing digital accessibility, using design and data to enhance user experiences, navigating compliance and resourcing discussions, exploring open-source solutions, and many more.
Along with excitement about the potential of AI, its rapid emergence has also raised significant concerns about cybersecurity. In a “speculative voyage into the future,” Michael Tran Duff, University chief information security group and data privacy officer, predicted that while it’s likely we will see a rise in cybercriminal activity aided by the use of generative AI, the eventual deployment of AI-enabled vulnerability assessment and “personal AI assistants” to block social engineering attacks, coupled with cybersecurity measures such as a transition to passwordless logins, could lead to significantly fewer incidents.
Concluding the day’s events in Sanders Theatre, Lewis encouraged the audience to reconsider their definition of failure as they strive for innovation. Drawing on themes and research from “TheRise,” she shared examples of celebrated innovators throughout history whose progress was frequently halted by failure. Rather than seeing failure as a negative comment on themselves, their abilities, and their identities, said failure can be used as feedback: valuable information that’s part of the process of finding solutions.
Lewis also offered advice on how organizations can create environments in which failure and risk-taking is made safer, such as creating time and space for employees to experiment, and reducing the stigma of seemingly outlandish ideas (which may later be hailed as innovations). Responding to an audience question, Lewis likened failure to a New England winter: I may feel interminable as it happens, but, “Just as the seasons change, there is always the possibility for spring.”
Presidential task forces deliver preliminary recommendations to Garber
Co-chairs of initiatives to combat anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias and antisemitism outline recommendations for near-term action — with final reports expected in the fall
Andrea Perera
Harvard Correspondent
long read
File photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The two presidential task forces focused on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias and antisemitism have delivered their preliminary recommendations to Harvard’s interim president, Alan M. Garber. The recommendations focus on 13 thematic areas where the University can act soon.
In a message sharing the preliminary recommendations with the Harvard community, Garber wrote: “We must strengthen our ties with a sustained commitment to engaging each other with tact, decency, and compassion. Our learning cannot be limited to purely academic pursuits if we hope to fulfill our responsibilities to one another and to the institution that is our intellectual home.”
“I am profoundly grateful to [the co-chairs of the task forces] Ali Asani, Jared Ellias, Wafaie Fawzi, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Derek Penslar for their candor, thoughtfulness, and, most important, their optimism. The work ahead of us will require a concerted effort. As both task forces work toward final recommendations, their preliminary recommendations offer a path forward. We will commence detailed review and implementation of the shorter-term recommendations over the summer. Those that are longer-term will be developed, refined, and implemented in due course.”
The Gazette sat down with the five co-chairs of the task forces to learn more about the recommendations and what the co-chairs learned in a combined 85 listening sessions with close to 900 members of the Harvard community this spring.
Each co-chair spoke about the immense responsibility they felt while navigating the collective grief and pain on campus after the attack of Oct. 7; the ways that different communities experienced bias, hatred, exclusion, and fear; the values Harvard community members shared; and their joint effort to model collaboration and dialogue across the two task forces.
The preliminary recommendations “provide an opportunity to share with the community what the effort has been up to, regain some trust, and show that these task forces are actually acting in a way that the community expects,” said Fawzi, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences and professor of nutrition, epidemiology, and global health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Memos from each task force outline the preliminary recommendations and serve as a prelude to the final reports from the task forces, which are expected to be delivered to Garber in the fall semester. The co-chairs have shared the preliminary recommendations with the deans and with the Corporation. The University administration is working with the Schools to implement the recommendations throughout campus.
The task forces will work through the summer to further refine some of the recommendations, assist in the development of programs, and position the University for a better fall semester.
“The situation over the past year has been quite grave, and unless we take significant steps forward by the beginning of the coming academic year, we could be in a position similar to last year, which we want to prevent,” said Derek Penslar, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Common themes
While each task force reported hearing very different experiences from community members, some common themes emerged. These included the feeling that the University has fallen short of its stated values, specifically those that celebrate diversity while respecting differences.
Asani, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said that seeking to understand different identities and perspectives is not just core to Harvard’s values, it is core to what a university education is supposed to provide.
“Intentional engagement with diversity is a very important skill that all our students should have, regardless of what School they attend. Not having those skills and the tools to engage has serious consequences for our world as it leads to polarization,” Asani said. “It’s recognizing difference and respecting it, but at the same time acknowledging that there are shared values that we as a community hold.”
Time and again, the co-chairs returned to the idea that a university should provide its students with the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate an increasingly complex world and that this is the very mission of Harvard — to bring together a diverse community whose members challenge and teach one another about new and sometimes conflicting ideas.
“We have to return to our foundational principles as an educational institution and recognize both the potential that we have, but also the inherent limitations as a university that’s in the business of admitting students, teaching them, and giving them a degree,” said Jared Ellias, co-chair of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Scott C. Collins Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “We must also appreciate that the global ambitions of the University mean that we’re going to bring together a gigantically different group of people where what they have in common is their excellence. And we’re going to, hopefully, let them meet each other, form meaningful friendships and relationships, and then help them become leaders in the world that they’re going to graduate into.”
Teaching students doesn’t mean sugarcoating conflict among current peers and instructors, and future colleagues, neighbors, and friends, Ellias said. “I think we have to start being more intentional in saying that we aren’t going to agree with every idea that everybody has, and we’re not going to agree with every version of the world that people might want to create.”
For the co-chairs, this focus on thoughtful and constructive debate felt like a natural and first-order recommendation from a group of faculty focused on educating future world leaders.
“As a university, we should be focusing on what we do best. We do research. We teach. We enable each other to have serious, substantive, and constructive conversations on all issues,” said Khwaja, co-chair, Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias and Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School. “In many ways, what we’re responding to is both what we’re hearing our community say, but also what we feel the University can and should actually effectively deliver on as well — which is to create a safe and supportive space to learn, educate, and grow.”
The co-chairs from both task forces said they meet regularly to coordinate efforts and share what they’re hearing from Harvard students, staff, and faculty. While they see commonalities, they also recognize that the communities they represent have some very distinct needs.
Recommendation highlights: Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias
The recommendations of the Task Force to Combat Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias focus on seven core areas:
Safety and security
Recognition and representation
Institutional response
Freedom of expression
Transparency and trust
Relationships among affinity groups
Intellectual excellence
Ali Asani.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Wafaie Fawzi.
Photo by Harvard Chan School Communications
Asim Ijaz Khwaja.
Photo by Martha Stewart
The recommendations emphasize the need to create a safe environment for community members by expanding protective and counseling services and publicly denouncing and helping mitigate the consequences of various forms of harassment, including doxxing.
The task force also made recommendations to address the perceived lack of recognition felt by members of the community on issues they care about. This includes an expansion of the name of the task force itself to add a focus on anti-Palestinian bias experienced both by Palestinian members of the Harvard community and by those who ally with Palestine. The suggestion to rename it the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias was made in response to numerous reports from these individuals on campus about how the Palestinian identity has often felt “erased” or unrecognized.
“While Palestinians face Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism like other groups, they hail from a variety of religious backgrounds and also encounter unique challenges stemming from their status as Palestinians seeking national rights,” Fawzi said. “Highlighting anti-Palestinian bias would also promote inclusiveness of the voice of a large segment of our community that considers themselves allies of Palestinian aspirations, including South Asians, African Americans, whites, and other groups.”
The task force also recommended a Harvard-wide audit of academic resources related to Islam, the Middle East, and Palestine studies, as well as Arab, Middle Eastern, and Islamic studies across the University’s faculties.
“Teaching and research in these areas are critical to understanding the historical and contemporary challenges and opportunities facing these communities and to enabling constructive dialogue on the problems and on potential solutions,” Fawzi said. “We have consistently heard an immediate need for expanding curricular offerings related to Palestinian studies and seeking to recruit tenure-track faculty to enable this effort.”
According to the task force, many Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian Harvard affiliates also said they felt unsafe physically and in terms of their careers as students, faculty, and staff in expressing their opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“It’s clear that the issues and constraints around free speech have weighed heavily and directly impacted many in the community. They feel not only have the University and Schools often fallen short in protecting these values, but have also sent mixed messages about upholding them,” said Khwaja. “We are looking forward to the efforts of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group and hope that they will be supported by our findings about how consequential these values are to the sense of safety, well-being, and effective discourse an academic community should have.”
The task force called on the University and the Schools to reaffirm their commitment to free expression and open debate while also ensuring that their policies on protest and dissent are clear to students upon their return in the fall.
“The University and Schools need to clearly communicate their policies on protest and dissent and clarify any ambiguity about them. Doing so will also allow us to collectively and constructively deliberate on what should be considered as legitimate and permissible protest and what is not. It will also help clarify procedural fairness and perceptions of equity, especially if such policies are seen to disproportionately apply to some groups or differ from past practice,” Khwaja said.
Recommendation highlights: Combating Antisemitism
The task force on combating antisemitism focused their memo on six areas for immediate action:
Clarify Harvard’s values
Act against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate
Improve disciplinary processes
Implement education and training
Foster constructive dialogue
Support Jewish life on campus
Jared Ellias.
Photo by Jessica Scranton
Derek Penslar.
Photo by Robin Levin Penslar
The memo asks the University to take action against the derision, social exclusion, and hostility that Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel community members have experienced. Penslar said that the administration, faculty, and staff need to establish norms of civil engagement, communicate those norms to students, and practice them themselves.
“Training for instructional staff and at student orientation programs must clarify the difference between a challenging classroom atmosphere, which is healthy and constructive, and a threatening one, which is toxic,” Penslar said. “Guidelines for co-curricular organizations and residences should stress the importance of inclusivity, however contentious conversations within them may be.”
The task force also calls for greater antisemitism awareness training as part of the University’s efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and belonging. For example, the task force suggests offering anti-harassment training for students that includes examples of antisemitism and ensuring that orientation programs for new students include antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias in broader discussions of oppression and injustice.
“Our students are certain to encounter peers from backgrounds that they know little about,” Ellias said. “We want Harvard to tell our new students from day one, you are here to be with each other. We do not expect you to recognize all the ways you might offend each other, but we do expect you to be generous with each other, assume good intentions, and listen to what your fellow students say to you.”
What’s next
Some common recommendations emerged from both task forces related to everyday activities that many Harvard affiliates might take for granted. These include creating new calendars with information about Jewish and Muslim religious holidays (and those of other groups), reviewing accommodation policies, and improving kosher and halal food offerings in the dining halls.
“All of our students deserve convenient access to tasty and nutritious food. Depriving religiously observant students of that access is a violation of the most basic standards of equity. The same is true for denying students reasonable accommodation for religious holidays,” Penslar said. “So long as Harvard does not provide these forms of accommodation, it is signaling that religiously observant Jewish and Muslim students are not welcome here. That is a terrible message, and I am confident that it is not one that this University would ever endorse.”
And, finally, in an atmosphere rife with offensive and hateful social media posts and doxxing trucks circling campus, both task forces endorsed more deliberate — albeit more challenging — formal dialogues, such as high-profile talks and even in-classroom discussions between individuals who disagree respectfully and productively.
It’s these kinds of efforts that the co-chairs hope the University will pursue long after their final reports are delivered in the fall.
“One of the main reasons for conflict around the world is the inability to engage with and understand difference,” Asani said. “We should aspire to provide every student who is graduating from Harvard with the tools to engage with and understand all kinds of difference and in so doing enable them to make a positive difference in the world.”
Could high office-vacancy rates damage economy this year?
Getty Images
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Kenneth Rogoff sees tough road for some banks as surge of real estate loans come due by 2025, but doesn’t expect wider meltdown
Demand for downtown office space has plunged since the pandemic. Even now, as many businesses have ended or cut remote or hybrid work, office building vacancy rates are high, ranging from 12 percent to 23 percent in Boston and other major U.S. cities, depressing property values.
That downturn coupled with the Federal Reserve’s hesitation to reduce interest rates has a growing chorus of financial experts and market watchers alarmed about the potential for widespread bank losses (or even failures) if there are significant delinquencies among the surge of commercial real estate loans expected to mature by 2025. Such problems could, they fear, have a domino effect, rattling the wider economy.
Twenty percent of the $4.7 trillion in commercial mortgage debt held by lenders and investors comes due this year. On average, commercial real estate loans comprise about a quarter of lenders’ assets, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Kenneth Rogoff is a professor of economics and the Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics at Harvard. An expert on financial crises, Rogoff spoke to the Gazette about whether the wave of debt coming due poses real risks for U.S. banks and the economy. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Are the fears of widespread bank failures and forced consolidations warranted?
Yes, and no. There are definitely going to be a lot of firms that invest in commercial real estate who are going to see their equity wiped out, and the losses will be so big — with many buildings selling for half of what investors paid for them — that debt will get hit hard also. On its own, though, this will not cause a full-blown financial crisis, especially in the context of a still-solid global economic outlook.
This is not to say that the losses won’t hurt. Many pension funds are big holders of commercial real estate funds, as are insurance companies. Certainly, some of this will spill over into the banking system. There are hedge funds and private equity firms that have a lot of loans from banks. But banks, particularly the large banks, were given very strict financial regulation after the [2008 financial]crisis. They weathered the pandemic, obviously. Small and medium-sized banks, who have been more lightly regulated, could get hit harder, and some may go under.
But for better or worse, the Fed has shown a willingness to bail out most out, if needed. Commercial real estate is absolutely a slow-moving train wreck, but it’s not necessarily a replay of 2008-2009. Two other shoes would have to drop before we could be talking anything like that.
Many of the people who invest in commercial real estate are optimists who believe that long-term interest rates are going to come down, and they’ll end up being OK. A popular phrase has been “Stay alive till ’25,” on the view long rates will ultimately come down.
My recent research has looked at seven centuries of real interest data and reaches the conclusion that interest rates over the next decade are likely to remain, on average, not far from where they are today, with the new normal looking a lot like the old pre-global-financial-crisis normal.
Kenneth Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy from Harvard University’s Economics Department, is pictured in Littauer Center. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
What’s to blame for this looming crisis?
When interest rates were low, too many investors thought they would be low forever. Commercial real estate became over-leveraged, over-borrowed, and unprepared for having interest rates go up.
At the same time, the pandemic crushed demand for office buildings, especially in the U.S., where current occupancy rates (on average over the week) still hover around 50 percent in major cities. And it’s not going away quickly. Internationally, the situation is less severe. In Europe, people have much smaller homes and shorter average commuting distances, and therefore, have been more willing to come back to the office.
Some parts of the commercial real estate market in the U.S. are still doing well. For example, the so-called super-premium buildings that have amenities such as air filtration. You would think that with the shortage of housing, cities would be turning some of the unoccupied office buildings into apartments. Unfortunately, that turns out to be complicated not only from a zoning point of view, but also from an engineering point of view. These buildings, with a lack of interior windows, low ceilings, not to mention the placement of elevator shafts and electric lines, were just not designed to be turned into apartments.
Can anything be done to head off the “slow-moving train wreck”?
It would help a lot if long-term interest rates collapsed because then they can start refinancing. As noted, I consider that unlikely outside of a period of deep recession, though, of course, it is possible. No doubt part of the adjustment process will involve a lot of bankruptcies. But, in real estate, people go through bankruptcies all the time (as Americans realize better than ever). It’s part of their business model.
How might this scenario harm consumers or the U.S. economy?
Aside from losses through pension funds, there will be pockets of deep pain in regional banks, and that could well impact those areas more broadly, both in terms of lower consumption and tougher lending terms.
But let’s remember that so far, this is happening in the context of a solid job market and a booming stock market. In a way, we are looking at a part of the economy that’s particularly suffering, when, on the whole, the paradox is that the economy hasn’t been suffering more with the high interest rates.
So, for example, while some of the losses in commercial real estate will ultimately hit some consumers, many have also gained (for example through their pension funds) on the booming stock market. That’s why I mentioned you need another shoe (or two) to drop. Of course, if we have a giant recession, it will create many other problems and greatly amplify the commercial real estate crisis.
Earlier this month, a top executive at Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), one of the world’s largest asset managers, warned that regional banks could be the hardest hit. What impact could a huge wave of delinquent commercial real estate loans in that sector have on the U.S. banking system?
As discussed above, some regional banks went big into commercial real estate and are vulnerable today. This is particularly problematic for the smaller banks that were not required to abide by the same capital requirements as the larger banks. The small and medium-size banks had a problem just over a year ago when rising interest rates reduced the value of long-term loans banks had made at low interest rates.
After a couple went under, however, the Fed came in and bailed the rest out through a lending program where taxpayers took on a fair bit of risky loans to these banks. That definitely could be a problem down the road, but for now, having a few regional banks go under is not the same thing as having a giant such as Citi, Bank of America, or J.P. Morgan get into trouble. That would be a different order of magnitude.
Are the six largest banks — Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo — sufficiently prepared to withstand a possible cascade of bad commercial real estate debt?
The big banks are more diversified, and they’re making money in other areas. High interest rates have been an incredible money machine for the banks because they have gotten away with not fully passing the higher rates on to their depositors. And so far, the depositors haven’t moved their money out into higher-paying assets.
All in all, commercial real estate is definitely a major problem are in the economy, but it’s more on the order of having a major emerging market such as Turkey or Mexico default. It would be a terrible problem, but not on its own bring down the global economy.
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Study of adults over 50 examines how feelings boost threat over time
Maya Brownstein
Harvard Chan School Communications
4 min read
Chronic loneliness may significantly raise older adults’ risk of stroke, according to a new study led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Loneliness is increasingly considered a major public health issue. Our findings further highlight why that is,” said lead author Yenee Soh, a research associate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. “Especially when experienced chronically, our study suggests loneliness may play an important role in stroke incidence, which is already one of the leading causes of long-term disability and mortality worldwide.”
The study was published Monday in eClinicalMedicine.
While previous research has linked loneliness to higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, few have examined the impact on stroke risk specifically. This study is one of the first to examine the association between loneliness changes and stroke risk over time.
56%Greater stroke risk for study participants who experienced chronic loneliness than for those who consistently reported not being lonely
Using 2006-2018 data from the Health and Retirement Study, the researchers assessed the association between changes in loneliness and stroke incidence over time. During 2006-2008, 12,161 participants — all adults ages 50 and older who had never had a stroke — responded to questions on the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, from which the researchers created summary loneliness scores. Four years later (2010-2012), 8,936 participants who remained in the study responded to the same questions again. The researchers then placed the participants into one of four groups according to their scores across the two time points: consistently low (those who scored low on the loneliness scale at both baseline and follow-up); remitting (those who scored high at baseline and low at follow-up); recent onset (those who scored low at baseline and high at follow-up); and consistently high (those who scored high at both baseline and follow-up).
Among the participants whose loneliness was measured at baseline only, 1,237 strokes occurred during the follow-up period (2006-2018). Among the participants who provided two assessments of loneliness over time, 601 strokes occurred during the follow-up period (2010-2018). The researchers analyzed each group’s risk of stroke over the follow-up period in the context of their experiences with loneliness, controlling for other health and behavioral risk factors. These included social isolation and depressive symptoms, which are closely related to but distinct from loneliness.
The findings showed a link between loneliness and higher risk of stroke and found that chronic loneliness heightened risk the most. When loneliness was assessed at baseline only, the participants considered lonely had a 25 percent higher risk of stroke than those not considered lonely. Among the participants who reported loneliness at two time points, those in the consistently high group had a 56 percent higher risk of stroke than those in the consistently low group, even after accounting for a broad range of other known risk factors. While the baseline analyses suggest loneliness at one time point was associated with higher risk, those who experienced remitting or recent-onset loneliness did not show a clear pattern of increased risk of stroke — suggesting that loneliness’ impact on stroke risk occurs over the longer term.
“Repeat assessments of loneliness may help identify those who are chronically lonely and are therefore at a higher risk for stroke. If we fail to address their feelings of loneliness, on a micro and macro scale, there could be profound health consequences,” said Soh. “Importantly, these interventions must specifically target loneliness, which is a subjective perception and should not be conflated with social isolation.”
The authors noted that further research examining both nuanced changes in loneliness over the short-term and patterns over a longer period of time may help shed additional light on the loneliness-stroke association. They also noted that more research is needed to understand the potential underlying mechanisms, and that the study findings were limited to middle-aged and older adults and may not be generalizable to younger individuals.
Other Harvard Chan School authors included Ichiro Kawachi, Laura Kubzansky, Lisa Berkman, and Henning Tiemeier.
Peregrine enthusiast Brian Farrell has kept eye on Memorial Hall nesting box since 2015
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Brian Farrell has been fascinated with peregrine falcons since childhood. He even spent a summer as an undergrad in the 1970s raising and releasing the then-endangered birds. So the Museum of Comparative Zoology entomologist and Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America watched with interest in 2015 when state wildlife officials installed a peregrine falcon nesting box high above Harvard’s Cambridge campus, in Memorial Hall’s tower.
Late last month, he was walking by the tower hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the birds when he spotted a still-downy chick flutter to the ground. Farrell knew just what to do. Then one rescue led to another.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you wind up saving one of Memorial Hall’s peregrines?
I was meeting a friend in the Square. I swung by Memorial Hall to see if I could see any peregrines and just as I was crossing the street, I got a glimpse of a bird a few feet off the ground, gliding. I thought, “That’s weird, that looks like a peregrine but it’s so close to the ground. They’re never near the ground.”
I found it at the base of the stairs, trying to fly. It could fly well enough to control its descent but couldn’t fly up to the nest. This is a threatened species, and it would be illegal for me to touch it without permission, so I called the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife and spoke to the crew that installed the nest box. I said, “It looks healthy enough, I think I can find the building manager to let me in.” So, once we had a plan in mind — I know how to handle the birds — I grabbed it, which got me a few scratches, but I knew it would.
And you brought it all the way back up to the nest on the tower?
Yes, I found the Memorial Hall production manager Tina Bowen and then did a one-handed climb up the steep ladder. During the actual release — we got the video — I could hear the female screaming protectively. So all was well. The former Memorial Hall Director Ray Traietti went up with Dean Hopi Hoekstra after this bird was returned. They didn’t see the chick, but you have to be at the right spot, and they could hear the parents yelling their heads off. They were clearly protecting something. So that chick was no doubt still there.
And two days later, you had another encounter?
Yes, I heard a report that there was another bird on the ground so I came back. I looked up and the adult was folding its wings and zooming down from Memorial Hall directly for Busch Hall. It perched right on that red tile roof, and I thought, “That’s too low for a peregrine. It’s looking at something.” I knew it must be a chick below. The building was locked, so I rattled the doors. Someone was inside so they let me in. The chick was in the courtyard and had been there all day. This is chick number two. The adult was there, and it was safe. I was in touch with a local volunteer and peregrine fan, Susan Moses, who called Fish and Wildlife, and it was picked up and brought to the clinic, just to check it out, before they returned it.
Do we know how many chicks are up there?
I took photos of three. The one that I picked up was the youngest of the three. You can see in the photos that it was covered with down. Turns out there may even be a fourth chick too, so this was a very successful year.
It almost looked sick in the photos.
No, it’s just growing out its flight feathers. That’s how they look before it sheds them. The second bird had much less down — it was losing it in the courtyard. The third bird had very little down.
What happens is that the birds lay their eggs, one at a time, every few days. If they start incubating with the first egg, then that’s the first one to hatch, and it’s a little bit further along than the second, and then further still from the third. It also tends to get more food since the first is the biggest one.
Is it unusual for them to take these kinds of test flights?
It’s hard to know, but it seemed like they were a little early for test flights, since they couldn’t return to the nest. But on the tower, they don’t stay in the nest box. They’re running around and jostling for food above the gargoyles that surround the tower. They’re jumping up and down. And if one jumps off, another will see that and get the idea. They’re just antsy and right at the edge of being able to fly.
At this stage, does a day or two make a big difference?
Yes, and they were within a few days of being able to do it, so our goal was to get them back up high. The birds are very robust and the young are pretty robust, which is why there was a successful reintroduction program here.
Why did they have to be reintroduced?
They went extinct in Massachusetts because of the pesticide DDT. They disappeared in the East by the early 1960s. There were still a few populations hanging on in other parts of the world, in the Western U.S., in Alaska, and up in Canada. But they were extinct in the East where pesticide use was very intense.
You worked with peregrines as a student at University of Vermont?
I was contracted by Cornell in 1978 to work in the summer reintroducing them into New Hampshire. They bred for the first time in the East nearby in 1984. It was possibly our birds.
What is the history of peregrines at Harvard?
They nested the year before the nest box went up in 2015 but it was unsuccessful. There was a gap for a few years when they moved over to Boston University, but they did successfully nest here last year and raised three young, which were fun to watch all summer. I think these are younger birds since there isn’t a long nesting tradition at Harvard, and the birds tend to return to the same place. Ed Wilson had told me in 2014 that he remembered they last nested on Memorial Hall in 1955 when he was still a grad student in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
What makes Harvard’s Cambridge campus attractive to peregrines?
They’re the fastest creatures to ever fly on the planet — they’re just spectacular in the air — yet they’ve always nested in cities. Cities are canyon-like, with tall buildings. They need wide-open space with a high perch so they can dive-bomb on birds, because that’s what they do. Cities are filled with pigeons, so they have room and board. One wonderful thing about Harvard is that there are folks who care — and who are watching — if they fall to the ground.
Tiya Miles’ new biography looks at development of ‘eco-spiritual’ worldview, how it served her with Underground Railroad, later missions
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Many Americans today have a singular view of Harriet Tubman, the 19th-century hero who rescued herself and at least 70 others from slavery before the outbreak of the Civil War.
“We’re really focused on segments of her life that match up with a cinematic adventure story,” said Tiya Miles, the Michael Garvey Professor of History. “But Tubman lived a long life, and she was involved with the Underground Railroad for only about a decade. What did she do with the rest of her years?”
Miles provides an answer in her new book, “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People,” with its focus on the “eco-spiritual” worldview that made Tubman’s heroism possible. The biography begins with Tubman’s early days as a tenacious child who endures slavery’s abuses while acquiring deep knowledge of the natural world. It also gets to the root of Tubman’s abiding faith in God, a source of solace and strength from early girlhood.
The book’s June 18 release marks the debut of Penguin Press’ Significations series, featuring top thinkers on major Black cultural figures, curated and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. Coming next month is a biography on Mary McLeod Bethune, the turn-of-the-20th-century educator and activist, authored by Brown University’s Noliwe Rooks.
We caught up with Miles, winner of the 2021 National Book Award for “All That She Carried,” to learn more about “Night Flyer.” The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Tiya Miles.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
This book explores the development of Tubman’s worldview. Where did you get the idea for this approach?
Like many kids growing up in the U.S., I saw Harriet Tubman on posters in my elementary school classrooms and heard about her every year during Black History Month. When I became a scholar of slavery studies, I saw Tubman all across the literature. It wasn’t until I became conscious of environmental issues, and turned my attention toward environmental history, that I realized Tubman was an important figure for the ways she interacted with the natural world.
Around the time of Hurricane Katrina, when the exposure of African American people to environmental harms became much clearer, I realized I wanted to write about Tubman and the ways she navigated her environment toward the ends of freeing herself and many others from slavery.
“Wild Girls” was really inspired by my interest in Harriet Tubman. Thinking about Tubman and the outdoors for a book about the history of girls in the outdoors, writ large, led me back to seeing her as a child — and to seeing her experiences in entirely new light. I realized how much being in nature shaped her understanding of who she was and what she was capable of.
I then turned to other female figures in the 19th century and asked if the same applied to them. And it did! So with the help of Tubman, I really found my way to an interpretation about girls and the outdoors in the U.S.
Why did you return to Tubman so quickly for your very next book?
“Wild Girls” was part of a series called Norton Shorts, and I found there just wasn’t enough room for all I wanted to say. Working on “Night Flyer” allowed me to reopen the question of Harriet Tubman and nature — to revisit primary materials, to bring in a whole host of secondary materials, and to fit this exploration with the new series edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
What I really saw was that, yes, nature was prominent, but so was something else. And that was Tubman’s very full, very rich, very real spiritual and religious life.
Water, sky, land, and loblolly pine trees in the Maryland county where Tubman was born.
Photo by Perri Meldon, 2022
How did Tubman acquire her deep ecological knowledge?
From around the age of 4, Harriet Tubman — who at that time was known as Araminta Ross, or Minty — was leased out by her owners to other enslavers with farms near the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. She was often forced to do work that was terrible for a child, like collecting muskrats from traps. As an adolescent, she was leased out for outdoor manual labor, and then she got permission to hire herself out to work in the local timber industry.
Her education, as far as we can tell, was influenced by what she could see and hear and touch, but also by the fact that her father worked in the same woods. He was a foreman of a group of people, both free and enslaved, who were doing timbering work. Tubman probably learned from her father about the differences between tree species, how to identify stars in the night sky, and what would have been edible in those woods.
How did this knowledge serve her Underground Railroad mission?
It’s really hard for us now to understand how difficult and even impossible it was for enslaved people to escape captivity. As a result, the mass number of African Americans who were enslaved had to wait until the Civil War to obtain their freedom.
Many were living in isolated locations where roads were unmarked and unmapped. There were thick forests, wide waterways, and deep swamps, all of which were filled with wildlife that could be hazardous.
Those who did make the attempt had to cover great distances to get from southern states to the north. And they would do this knowing there were people on the lookout to identify them; there were hunters on their trail. That meant knowing how to sustain your own life and the lives of those making the journey with you. It meant being able to access water, food, and shelter. It meant knowing what path led through which woods, which waterways were nearby, which animals were dangerous.
“She spent the rest of her life taking people in, aiding them, and showing them the kind of love she always received from her family, but never received from enslavers as a child.”
When did Tubman’s religious education begin?
Harriet Tubman — little Minty Ross — was raised by parents who were themselves very religious. Although we don’t have a great deal of direct reportage, it seems she grew up ensconced in a broader Black enslaved community — with some free people mixed in — who were devout, practicing Christians.
When Tubman was leased out by her owner, she was distraught. She loved her mother and father — this is evident in the primary materials. Being separated from them was very painful. One thing she did to survive was to pray. Apparently, she wouldn’t pray in proximity to the people who were renting her. Instead, she would go off to be alone with her prayers.
And as she grew older, her prayer life became much more intense. She began to feel she was in direct communication with God.
Tubman famously sustained a brain injury around the age of 12. How did that impact her spiritual life?
The story takes place in Dorchester County, Maryland, in a little general store that still exists today and was close to a plantation where Tubman was leased out. She noticed someone described in the original materials as a “young slave” running from an overseer toward the store. According to descriptions, Tubman threw herself in between when the overseer hurled a very heavy metal weight toward the boy. The weight hit Tubman in the head, and she was knocked to the floor. She says in the first accounts of her life that it cut into her skull. Nevertheless, she was sent right back to work in the fields the next day. She talks about how her head was bleeding as she was forced to work.
After this, Tubman experienced a dramatic change. Scholars today assess her resulting condition as temporal lobe epilepsy. She had terrible headaches. She had seizures that left her unconscious. But she also had an enriched sense of spiritual intuition and understanding, which she felt guided her actions for the rest of her life.
This story is often told as the moment when Tubman became a hero. But one of the things I write about in “Night Flyer” is that Tubman already had an active religious sense. She already had an extremely strong will. She was already resisting slavery in the limited ways that she could as a child.
I would say this moment expanded and intensified these qualities. But it did not initiate all the characteristics we associate today with Tubman’s bravery.
I want to end with her role as a caregiver, because I love how prominently you feature this aspect of her life.
Harriet Tubman lived according to an ethos of caregiving. I think it stemmed from her love of family, from her observations of how well her mother had cared for her and her siblings, and also from her belief in God. And she did something remarkable in the later decades of life. She got ahold of a piece of land and made space for people who needed a place to live. There were a number of Black people who were impoverished, who were ill, or who had disabilities squeezed into Tubman’s very small house on a farm in upstate New York.
While keeping this wide-open home, she even expanded her dream to include a facility on the grounds where she could care for Black people who were older or in need of an additional degree of care. Basically, Tubman wanted to build a healthcare facility. And she did it! She spent the rest of her life taking people in, aiding them, and showing them the kind of love she always received from her family, but never received from enslavers as a child. Actually, I think this is her greatest lesson for us today.
Immunology focus expands to neurodegenerative diseases and other areas as collaboration between Harvard, MIT, and Mass. General Hospital turns 15
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
On its 15th anniversary, the Ragon Institute celebrates the opening of a 300,000-square-foot building to house its engineers, scientists, and doctors. The Cambridge-based Ragon — a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard — enables cross-disciplinary biomedical research aimed at solving global health problems. We spoke with Ragon Director Bruce Walker about the Institute’s next steps.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
The Ragon Institute was founded to bring about collaboration between scientists, doctors, and engineers. How does the new building facilitate this?
Traditionally, these scientific disciplines have been siloed. So one objective is to bring these different disciplines together, but unless they’re interacting you haven’t accomplished much. What we’ve done is to create an environment where the incentive is to leave your office and go to common spaces that we refer to as collaboration spaces where you have those chance encounters, where the scientists are visible. The Institute is built so that you can see people. It’s got a very large central atrium and catwalks on each level and a spiral staircase, so you know who else is in the building. In my experience, those random encounters are where innovation and creativity are spawned.
“You can work really hard to create something through the application of science and engineering, but if you can’t deliver it to people you haven’t accomplished much.”
Do you see any new disciplines or technologies being added to this collaboration?
We’re all studying how the immune system functions and how it malfunctions. Whether you’re a physicist or a computational biologist or an immunologist, we’re all working toward a common goal of understanding those processes. The immune system is beyond the capacity of the human brain to understand that whole complex system, but it’s not beyond the ability with AI and machine learning. In the new building there will be multiple spaces for computational biologists, AI, and machine learning.
As you celebrate the Ragon’s 15th anniversary, do you see its focus changing?
We have three major programmatic areas now going forward. We have just the beginning of an understanding of how the immune system works, but we know that that the immune system is in every nook and cranny in our bodies and keeping us healthy. In fact, it’s eliminating cancerous cells as they arise. The more we can understand about it, the better we can come up with therapies. So trying to understand the physiology of the immune system is one focus.
Immune engineering is another, and the third is patient-centered immunology. You can work really hard to create something through the application of science and engineering, but if you can’t deliver it to people you haven’t accomplished much. One of the things that we have in the new building is a clinical center. We’ll be able to do patient follow-up right in the institute.
What new challenges will the Institute take on?
A major challenge looking forward is the family of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that those are inflammatory in nature, in other words, mediated in some way or modulated in some way by the immune system. And so neuroimmunology is one of the areas that we’re specifically trying to extend into. We started out 15 years ago as an HIV institute, we rapidly expanded as Ebola and then Zika came along, and COVID-19, influenza, malaria, and in addition to that, autoimmunity and cancer. It’s all under the umbrella of how the immune system functions and malfunctions.
What has the partnership between Harvard, MIT, and Massachusetts General Hospital made possible?
It has enabled us to implement our strategy, which was to bring together scientists from different disciplines and give them the flexibility to take innovative ideas forward with flexible funding. Traditional funding sources are loath to fund things if they haven’t been shown to already work, and our view is that if we aren’t failing in some projects, we’re not pushing the envelope hard enough. The flexible funding is really critical because it enables us to take an idea and immediately sprint with it, taking high-risk, high-impact ideas forward.
For years when I was working at Mass General, I would have conversations with different people outside of the HIV field and we’d talk about, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to apply your skills to this HIV problem?” And it never went anywhere because we never had funding. We’re enabling those connections to happen by catalyzing them with flexible funding.
How do you see this partnership growing?
We are MGH, MIT, and Harvard, but we welcome people from all the other affiliated hospitals. We collaborate with UMass and Tufts and Boston University.
Our educational mission is not just local, it extends out to other places in the world, particularly South Africa, which has the greatest burden of TB and HIV infection in the world. We partner closely with two research institutes there, and our goal is to transfer the knowledge and technologies that we’re developing to the African continent and to help in training the next generation of African scientists.
We’re in the process of establishing new collaborations in South America and others in Africa. And we are establishing a formal collaboration with a new institute in Australia. Again, we really want to take down the walls.
What difference will this new facility make?
The expanded facilities allow us to cover more dimensions of immunology, recruit more faculty, and provide an expanded number of better-equipped labs to support the scientists. It was built for collaboration, which is the reason that the Ragon Institute was built: to bring together scientists and engineers and medical doctors from multiple disciplines and use their creativity and knowledge in a pooled way to solve some of the biggest global health problems of our generation and future generations.
The Institute also has a childcare center, to support young faculty with families, and educational spaces to teach the next generation of scientists and engineers and medical doctors. We actually overbuilt things, so it’s got a very large biosafety Level 3 facility, which will service people in this incredible square mile of scientific innovation that’s unmatched anywhere in the world.
The incoming Harvard Quantum Initiative graduate student already knew she had an interest in the field. But that wasn’t the same as feeling there may be a place for her in it.
“Being able to congregate with different professionals in the field gives me hope for the future, and it really affirms that what I want to do, and what I’m able to do, is right here,” she said.
Emodogo, a recent Jackson State University graduate, was among more than 100 attendees of the inaugural Quantum Noir conference at Harvard on June 11-14, a quantum science and engineering event aimed at students and scientists of color. Faculty at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Dartmouth, and many other colleges led sessions that blended overviews of the latest advances in quantum science with non-technical subjects such as entrepreneurship, venture capital, and how to navigate spaces in the field as an underrepresented minority.
“This really was a missing link, in the sense that we’re not educating students in this space … and we’re letting that talent go do something else. We’re letting that talent go work on satellites, as opposed to working on semiconductors,” Wilson said.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Wilson and colleagues launched Quantum Noir to create a community of researchers, innovators, and students of color interested or involved in quantum science, nanoscience, and engineering. Organizers hope to create a “more inclusive future” for the field by training the best and most diverse set of minds to conquer its hardest problems — from networking hardware to algorithm development.
William Wilson, who led the drive to launch Quantum Noir, opens the conference.
Nathalie de Leon, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University.
Sean Persaud (left) and Xavier Jackson, both from the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine.
James Whitfield, Amazon Visiting Academic, Amazon Web Services.
A number of attendees hailed from historically Black colleges and universities, including undergraduates, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty from Howard University and Morehouse College. Preconference tutorials introduced the basics of quantum computing and quantum networks, and subsequent technical sessions were designed to be accessible to students or researchers without a deep background in any particular field.
Howard computer engineering major Malcolm Bogroff was one such undergraduate, with designs on graduate school but open to different directions. The rising sophomore appreciated the conference’s approach. “I think the sessions toe the line, where you can have people at the graduate student, and maybe higher undergraduate level, able to understand and ask questions,” he said.
Harvard College alumnus Makinde Ogunnaike ’17 was among those who helped students such as Bogroff get the most out of the conference. A recent Ph.D. graduate of MIT, Ogunnaike served as a student ambassador of the conference and helped co-organize networking events. Gatherings like Quantum Noir are critical to promoting exposure and community, he said.
“This conference is one of the few venues that supports Black and other underrepresented researchers both professionally and personally,” said Ogunnaike, who credited mentorship he received at the National Society of Black Physicists as an undergrad with helping him pivot from experimental particle physics to theoretical condensed matter physics.
“Just as there is a ‘hidden curriculum’ in school, where best practices and institutional resources can be hidden to people who are not familiar with elite institutions or higher education, the world of scientific research has many hidden disparities,” he said.
No traction for more positive economic developments, research says
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
3 min read
Say “inflation” these days and the minds of most Americans jump to steep grocery bills and high interest rates.
As highlighted by two recent papers by Stefanie Stantcheva, the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, the majority are much less likely to focus on the more positive economic trends of the past few years, including wage growth and strong employment prospects. What’s more, Americans overwhelmingly oppose the tools that policymakers use to mitigate inflation’s worst effects. In fact, many see inflation as only getting worse when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, as it did 11 times between spring 2022 and last summer.
“There hasn’t been enough work to see how people understand inflation, what policies they want to support in order to fight inflation, and also how inflation actually impacts them,” Stantcheva said.
For a paper titled “People’s Understanding of Inflation,” Stantcheva and graduate student co-authors Francesco Nuzzi (Harvard) and Alberto Binetti (Princeton) conducted a large-scale survey through which they found that most Americans believe inflation has been caused by government action, trailed by supply-chain disruptions and other COVID-related issues. Respondents expressed skepticism about rate hikes as an effective countermeasure.
75%Of Republican voters surveyed blamed inflation on the government vs. 60% of Democrats
Clear partisan differences surfaced in the findings. Republicans were more likely to blame inflation on the government (more than 75 percent of GOP voters vs. 60 percent of Democrats) and less likely to blame private companies. All respondents saw inflation as more harmful to lower-income people, but Republicans were less likely to support policies that might help these households, such as expanding access to food stamps (supported by 80 percent of Democrats vs. 50 percent of Republicans) or boosting the minimum wage (80 percent for Democrats vs. 50 percent of Republicans).
The most cited burden of inflation was the impact on family budgets, notably the way it raises the stakes on household purchases and standard of living.
Among the details that caught Nuzzi’s attention was the lack of ambiguity in survey responses. “People perceive inflation as unequivocally negative, rarely associating it with positive economic developments or with a good economy,” he said.
Discussing the second paper, “Why Do We Dislike Inflation?,” Stantcheva noted that inflation typically plays out in one of two ways. The first is a product of a booming economy: “There’s high demand, things are going well, and that can actually generate inflation.” The other possibility, “stagflation,” is associated with high unemployment and stagnant demand.
Most respondents viewed all inflationary episodes as “stagflation,” Stantcheva said. “There is a perception that inflation is unambiguously a bad thing.”
Views on the tools policymakers use in attempts to control inflation echoed findings from “People’s Understanding of Inflation.”
“People tend to think that policymakers do not face harsh trade-offs when it comes to fighting inflation,” she said.
This is important, she added, because “when you ask people what type of policies they support to fight inflation … contractionary monetary policies like increasing interest rates or reducing money supply have very low support.”
Harvard digital atlas plots patterns from history ancient and modern
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
A network of ancient Roman roads converges neatly with satellite images of the Earth at night. A heat map of 15th-century bubonic plague outbreaks bears an eerie resemblance to Europe’s early COVID-19 hot spots. Mapping Past Societies, a free digital atlas hosted by the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, illuminates just a few of these patterns.
“It has a rich dataset of historic, economic, archaeological, environmental, and health information as well as climate data going back much further,” said Santiago Pardo Sánchez ’16, the project’s co-managing editor. “Someone who’s interested in modern transportation could look at how it worked in the past. Someone who’s looking at the plague in Central Asia could also get data from the Middle East.”
Mapping Past Societies, or MAPS, is powered by vast spreadsheets that geo-locate everything from historic rat populations to medieval marketplaces and Roman military structures. Its user-friendly interface, which runs on ArcGIS software, invites discovery by layering multiple phenomena across a single map — or by animating how one dataset plays out over time.
Heat map of 15th-century bubonic plague outbreaks (click to enlarge).
Credit: MAPS
“The shipwreck data have been important to me and other economic historians,” said MAPS founder and general editor Michael McCormick, the Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History and chair of the Science of the Human Past initiative. “They offer a rather crude but nevertheless rich indicator of economic activity for the period between about 500 B.C.E. and 1500 C.E.”
For much of his career, McCormick focused on the history and archaeology of the fall of the Roman Empire. He was once in the habit of hand-drawing maps for his classes. Then a thought occurred one evening in the 1990s while he was outlining the Roman Empire for an exam: “At this very moment, around the globe, there are probably 100 other professors drawing exactly the same map,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Wait! This is not a good use of our time. There should be one map!’”
Soon he was experimenting with geographic information systems to design his own digital maps, with several appearing in “Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900” (2002). That led to partnering with the Center for Geographic Analysis to launch the free Digital Atlas of Roman Empire and Medieval Civilizations in the mid ’00s. Over the years, DARMC was slowly expanded to incorporate new datasets. Information on the ancient and medieval worlds remains most robust, but more recent additions cover Colonial Latin America, 18th-century France, and more.
Michael McCormick (from left), Santiago Pardo Sánchez, and Alexander More.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The pandemic inspired the team to refresh the project’s branding and interface, relaunching DARMC earlier this year as MAPS. The site’s new dashboard will be familiar to anybody who recalls tracking COVID cases on the Johns Hopkins website. At the same time, recent software updates enabled the addition of that showstopping layering feature.
“Before you could just turn on and off one layer,” Pardo Sánchez noted. “But now, you can do much more. You can change the visualizations with overlays and transparencies. You can share it more easily. You can switch the basemap, or background, to satellite imagery of the Earth at night.”
From the start, students have been key to the project’s success. Undergraduates bring a natural fascination with Roman and medieval history, McCormick said, but many struggle to make meaningful early academic contributions in the field, given the need for proficiency in multiple languages including Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac — not to mention all the must-read secondary literatures in German, Italian, French, and Spanish.
To work on MAPS, however, all they need is curiosity, attention to detail, and facility with spreadsheets. “This is a real intellectual contribution to our understanding of the human past which they can, should, and do cite among their publications,” McCormick said.
“My litmus test has been: Could a nerdy 12-year-old use it? Because if a nerdy 12-year-old can use it, then anybody can.”
Anika Liv Christensen, MAPS research assistant
“The undergrads working on the project now are younger than the project,” quipped Pardo Sánchez, who made his first MAPS contributions as an undergraduate, cataloguing findings from McCormick’s “Origins of the European Economy.” As an undergraduate concentrating in history, Pardo Sánchez later contributed to one of the site’s biggest datasets, nearly 60,000 records of climate events over the past 2,000 years.
Today, Anika Liv Christensen ’26, a research assistant currently working on MAPS, says, “It was the perfect job for a 19-year-old with no experience. Originally, my job was to check databases for errors. With so many entries, there are bound to be misspellings and formatting problems.”
Christensen, a joint concentrator in music and human evolutionary biology, recently worked on inventorying atypical burial sites in medieval France, currently with about 300 entries (each with up to five individuals per site).
“My litmus test has been: Could a nerdy 12-year-old use it?” Christensen said. “Because if a nerdy 12-year-old can use it, then anybody can.”
The enormous spreadsheets that populate the site’s map are freely available for download to anybody with an internet connection. The information on Roman roads has proved especially popular, McCormick shared. “There was a wholeseries of economic studies on 21st-century Europe showing that proximity to Roman roads helped predict economic vibrancy today.”
At a recent MAPS kickoff event, co-managing editor Alexander More, M.A ’07, Ph.D. ’14, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Massachusetts, demonstrated what it looks like to plot the Roman roads alongside information on bubonic plague outbreaks from the 14th century.
“You can really see the data come alive,” he marveled. “For the first time, you can see the progression of this pandemic throughout Europe, with these hotspots emerging at nexuses of Roman roads.”
As bursts of yellow covered Italy and France, yet another historical intersection came into view. “These nexuses are in fact also the same places where COVID emerged in full force in 2020,” More said.
College sees strong yield for students accepted to Class of 2028
Financial aid was a critical factor, dean says
3 min read
Eighty-four percent of students accepted to the Class of 2028 have decided to attend Harvard College this fall, a slight increase from last year. The strong yield indicates that Harvard continues to be a top choice for many of the world’s most promising students.
Financial aid was a critical factor. Approximately 55 percent of the class will receive need-based aid, and the average parent contribution for students receiving aid is $15,500. Nearly one-quarter (23.4 percent) of the admitted class will attend Harvard with no parent contribution.
“It’s exciting to hear from so many incoming students and their families about the importance of our generous financial aid in their decisions to come to Harvard,” said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons.
A new launch grant program, announced last fall, has expanded support for students with family incomes below $85,000, providing $2,000 during junior year as students prepare for life after graduation.
“The launch grant complements a $2,000 start-up grant that ensures students have a smooth transition to life at Harvard,” said Griffin Director of Financial Aid Jake Kaufmann.
First-generation students make up 20.3 percent of the class. Pell recipients make up 20.4 percent, and students requesting an application fee waiver make up 29.4 percent.
The Class of 2028 is made up of 53.2 percent women and 46.8 percent men. Additionally, 13 transfer students will join the College this fall. Harvard continues to successfully recruit from the military, enrolling 19 veterans for the Class of 2028. The class also includes 23 students who received ROTC scholarships.
A robust recruitment effort by faculty, staff, alumni, and students supported the application cycle. Thousands of volunteers helped interview applicants and recruit students through college fairs. Admissions officers visited some 150 cities in the U.S.
“Our recruitment efforts are only as good as the staff and volunteers who are committed to seeking out our most promising students. The Class of 2028 represents the best of these kinds of efforts,” said Director of Admissions Joy St. John.
The incoming class includes students from all 50 states and the U.S. territories: New England (17 percent); Mid-Atlantic (20.2 percent); South (16.1 percent); Midwest (9 percent); Mountain (2.5 percent); Pacific (14.9 percent); Central (1.6 percent); and U.S. territories (.4 percent). International citizens, representing 94 countries, comprise 16.7 percent of the class.
Prospective social science concentrators make up 36.9 percent of the incoming first-years while 12 percent of students expressed interest in the humanities. More than 25 percent of students expressed interest in the sciences (15.5 in the life sciences, 10 percent in the physical sciences) and 22.9 percent in studying computer science and engineering. Only 1.7 percent declared themselves undecided.
A record number of admitted students (1,304) attended Visitas in April. Expanded programming included opportunities to attend actual or sample sessions of four iconic Harvard courses (CS50, Econ10B, Human10B, and LifeSci1A) and engage with faculty; there was also an option to attend virtually as well. Many students reported that their decision to come to Harvard was influenced by Visitas and other outreach conducted during the month of April by faculty, students, and alumni.
Boston busing in 1974 was about race. Now the issue is class.
School-reform specialist examines mixed legacy of landmark decision, changes in demography, hurdles to equity in opportunity
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Nearly 50 years ago, a landmark federal court decision found the Boston School Committee had illegally perpetuated segregation and allocated lower funding in predominantly Black neighborhoods. It ordered racial rebalancing of white and Black students through busing.
The ruling by Judge W. Arthur Garrity on June 21, 1974, ignited racial violence and bitter protests from mostly working-class whites who resisted complying and sparked fears in both white and Black neighborhoods over the safety of their children. The tumultuous era tore apart Boston and left an indelible stain on the city’s reputation.
There is widespread agreement that the results of this attempt to achieve more equal educational opportunity were mixed at best. And a new report by a state education oversight panel finds that a majority of public schools in Massachusetts remain segregated.
The Gazette spoke with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Paul Reville about Boston’s busing crisis and what has improved — and what hasn’t — over the past half-century. An expert on school reform, Reville was secretary of education in Massachusetts from 2008-2013 and is now the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at HGSE. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
While well-intentioned, busing didn’t yield the kind of student gains Judge Garrity and others likely thought it would. Was this experiment doomed to fail from the start, or an idea with potential that was derailed by racial and class politics?
The decision Judge Garrity made to bus students in Boston was his answer to the blatant discrimination against racial minorities promulgated by the Boston School Committee. When that school board failed to come up with an acceptable plan for integration, Garrity imposed a court-designed plan on the school system.
People in Boston, then as now, felt like they were entitled to have good, safe, nearby schools in their neighborhoods. For many parents, Black and white, the idea of busing their children to a far-away, possibly unsafe school was outrageous.
The court order was seen by many as not only a misguided technical solution to a much larger problem, but also as an imposition by affluent, white liberals on vulnerable urban neighborhoods. Many Black parents in Boston had painfully endured decades of discrimination by the school system, and they wanted a remedy. At the same time, they feared for the safety of their children who were being bused into sometimes hostile neighborhoods.
The plaintiffs had sought a ruling that would prevent the discrimination against and isolation of racial minorities. The court concluded that the only way to accomplish this was to force the integration of each school so that no particular school could be identified for discrimination. If there were Black and white children in every school, then the system would be forced to treat them all equally in terms of policy and budget.
That was a logical and well-intentioned strategy, but the court did not anticipate the degree of resistance forced busing would generate, nor the degree to which forced busing would trigger white and middle-class flight from Boston’s public schools.
What has changed for the better and what hasn’t since 1974?
The demographics in the U.S. and in public education, in particular, have changed dramatically. Students left the Boston Public Schools in droves. While initial enrollment declines were attributable to the court decision, larger demographic and societal changes compounded the effect.
85%Of those attending Boston Public Schools today are students of color
Current enrollment is now roughly half of what it was in the early 1970s. Students of color are now more racially isolated in Boston public schools than ever before. Currently, BPS has roughly 85 percent students of color, whereas white students were in the majority [57 percent] when busing began. To have an integrated student body in every school, given current demographics, is virtually impossible. On the other hand, we now have a more equitable distribution of budget and resources between schools.
Many factors at play during this era have changed: People of color are now the majority population in Boston; the school committee is not as politically powerful as it once was; and the last two mayors and the current Massachusetts secretary of education are people of color. And yet, Boston’s public schools are about average compared to other large U.S. cities. Should we be seeing better results?
Boston has strong leadership now, an effective mayor and an experienced superintendent presiding over a challenged school system. The challenges are huge: You’ve got declining enrollment, increased absenteeism, and spiraling mental health and behavioral problems.
Although student attendance appears to be increasing somewhat, you still have something like a quarter of students chronically absent. No amount of school improvement is going to raise your scores if high percentages of young people are absent from school on a regular basis.
It’s much more a matter of socioeconomics than race. Educational achievement and attainment are closely associated with class. Boston is now a much less socio-economically diverse school district than it was before.
Socioeconomic flight from the district to private, parochial, and suburban schools, even to charter schools, has drawn down enrollment and left the system with much more concentrated poverty.
The cost of housing has driven a lot of middle-class people out of the city. The hollowing out of that middle means that the school system is now serving many more children with profound special needs, more multilingual learners, and students from low-income backgrounds. These factors make it much more complicated and difficult to educate all children to higher levels.
Boston, like a lot of cities, has got major challenges in dealing with the circumstances in children’s lives outside of school. Children are in school for only 20 percent of their waking hours between kindergarten and grade 12. So, school is a fairly weak intervention in terms of changing the prospects and opportunities available to young people.
“The school-choice system sometimes seems to amount to little more than an expensive game of musical chairs. Somebody always loses out.”
Whenever you have concentrated poverty, irrespective of race, it diminishes the chances for young people moving forward. Folks like Harvard economist Raj Chetty have done a lot of research on the importance of social class and social class interaction for social and economic mobility. That matters a lot.
What still needs to be done?
The school-choice system has not worked very effectively. It sometimes seems to amount to little more than an expensive game of musical chairs with a limited number of high-quality educational opportunities. Somebody always loses out in that kind of a game.
I think we should move back to neighborhood schools. Until recently, you could barely mention the idea of having a “neighborhood school” because that term became so fraught during the busing days. But the concept is worth reviving.
We desperately need high school reform. There must be school-to-career pathways and early college options in all those high schools. There’s some good work going on in Boston on “hub schools” — full-service community schools — which I applaud. This movement addresses some of the out-of-school factors that become impediments for many children. We need a “children’s cabinet” to oversee and expand this work.
We desperately need, and are now beginning to see, improvements in Boston’s school buildings. This administration has committed significant capital funding and is moving ahead in spite of some predictable setbacks and controversies.
We are stuck with a framework where school lines are drawn along municipal lines. Increasingly, in the U.S., people are segregating on the basis of income. That sort of segregation is as difficult to overcome as racial segregation has been in the past. Students in schools with high concentrations of poverty have a much more difficult time achieving and moving up than students in more integrated schools. To the degree that we can get affordable, mixed-income housing, Boston will have a more integrated school system. But that takes time.
What did school administrators, policymakers, and scholars learn from this period? Has anything positive come from it?
Yes, I think a couple of things. On the one hand, it was obviously right for the court to demand that the Boston School Committee treat all of its students equitably. That had to happen. On the other hand, we learned that you can’t have a successful, externally imposed remedy if people who are on the receiving end had no role in designing the remedy.
“Ultimately, we should be striving to have a quality school in every neighborhood.”
Those who bear the full brunt of the strategy are going to demand changes when the remedy threatens their children’s safety. If those changes are not forthcoming, those who can will leave. In the end, busing was not a successful remedy for racial segregation even if it did fix some aspects of a biased system.
We still have a long way to go. The school-choice program we have now is another well-intentioned attempt to achieve integration on a voluntary basis. That is a step in the right direction, but one with serious problems. We should be worrying less about achieving the perfect balance in all schools based on racial or ethnic demographics and be more concerned about socioeconomic integration.
Ultimately, we should be striving to have a quality school in every neighborhood, a school tailored to meet the needs of those particular children, giving them what they require to be successful both inside and outside of school. This should be part of a much larger city-wide social contract which guarantees every neighborhood the preconditions which will allow residents to flourish.
This is no simple matter given demographic trends, the history and politics of achieving equity, and the cost of housing in Boston, but it’s the best way forward.
An “incredible advocate for students.” An “administrative MacGyver.” A revitalizer and re-energizer of promoting gender equity, with a “warm, human-centered approach.”
Those words and more described winners of the 2024 Dean’s Distinction awards, which annually recognize exceptional work of Faculty of Arts and Sciences staff. Sunny skies befitted a festive awards ceremony earlier this month, where 12 individuals and two teams were feted for their dedication and expertise over the past year.
The annual FAS celebration took place in the Dunster House courtyard among throngs of cheering colleagues who came to support their peers and celebrate the academic year’s end.
“You shine as leaders within your individual departments and across the FAS as a whole,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS, before bestowing the awards. “You collaborate, you tackle problems with enthusiasm and energy, and you have a positive impact both here and in the world.”
Honorees hailed from across departments and centers, from the Dean of Students Office and the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to the Harvard Forest. Cheers erupted as Hoekstra read each name.
Francisco Arellano, events manager in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, accepted his award onstage before a lively group from MCB wearing matching sunglasses and waving balloons that spelled out his name in his favorite color, orange.
Arellano said he was “thrilled and humbled” to receive the award. “It’s an extraordinary feeling to be recognized in such a meaningful way. The best part of this experience has been how my team, who have been instrumental in my success, celebrated with me.”
“You shine as leaders within your individual departments and across the FAS as a whole,” said Dean Hopi Hoekstra.
Fellow awardee Genesee Johnson, director of financial administration and operations in Arts and Humanities, was likewise deeply touched by her team’s outpouring of support. “It’s one thing to receive recognition from a formal body or committee, but it’s another thing entirely to be uplifted by those you work alongside every day,” she said.
Boisterous supporters hoisted glittery signs for awardee Dell Marie Hamilton, Acting Director of the Cooper Gallery for African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. In her nomination, Executive Director Abby Wolf highlighted Hamilton’s curatorial experience and “tenacious attention to detail” that has brought the organization through “many difficult spots.”
“She went far above and beyond what was anticipated, driven always by our mission to educate and fill in gaps of traditional histories and institutions,” Wolf said.
Awardees were lauded for a range of qualities, Hoekstra said: cultivating a strong sense of community and connection across the FAS; creating humane and supportive work environments; exceeding regular responsibilities and expectations; fostering diversity, inclusion, and belonging; collaborating with the University’s best interests and mission in mind; and demonstrating ingenuity and creativity in their roles.
Two staff teams were honored: The Crimson Summer Academy, an academic program serving local public schools that hosts 30-40 students on campus each year; and the Research Administration Team that supports the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, managing faculty research portfolios in financial planning, sponsor requirements, and other areas.
In opening remarks, Dean of Administration and Finance Scott Jordan said, “It is worth taking a moment to be happy to be together.”
“I want to acknowledge — and this is heartfelt — that we are all winners today,” Jordan said. “We have gotten through the 2024 academic year.”
Francisco Arellano, Molecular and Cellular Biology Marvin Glenn Arenzana Baclig, Dean of Students Office Raul Figueroa, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Meg Fuchs, Harvard Forest Andrew Gitchel, Theatre, Dance & Media Dell Marie Hamilton, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research Genesee Johnson, Arts and Humanities Administrative Services Sol Kim-Bentley, English Helen Lewis, Linguistics Patricie Niyitegeka, Science Division Daniel Oliver, Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology Alejandra Rincon, Dean of Students Office
Team awardees:
Crimson Summer Academy, in the Division of Continuing Education Joseph Lewis Kimberly Parker Jamie Shushan Melissa Trottier
Human Evolutionary Biology-Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Research Administration Team Diana Gjino Jenna Legault Kristin Pennarun Emily Reynolds Liliana Teixeira-Davis
65 staff members honored as Harvard Heroes for leadership, teamwork, willingness to go extra mile to make University better
Go into any office or department, and everyone knows who they are.
Take Flora Chan. The special proctor for BGLTQ and financial aid and admissions officer stands out for her calming presence, generous spirit, and for welcoming students to be themselves.
Then there’s Leo Gomez. As director for active learning in electrical engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he overperforms in creating student learning modules with his positive attitude and commitment to education.
Meghan Kerr exceeds expectations with her meticulous work involving research data. In addition, the records manager and archivist at Countway Library has earned a reputation for helping faculty and staff crack complex policies and survey records to reduce storage costs.
The three were among the 65 recognized for their contributions at this year’s Harvard Heroes, a program that honors high-performing staff members from across campus. The honorees are nominated by their peers for their leadership, teamwork, and willingness to go the extra mile to make the University better.
Honorees are cheered in a ceremony at Sanders Theatre.
Interim President Alan Garber expresses gratitude for the employees’ contributions.
A special award went to Sasha, Harvard Police’s community engagement dog.
Leanne “Jake” Jacobellis of the School of Dental Medicine waves.
Jennifer Goodman and Don Olander of the Kennedy School step into the spotlight.
Interim President Alan Garber hosted the awards ceremony on Thursday at Sanders Theatre, which was packed with Harvard employees, who clapped and cheered every time as each of the 65 names was announced.
“Today we celebrate you and we recognize all of the outstanding ways you make the University better,” said Garber. “You are heroes because you never forget the greater significance of your work. You are heroes because your to-do lists are also how-to-do lists: How can I keep learning and growing? How can I be welcoming, helpful, and supportive? How can I aim for excellence and enable excellence in others? Your commitment to asking these kinds of questions helps steer the University through challenge and through change. With attention, care, and skill you keep Harvard moving forward, and for that we are all grateful.”
Among other staff members recognized were Norma Rodriguez, communications center supervisor with the Harvard Police Department, for going above and beyond to help students in crisis, as well as dining services worker Adilson Lopes; campus driver Jack Benson; building maintenance worker Manny Aguiar; and four other campus services employees.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences nominated 14 employees; the Harvard Medical School, seven; and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, four. Workers from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Office of the President and Provost, the Harvard Library, Alumni Affairs and Development, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University Information Technology, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Human Resources, Financial Administration, and the Harvard Public Affairs and Communications were among the honorees.
A special award was given to Sasha, the Harvard University Police Department’s community engagement dog. The black Labrador retriever made a special appearance during the ceremony, and her presence almost brought down the house.
In a prerecorded video shown during the ceremony, honorees described how they view their work. Their answers ranged from “rewarding” to “unpredictable” to “exciting” to “busy, really busy.” They were also asked what they liked best about their jobs. Some talked about the challenging nature of their work and their sense of accomplishment, but for most it came down to one thing: the people.
“I couldn’t do it without my fantastic office community,” said Chan, in an interview at a reception after the ceremonies. “I’m just really honored. I really love this place. I live on campus with my wife and 32 first-year students. That’s my night job and my day job is working in admissions and financial aid. We feel part of the Harvard community.”
Gomez agreed.
“There’s just so many people that are deserving of a recognition like this,” he said. “There are thousands and thousands of people that support Harvard and try to do their best, day in and day out, but it’s nice to be recognized for your efforts.”
Another honoree, Kendra Barber, assistant dean for faculty affairs for arts and humanities, said her favorite part of work is the whole thing.
“The job is interesting, the people are nice, and it’s fun!” said Barber in one of the videos shown during the ceremony. “Even on the busiest, hardest day, it’s still fun.”
Research using new method upends narrative on ritual sacrifices, yields discovery on resistance built to colonial-era epidemics
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
Photo by Johannes Krause
La historia de Chichén Itzá escrita en el ADN
Un nuevo método de investigación pone en entredicho la interpretación de los sacrificios rituales y pone al descubierto la resistencia a las epidemias de la época colonial.
Durante más de 100 años, la antigua ciudad maya de Chichén Itzá ha sido fuente de fascinación arqueológica.
La arqueóloga biomolecular Christina Warinner destacó que los restos humanos descubiertos a principios del siglo XX inspiraron “relatos escabrosos” de sacrificios rituales de mujeres vírgenes. Hubo que esperar hasta principios del siglo XXI para que los investigadores reunieran suficiente evidencia, basada en análisis de restos óseos, que pusiera en dudaesta historia.
Ahora Warinner, catedrático adjunto de Ciencias Sociales John L. Loeb, y un equipo interdisciplinario internacional de científicos le han dado un vuelco a esa historia. Su investigación de vanguardia, publicada esta semana en Nature, revela que los niños, especialmente los gemelos, eran el centro de los sacrificios en la legendaria ciudad-estado. La investigación también ha arrojado luz sobre los lazos familiares y la dieta de estos niños, las epidemias de la época colonial y el paradero actual de los descendientes de Chichén Itzá.
“Este es el primer estudio que utiliza ADN antiguo, isótopos y bioarqueología para trazar una mejor imagen de lo que estaba sucediendo allí”, dijo el autor principal Rodrigo Barquera, inmunogenetista e investigador postdoctoral en el Instituto Max Planck de Antropología Evolutiva en Alemania, donde Warinner es también investigadora.
Chichén Itzá se hizo prominente alrededor del año 800 d.C., y permaneció poderosa y densamente habitada durante más de dos siglos, y sirvió como destino de peregrinaciones durante y después del período colonial español.
La arquitectura de la capital regional refleja varios estilos y evolucionó a medida que los habitantes de Chichén Itzá forjaban alianzas políticas, culturales y religiosas tanto en las cercanías como en las lejanías. Por ejemplo, El Castillo, el templo de 75 pies de altura del yacimiento, se construyó siguiendo el estilo de los toltecas, que gobernaban una zona situada a cientos de kilómetros, cerca de la actual Ciudad de México. Estas conexiones despertaron la curiosidad de Barquera sobre la procedencia de las personas enterradas a escasos metros del Cenote Sagrado, un hundimiento acuático donde se realizaban ofrendas rituales de oro, jade y vidas humanas.
“Queríamos conocer mejor a las personas que vivieron y murieron allí”, afirma Barquera. “¿Eran de la región maya? ¿De algún otro lugar de Mesoamérica? ¿O incluso de más lejos?”
Para averiguarlo, el equipo de investigación se embarcó en un análisis genético en profundidad de niños enterrados ritualmente en un chultún, o cisterna artificial, no lejos del Cenote Sagrado. Warinner señaló que los chultunes y las cuevas han sido representados durante mucho tiempo en el arte y los mitos mayas como portales al submundo. “Hay un patrón que se repite en estas estructuras subterráneas: el agua y los enterramientos de niños”, dijo Warinner.
El clima cálido y húmedo de la península de Yucatán había sido hasta ahora un factor que complicaba la investigación del ADN antiguo. Los recientes avances tecnológicos, así como la relativa estabilidad de la temperatura del chultún, que ayudó a preservar los restos óseos de los infantes, permitieron el análisis de Barquera, que decidió centrarse en el hueso de la parte petrosa del oído interno.
“Es el mejor sitio para encontrar ADN”, explicó, y añadió que centrarse en el lado izquierdo permitió a los investigadores evitar duplicados. “Tuvimos suerte de que, de los más de 100 individuos que se cree que fueron enterrados allí, pudimos recoger el hueso petroso izquierdo de 64 de ellos”.
Sacrificados en torno a los 3 o 4 años de edad, estos niños fueron enterrados en su mayoría entre los años 800 y 1.050 d.C., que fue la época de apogeo político de Chichén Itzá. Todos procedían de poblaciones mayas locales. Además, todos eran varones, con dos pares de gemelos idénticos en la muestra.
Otros análisis revelaron que al menos una cuarta parte de los varones estaban estrechamente emparentados de alguna otra manera. Pero el ADN no era lo único que tenían en común. La investigación de isótopos estables, o sea el uso de la química de huesos y dientes para investigar dietas antiguas, mostró que su alimentación era extremadamente similar, como si vivieran en la misma casa. “Esto era cierto no solo en el caso de los gemelos, sino también en el de cada grupo de individuos emparentados”, señaló Barquera.
“Parecían haber sido seleccionados por parejas”, añadió Warinner, que también señaló la importancia de los gemelos en textos sagrados mayas como el Popol Vuh. “Sugiere una actividad ritual muy específica”.
Los investigadores también estudiaron a las personas que viven actualmente en Tixcacaltuyub, situada a una hora en auto del sitio arqueológico. Los residentes de esta comunidad maya local ya trabajaban en diversas iniciativas con investigadores de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. Los científicos esperaban comparar el ADN de la población con el de los antiguos niños.
La colaboración con académicos locales resultó vital, según Barquera. Estos profesionales de la salud y expertos en antropología de Yucatán le ayudaron a viajar al pueblo y le explicaron lo que esperaba conseguir el estudio del ADN antiguo. También fueron útiles las copias de “Aventuras en la ciencia arqueológica”, un libro para colorear que Warinner creó con colegas del Instituto Max Planck, ahora traducido al maya yucateco y al español.
“Los libros fueron pensados para niños, pero sirven para todos”, relató Barquera. “Muestran lo que hacemos de una manera accesible”.
Las muestras genéticas revelaron que los habitantes de Tixcacaltuyub son, de hecho, “parientes vivos cercanos de las personas enterradas en Chichén Itzá”, explicó Barquera. La comunidad estaba encantada con estos hallazgos, añadió, dada la prevalencia del racismo contra las poblaciones indígenas en México en la actualidad. Ahora pueden reivindicar sus vínculos ancestrales con las personas que construyeron la gran ciudad de Chichén Itzá.
“Hemos visto a investigadores entrar en comunidades o yacimientos arqueológicos en el pasado para tomar muestras o datos para sus trabajos sin dejar nada a cambio”, dijo Barquera, que creció en México y trabajó en varias clínicas y laboratorios de inmunología, y en la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia de Ciudad de México antes de hacer su doctorado en Europa. “Lo que queríamos era dejar algo en compensación a la comunidad”.
El último descubrimiento del estudio se refiere al legado genético de las epidemias de la época colonial, que causaron estragos devastadores entre los mayas y otros pueblos indígenas. La historia comienza en 2006 con la tesis doctoral de Warinner sobre Teposcolula-Yucundaa, un cementerio de la región mexicana de Oaxaca asociado al brote en 1545 de una misteriosa enfermedad que los aztecas denominaron cocoliztli, o pestilencia. Se calcula que la infección mató entre 5 y 15 millones de personas, es decir, casi el 80 por ciento de la población indígena de México.
“Cambió radicalmente la población de México”, afirma Warinner. “Pero nadie sabía lo que era”.
Warinner regresó en 2018 para un estudio de ADN antiguo que identificó una forma de Salmonella enterica en individuos enterrados en el cementerio. “Hoy en día es una cepa muy rara”, afirma Warinner. “Pero ahora sabemos que estaba bastante extendida en Europa en la época del colonialismo y que probablemente se introdujo durante la conquista española”.
Por su parte, Barquera seguía trabajando en Ciudad de México a principios de la década de 2000 cuando empezó a notar un alelo recurrente, o variante genética derivada de una mutación, mientras realizaba pruebas a donantes y pacientes antes del trasplante de órganos. Recuerda que planteó el asunto a su supervisor.
“Le dije: ‘¡Esto es raro! ¿Cómo puede ser que en todo México veamos este alelo con una frecuencia tan alta? Sabíamos que tenía que venir de algún sitio. Pensamos que tal vez tenía que ver con la resistencia a algo. Pero entonces nunca llegamos a una conclusión, porque no teníamos las herramientas analíticas para probar nada”, dijo Barquera.
En el estudio de Chichén Itzá, el equipo de investigación identificó un cambio en el mismo alelo que Barquera señaló años antes. Hoy en día, dijo, la variante genética es “una de las más prominentes, si no la más prominente, en México y América Central”, pero su prevalencia resultó ser baja en los mayas de Chichén Itzá.
Análisis posteriores demostraron que la variante protegía contra la Salmonella, que Warinner y sus colegas habían relacionado con las epidemias del México del siglo XVI. “Aquí es donde las cosas realmente encajan”, dijo Warinner.
Se sabe que cocoliztli reapareció en 1576, matando a otros 2 millones de personas. “La tasa de mortalidad fue tan alta”, dijo Warinner, “que los científicos han especulado durante mucho tiempo sobre si cambió los perfiles inmunológicos de los pueblos indígenas de las Américas”.
Y ahora, dijo Warinner, el estudio de los individuos enterrados en Chichén Itzá ha revelado la respuesta inmunológica a la mortal propagación de la bacteria por el México colonial.
Después de todos estos años, sigue escrito en el ADN de la nación.
For more than 100 years, the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá has been a source of archaeological fascination.
Human remains discovered early in the 20th century inspired what biomolecular archaeologist Christina Warinner called “lurid accounts” of ritual sacrifices of female virgins. Not until the early 21st century did researchers piece together enough skeletal evidence to cast doubt on the narrative.
Chichén Itzá rose to prominence around 800 A.D., remaining powerful and populous for more than two centuries and serving as a destination for pilgrimages through and after the Spanish colonial period.
Now Warinner, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, and an international team of genetic scientists have turned that story on its head. Their state-of-the-art research, published this week in Nature, reveals that boys — especially twins — were the focus of sacrifices in the legendary city-state. The investigation also yielded broader insights into the victims’ familial ties and diets, colonial-era epidemics, and the whereabouts of Chichén Itzá’s descendants today.
“This is the first study that uses ancient DNA, isotopes, and bioarchaeology to draw a better picture of what was going on there,” said lead author Rodrigo Barquera, an immunogeneticist and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, where Warinner is also a group leader.
Chichén Itzá rose to prominence around 800 A.D., remaining powerful and populous for more than two centuries and serving as a destination for pilgrimages through and after the Spanish colonial period.
The regional capital’s architecture reflects a number of styles and evolved as Chichén Itzáns built political, cultural, and religious alliances near and far. For instance, El Castillo, the site’s 75-foot temple, was constructed in the style of the Toltecs, who ruled an area hundreds of miles away near present-day Mexico City. Those connections piqued Barquera’s curiosity about the provenance of individuals put to rest in or near the Sacred Cenote, a watery sinkhole where ritual offerings of gold, jade, and human lives were made.
El Castillo.
Photo by Johannes Krause
“We really wanted a better picture of the people who lived and died there,” Barquera said. “Were they from the Maya region? Somewhere else in Mesoamerica? Or even farther away?”
To find out, the research team embarked upon in-depth genetic analysis of children ritually buried in a chultún, or man-made cistern, not far from the Sacred Cenote. Warinner, who is also the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, noted that chultúnsand caves have long been depicted in ancient Maya art and myths as portals to the underworld. “There’s a repeating pattern between these subterranean structures, water, and child burials,” she said.
The Yucatan Peninsula’s hot, humid weather has been a complicating factor in ancient DNA research until now. Recent technological advances as well as the chultún’s relatively temperature-stable setting, which helped preserve the victims’ skeletons, enabled Barquera’s analysis. He chose to focus on bone from the petrous portion of the inner ear.
“It’s the best site to find DNA,” he explained, adding that focusing on the left side enabled researchers to avoid duplicates. “We were lucky that out of the more than 100 individuals thought to have been buried there, we were able to collect the left petrous bone for 64 of them.”
Killed around the ages of 3 or 4, these children were mostly interred between the years 800 and 1,050 A.D., which was the era of Chichén Itzá’s political apex. All originated from local Maya populations. They also all proved to be male, with two sets of identical twins in the sample.
Further analysis revealed that at least a quarter of the boys were closely related otherwise. But DNA wasn’t all they had in common. Stable isotope research — or using the chemistry of bones and teeth to investigate ancient foods — showed their diets were extremely similar, as if they lived in the same household. “This was true not only for the twins but for each set of related individuals,” Barquera noted.
“They seemed to have been selected in pairs,” added Warinner, who also pointed to the importance of twins in Maya sacred texts like the Popol Vuh. “It suggests a very specific ritual activity.”
The researchers also studied people living today in Tixcacaltuyub, located about an hour by car from the ruins. Residents of this local Maya community were already working on various initiatives with researchers from the Autonomous University of Yucatán. Scientists hoped to compare the population’s DNA with that of the ancient children.
Tixcacaltuyub community members.
Photo by Pilar Márquez Vega
Partnering with local academics proved vital, according to Barquera. These Yucatán-based healthcare professionals and anthropology experts helped him travel to the town and explained what the ancient DNA study hoped to accomplish. Also helpful were copies of “Adventures in Archaeological Science,” a coloring book Warinner created with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute, now translated into Yucatec Maya as well as Spanish.
The community was thrilled by these findings, he added, given the prevalence of racism against Indigenous populations in Mexico today. Now they can claim ancestral ties to the people who built the great city of Chichén Itzá.
“The books were intended for kids, but they work for everyone,” Barquera offered. “They show what we do in an accessible way.”
Genetic sampling revealed that Tixcacaltuyub residents are, in fact, “close living relatives to the people buried at Chichén Itzá,” Barquera explained. The community was thrilled by these findings, he added, given the prevalence of racism against Indigenous populations in Mexico today. Now they can claim ancestral ties to the people who built the great city of Chichén Itzá.
“We have seen researchers go into communities or archaeological sites in the past to take samples or data for their papers without returning anything,” said Barquera, who grew up in Mexico and worked in various Mexico City clinics and immunology labs before pursuing his Ph.D. in Europe. “What we wanted to do was give back.”
The study’s final discovery concerns the genetic legacies of colonial-era epidemics, which exacted a devastating toll on the Maya and other Indigenous peoples. The story begins in 2006 with Warinner’s Ph.D. dissertation research on Teposcolula-Yucundaa, a cemetery in Mexico’s Oaxaca region associated with the 1545 outbreak of a mysterious illness the Aztecs termed cocoliztli, or pestilence. The infection killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million, or up to 80 percent of Mexico’s Indigenous population.
“It fundamentally changed the population of Mexico,” Warinner said. “But nobody knew what it was.”
Warinner returned in 2018 for an ancient DNA study that identified a form of Salmonella enterica in individuals buried at the cemetery. “Today it’s a very rare strain,” Warinner said. “But we now know it was quite widespread in Europe at the time of colonialism and was likely introduced during the Spanish conquest.”
For his part, Barquera was still working in Mexico City in the early 2000s when he started noticing a recurring allele, or genetic variant arising from a mutation, while conducting tests on donors and patients prior to organ transplantation. He remembers bringing the matter to his supervisor.
“I told him, ‘This is weird! How can it be that all over Mexico we see this allele in such high frequency?’ We knew it had to come from somewhere. We thought maybe it had to do with resistance to something. But back then, we never came to a conclusion, because we didn’t have the analytical tools to prove anything.”
In the Chichén Itzá study, the research team identified a shift in the very allele Barquera flagged years before. Today, he said, the genetic variant is “one of the most prominent — if not the most prominent — in Mexico and Central America,” but its prevalence proved low in the Maya of Chichén Itzá.
Subsequent analyses showed the variant was protective against Salmonella, which Warinner and colleagues had linked to the epidemics of 16th-century Mexico. “This is where things really come together,” Warinner said.
Cocoliztli is known to have reappeared in 1576, killing another 2 million people. “The mortality rate was so high,” Warinner said, “scientists have long speculated as to whether it shifted the immune profiles of Indigenous peoples of the Americas.”
And now, she said, studying individuals buried at Chichén Itzá has revealed the immunological response to the bacteria’s deadly spread across colonial Mexico.
After all these years, it remains written in the nation’s DNA.
One judge’s track record — with and without algorithm — surprises researchers
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Should artificial intelligence be used to improve decision-making in the court of law? According to a new working paper, not only does one example of an AI algorithm fail to improve the accuracy of judicial calls, on its own the technology fares worse than humans.
“A lot of researchers have focused on whether the algorithm has a bias or AI has a bias,” noted co-author Kosuke Imai, professor of government and statistics. “What they haven’t really looked at is how the use of AI affects the human decision.”
While several sectors, including criminal justice, medicine, and even business, use AI recommendations, humans are typically the final decision-makers. The researchers took this into account by comparing criminal bail decisions made by a single judge with recommendations generated by an AI system. Specifically analyzed was AI’s influence on whether cash bail should be imposed.
30%— percentage of cases in which the judge rejected AI recommendations
The randomized controlled trial was conducted in Dane County, Wisconsin, focusing on whether arrestees were released on their own recognizance or subjected to cash bail. The researchers — led by Imai and Jim Greiner, the Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law at Harvard Law School — set their sights on hearings held by a single judge over a 30-month period, between the middle of 2017 and the end of 2019. Also analyzed were arrest data on defendants for up to 24 months later.
Results showed that AI alone performed worse than the judge in predicting reoffenders — in this case, by imposing the tighter restriction of cash bail. At the same time, little to no difference was found between the accuracy of human-alone and AI-assisted decision-making. The judge went against AI recommendations in slightly more than 30 percent of cases.
“I was surprised by this,” Greiner said. “Given the evidence that we’ve cited that algorithms can sometimes outperform human decisions, it looked as though what happened is that this algorithm had been set to be too harsh. It was over-predicting that the arrestees would misbehave, predicting that they would do so too often, and, therefore, recommending measures that were too harsh.”
This issue could be fixed by recalibrating the algorithm, the professors argued.
“It’s a lot easier to understand and then fix the algorithm or AI than the human,” Imai said. “It’s a lot harder to change the human or understand why humans make their decisions.”
“The advantage of AI or an algorithm is that it can be made transparent.”
Kosuke Imai
The AI studied here did not specifically account for race, instead focusing on age and nine factors related to past criminal experience. Imai, an expert on deploying statistical modeling to call out racial gerrymandering, attributed inequities concerning cash bail to a variety of societal factors, particularly relating to criminal history.
He acknowledged that the study’s findings may be cause for concern, but he noted that people are biased as well. “The advantage of AI or an algorithm is that it can be made transparent,” he said. The key is to have open-source AI that is readily available for empirical evaluation and analysis.
The way the criminal justice system is currently using AI as well as unguided human decisions should be studied with an eye to making improvements, Greiner added. “I don’t know whether this is comforting,” he offered, “but my reaction for folks who are afraid or skeptical of AI is to be afraid and skeptical of AI, but to be potentially more afraid or skeptical of unguided human decisions.” He added that the way the criminal justice system is currently using AI as well as unguided human decisions should be studied to make improvements.
The paper’s other co-authors were Eli Ben-Michael, assistant professor of statistics and data science at Carnegie Mellon University; Zhichao Jiang, professor of mathematics at Sun Tay-sen University in China; Melody Huang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Wojcicki Troper Harvard Data Science Institute, and Sooahn Shin, a Ph.D. candidate in government at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
An example of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test.
AP Photo/Allen G. Breed
Most voters back cognitive exams for older politicians. What do they measure?
Amid concerns about the mental fitness of the U.S. presidential candidates — Joe Biden is 81 and Donald Trump is 77 — some have called for mandatory cognitive tests for aging politicians. A recent poll showed 75 percent of voters favor such measures with support highest among the oldest cohort of Americans surveyed.
The Gazette asked clinical neuropsychologist Julie Brody Magid, Psy.D., clinical director of the McLean Memory Disorders Assessment Clinic and an instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School, what functions cognitive tests measure, warning signs of mental decline, and how to maintain brain health. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do cognitive tests assess?
Overall, cognitive tests assess a range of functions including memory, attention and concentration, language, spatial skills, orientation, and executive functioning. There are cognitive screening measures that offer a quick overview of different cognitive functions.
Currently, the most used cognitive screening test is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA. In the past, the Folstein Mini Mental State Exam was frequently used by physicians. These are abbreviated cognitive screening measures that take five or 10 minutes to administer and score.
What does the MoCA test involve?
The MoCA test includes tasks that assess attention, orientation, naming of objects, learning a short list of words, and verbal reasoning tasks like analogies. It has a total score of 30 points. It’s a standardized test, given the same way every time. You earn a raw score based on your performance, which determines if your skills are within a normal expected range for your age and for your background. For example, given a person’s education and achievement, is their functioning where we would expect it to be? Or does the screening test show suggestions of a decline?
Sleep, exercise, and diet play key role in maintaining cognitive health, says Julie Brody-Magid.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Who can perform well on the MoCA test?
There are very accomplished, smart people who can perform relatively well on a cognitive screening test like the MoCA even if they have had some changes in their day-to-day abilities. If you think of lawyers, doctors, or professors, it’s clear that they have strong intellectual ability, and what we call cognitive reserve, which is your cognitive savings account from being intelligent, educated, and enriched. Some people can “cruise” on their reserve even when they’re having subtle difficulties since their baseline abilities were so strong. Sometimes we might flag a patient who’s very high-functioning and who’s still performing relatively well on a MoCA test but may have subjective cognitive complaints. Some people come into my memory clinic saying, “Something’s not right, I’m not remembering well, I feel I’m declining.” They may notice themselves or the family may be observing changes. Those screening tests by themselves have some utility, but they don’t tell the whole story. The clinical information provided by the patient or family on interview about the course of change compared to who that person was at their highest level of functioning is very important. We need both sets of information to make distinctions about what a cognitive screening score means, and when further workup is needed.
What are the red flags that could warn of cognitive changes?
One red flag is if people are showing signs of rapid forgetting, such as if they are having a conversation, and something is discussed or planned, and minutes or hours later, they forget, and after being told again, they still forget. Rapid forgetting with repetitive questions is not usually an age-appropriate memory change. That type of memory change connotes Alzheimer’s disease, which is a disorder of memory storage or retention. Sometimes short-term memory loss can be accompanied by subtle language changes, where people can’t find words, especially when naming objects, they often will start to use generic words, such as “the thing,” “the whatchamacallit,” or they might describe the object, but they can’t name it. Those are some of the signs that we look out for.
“Rapid forgetting with repetitive questions is not usually an age-appropriate memory change.”
In vascular dementia, which is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s, we see more executive functioning issues, such as problems with organization, with keeping their paperwork in order; people lose track of the bills because they put them down somewhere or they don’t address them. We see people with vascular risk factors who have difficulty with reasoning and problem-solving. For example, they have a minor motor vehicle accident due to poor judgment and then don’t know how to handle it. Some people have reduced initiation and motivation; they stop doing things they always had passion for and cannot explain why. Slowed processing speed is often reported in daily functioning; everything takes much longer to work through and complete.
Is cognitive decline part of normal aging?
There are age-related changes that occur throughout our lifespan. As we age, there are some brain changes that occur as part of the normal aging process; white matter changes are the result of arteries that get narrowed or blocked by atherosclerotic plaque, this can begin around age 60. As that happens, there’s some associated slowing of processing, difficulty with being able to access information, pulling up that memory crisply, and efficiently finding words; some people identify those experiences as “senior moments.” We also have some cell loss and atrophy in the brain that occurs with normal aging. On neuroimaging, we see age-commensurate loss of volume in the cortex or gray matter, which plays a significant role in many functions including memory/learning and language. All of these changes are part of normal aging.
When is the right time to take a cognitive test?
What we typically suggest is that if a patient has what we call subjective cognitive complaints because they are noticing change, a cognitive screening should be done. However, one of the tricky parts of dementia, especially certain types like Alzheimer’s, is that the illness can affect the awareness center of the brain, and people don’t notice changes in themselves, but the family, spouse, or doctor notices change. If there’s any indication of subjective cognitive complaint or objective observation that that person is showing signs of early decline, that’s the time to pursue a neurocognitive screening test at minimum. That is often the beginning of the workup process, which can also include neuroimaging and bloodwork because other medical issues besides dementia can cause people to have cognitive problems.
Cognitive changes may be the result of hypothyroidism, anemia, a vitamin deficiency, sleep apnea, low blood pressure, unstable blood sugar, and a range of medical issues that can be reversible and allow the person to stabilize. Correction of vision and hearing problems can improve cognition too. Mental health issues like depression and anxiety can also affect cognition, but with appropriate targeted treatment, cognition can return to baseline. We must think holistically about all the factors that could contribute to somebody having cognitive issues to see which are treatable and potentially reversible.
What are the key steps to maintain our cognitive health?
There’s good research to support the Mediterranean diet for promoting successful aging and brain health. Exercise is very important because you are exercising the heart muscle and maintaining cardiovascular health. There are studies that show that exercise perfuses the brain with blood, which can cause neural growth and protection of key areas like the hippocampus. Exercise may delay the onset of cognitive symptoms or help prevent dementia. Studies of people with cognitive disorders have found that those who exercise perform better on average on cognitive tests and often do better in function than those who don’t exercise. Sleep is also very important for maintenance of cognitive health; at least seven to eight hours of sleep per night is necessary to clear debris out of the brain.
It is crucial to manage medical comorbidities like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoking, sleep apnea, sedentary lifestyle, hearing/vision impairment, and depression. We also recommend limiting alcohol and marijuana use. We often see elderly people using excessive amounts of alcohol, which confers risk of cognitive decline and falls. There is literature to support that meditation and stress reduction promote brain health and cognitive functioning.
Other factors that promote brain health are engaging in activities that are stimulating to your brain such as doing crossword puzzles, learning a language, playing an instrument, discussing current events, and playing interactive games. Maintaining social connections and support is critical for mood stability and cognitive functioning.
Finally, it is very important to overcome the stigma associated with potentially losing your cognitive skills and reach out to get an assessment when you see the first red flags. If you let these problems go for too long, there are fewer modes of effective intervention. We have some good tools and resources available to support people’s functioning and manage symptoms and many more interventions are in the pipeline as we speak.
DNR orders for Down syndrome patients far exceeded pandemic norm
Co-author sees need for additional research and earlier, deeper conversations around care
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
The first year of the pandemic was marked by a sustained surge in hospital visits, forcing providers to stretch resources to meet needs. Discussions about triaging patients and rationing care were of great concern to Down syndrome advocates at the time, says Stephanie Santoro, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and co-author of a recent study on do-not-resuscitate orders that suggests those concerns were justified.
A DNR order directs medical personnel not to provide CPR — cardiopulmonary resuscitation — to a patient if their breathing stops or heart stops beating. The order is determined by the patient, or if they’re unable to do so, by their family or guardian, typically in consultation with a healthcare provider. Santoro, also director of quality improvement research for the Down Syndrome Program at Mass General, worked with fellow investigators to examine billing codes and claims data for 1.7 million patients at 825 U.S. hospitals between January 2019 and June 2022, and then examined diagnoses and DNR status for people with and without Down Syndrome. The team found that people with Down syndrome and a diagnosis of COVID-19 or COVID pneumonia were six times more likely to have do-not-resuscitate orders than similar patients without Down syndrome. We talked to Santoro about the findings in a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.
Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Why did you do this study?
It seems like a lifetime ago, but early in the pandemic, extreme steps like rationing ventilators were being discussed. In the Down syndrome community there was a lot of worry, of wanting to protect the rights of people with Down syndrome. We also began this study because there’s very little about DNR orders in the Down syndrome literature, and our first author, Jennifer Jett, had a real interest in the topic.
“Someone with a diagnosis of Down syndrome and COVID pneumonia had six times the odds of having DNR status.”
What was the main takeaway?
Someone with a diagnosis of Down syndrome and COVID pneumonia had six times the odds of having DNR status ordered on admission to the hospital as someone with the same diagnosis without Down syndrome. That was the main finding. I should say that the nature of the study means that these were associations, meaning we can’t directly determine causality.
Was that surprising?
Yes and no. When we first saw this, we wondered if there were physiologic reasons behind it. In the literature, there are many studies that show that people with Down syndrome do get sicker, have longer admissions, and need more support if they have respiratory infections. So our first thought was that perhaps the folks with Down syndrome were more sick with COVID pneumonia than the people without Down syndrome. We tried to compare some comorbidities — like intubation rates, if they had been in the ICU, or if they had come from acute care — but it didn’t pan out to have a similarly high odds ratio as the diagnosis of Down syndrome.
Your reasoning was that if someone comes into the hospital sicker, it would be more likely that they had a DNR status?
That’s what we wondered: Might people or their families be choosing DNR status when admitted with high acuity, life-threatening disease? We also wondered whether the folks with Down syndrome were older or if there was some other intervening covariable that would explain the high odds ratio of DNR status. But we couldn’t find anything that explained it.
When you reached that point, what did you think?
We were all a bit surprised — and concerned — that we had found a difference in care for people with Down syndrome. There’s not much literature around this and there are not many people who are studying end-of-life care for people with Down syndrome, so it would be great to replicate this finding in a future study.
Is there any reason that the DNR status of people with Down syndrome shouldn’t mirror that of the general population?
I don’t think anything has been done — apart from our study — that assesses the rate of DNR status in people with Down syndrome, so I would just be guessing. I can say that there are a number of medical conditions that can go along with Down syndrome. But in general, people with Down syndrome are leading healthy, happy, productive lives. I think the DNR status rate should likely be the same as for people without Down syndrome.
And six times greater is a really big number.
Right.
“This whole topic of end-of-life care and how you talk about that with someone with an intellectual disability is important to think about and to research.”
You work with a Down syndrome population. Are there other areas where patients may face unequal access to healthcare or unequal treatment?
The first thing I think of is life expectancy in general. Decades ago, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was in their 20s or 30s. Now it’s improved to the 60s. That difference in life expectancy is related to better medical care and better access to care, but there are still gaps.
Are we talking about preventive care? Can you give some examples?
I did a study here at MGH and one in the past in Ohio that show that there are recommendations that are not being met. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that every person with Down syndrome have their thyroid checked once a year with a TSH blood test. Only about two-thirds were getting that test done. When we looked at overall guidelines, only about 13 percent of kids with Down syndrome were up to date on all the guidelines — basic blood tests and evaluations, hearing tests.
In the new paper, the team recommends starting conversations around this issue. What would be the nature of those conversations?
In our clinic, we’re trying to provide more multidisciplinary end-of-life support as our patients get older. It’s difficult for people with Down syndrome because there’s such a range of different abilities and communication levels, and many of our patients have guardians who are helping with their medical decision-making. The time of admission is a busy, acute moment, so it would be nice if a trusted medical provider could have these broader end-of-life discussions with families and patients earlier to give them time to think about their decisions and what they want.
Is there any way to know how much input the person with Down syndrome has in this decision?
There’s not much in the literature, but including people with Down syndrome in healthcare discussions is a real area of passion for me. I’m trying to do more studies to collect information directly from people with Down syndrome because studies often default to the caregiver or the guardian. In a few years, we could do a follow-up and look at the claims data again to see if things have changed. But we believe this whole topic of end-of-life care and how you talk about that with someone with an intellectual disability is important to think about and to research.
Sarah Ganz Blythe appointed director of Harvard Art Museums
Curator, educator, and scholar, now at RISD Museum, will start in new post Aug. 12
5 min read
Sarah Ganz Blythe, a highly respected curator, educator, and scholar with more than 25 years of museum experience, will be the new Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums, interim Provost John Manning announced Wednesday. Ganz Blythe is joining Harvard from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, where she is currently deputy director, exhibitions, education, and programs. She will take her post as director on Aug. 12.
“We are delighted that Sarah Ganz Blythe has agreed to become the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums beginning this summer,” Manning said. “Sarah brings to her role not only great knowledge, creativity, judgment, and leadership experience, but also a deep commitment to teaching, learning, collaboration, and engagement with our museums’ extraordinary communities. Especially with the opportunities presented by the vast increase in public attendance since the Harvard Art Museums began offering free admission last June, Sarah’s experience and leadership perspective will serve Harvard and the museums well in this exciting time in their history.”
Ganz Blythe has held leadership positions at the RISD Museum for the past 15 years, including serving as its interim director from 2020 to 2023. In this role, she led the institution through the pandemic to its current state, with rebounded attendance, expanded board participation, a balanced budget, a robust traveling exhibition program, an increase in acquisitions by underrepresented artists, and refurbished galleries.
In addition to the RISD Museum, she has worked in curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York. During her time as an undergraduate at Wellesley College, she was a conservation intern at the Harvard Art Museums. She has maintained deep connections to the Museums throughout her career, including as a visiting committee member in both 2017 and 2020.
“As a student, my experiences with the Harvard Art Museums revealed the profound rewards of engaging deeply with and thinking expansively about art,” Ganz Blythe said. “I am thrilled to return and have the opportunity to guide this dynamic institution as it collaborates with students, faculty, staff, artists, and community partners.”
“Sarah’s experience and leadership perspective will serve Harvard and the museums well in this exciting time in their history.”
Interim Provost John Manning
Ganz Blythe holds a B.A. in art history from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. in modern art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has taught at Brown University, Wellesley College, and RISD, and has published widely throughout her career on the complicated histories of museums, art pedagogy, and underrepresented women artists.
“Sarah brings a breadth of perspective, built throughout an impressive career, to this important role at Harvard,” said interim President Alan M. Garber. “Among her many strengths, her creativity in engaging students and her passion for teaching ensure that the Museums will extend their excellence as an academic and cultural resource as they enter a new era.”
Ganz Blythe’s publications include “Why Art Museums? The Unfinished Work of Alexander Dorner,” with Andrew Martinez, and “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” with Dominic Molon and Kajette Solomon. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including, this year, the Kress Foundation/Association of Art Museum Curators Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
“As an institutional leader, Sarah listens with care and embraces differences of perspective, all the while seeking opportunities for integration and mutual regard,” said Robin Kelsey, dean of arts and humanities in the FAS and a member of the search committee. “In this moment, I can think of no better person to lead the Harvard Art Museums, an institution dear to so many on this campus and beyond.”
Ganz Blythe’s appointment is the culmination of a nationwide search that included outreach to hundreds of stakeholders in collaboration with a University-wide search advisory committee. She will succeed Martha Tedeschi, who is retiring from her post on June 30 after leading Harvard Art Museums since July 2016.
“I look forward to building on Martha Tedeschi’s achievements and joining the remarkable staff engaged in original research, generative learning, and open engagement,” Ganz Blythe said.
The Harvard Art Museums — the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum — are dedicated to advancing and supporting learning at Harvard University, in the community, and around the world. The Museums have played a leading role in the development of art history, conservation, and conservation science, and in the evolution of the art museum as an institution.
The museums’ collections comprise a quarter-million works that span from ancient times to the present, with art from the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Asia. The Special Exhibitions Gallery presents important new research on artists and artistic practice, and the University Galleries are programmed in consultation with Harvard faculty to support coursework.
New study of ancient genomes tracks disease over 5,500 years, factors in spread, including trade, warfare, colonialism, and slavery
Today, Malaria represents a major public health problem across much of the globe, killing more than 600,000 people annually and infecting another 250 million. It is a disease that has been around for millions of years and is undeniably entwined with human history.
“Malaria has actually shaped the human genome,” said Megan Michel, a Ph.D. candidate in human evolutionary biology at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She pointed out that certain inherited blood disorders, like sickle cell disease, rose in prevalence because they provide a measure of resistance to the mosquito-borne infection.
Now a new study led by Michel reconstructs the ancient genomes of the two deadliest malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, with an eye to understanding the pathogen’s past. The research, published this week in Nature, tracks the disease over 5,500 years, with trade, warfare, colonialism, and slavery identified as major factors in its global spread.
The findings represent a feat of collaboration and data-sharing, with 94 co-authors representing 80 institutions and 21 countries. The DNA itself was plucked from genetic sequences collected from more than 10,000 ancient humans, with Michel identifying 36 malaria-infected individuals from 26 archaeological sites on five continents.
“For a graduate student to be coordinating all of this is really, really impressive,” said co-author Christina Warinner, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and one of Michel’s three advisers. “By reconstructing these ancient Plasmodium genomes and comparing the genetic relationships between ancient and modern parasites, we’re finally able to place malaria in its evolutionary and human history context.”
“By reconstructing these ancient Plasmodium genomes and comparing the genetic relationships between ancient and modern parasites, we’re finally able to place malaria in its evolutionary and human history context.”
Christina Warinner, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Malaria is marked by cyclical fevers that repeat every 48 or 72 hours. Until recently, written records were the only way researchers could track the disease’s progression across time and space. “There are descriptions in Greek and Roman texts that point to the presence of malaria,” Michel said. “But we were able to go back even further than that to show that malaria has been present in Europe for a very, very long time.”
The disease was also common in the U.S. until the arrival of modern drainage and insecticides in the 20th century. Warinner, a biomolecular archaeologist, pointed to the high number of U.S. presidents to suffer from malaria, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. “Teddy Roosevelt and JFK became infected while traveling,” she said, “but earlier presidents contracted it in their hometowns or in the Washington, D.C., area” — which was notoriously swampy.
The new paper features three compelling case studies, each illustrating the role of mobility in circulating malaria. The first concerns a Belgian cemetery, excavated between 2009 and 2011 and adjacent to the first permanent military hospital in early modern Europe. Historical records document that the Habsburg Army of Flanders recruited its soldiers from the Mediterranean region for its 80 Years’ War against Spain (1568-1648).
Malaria leaves no visible trace in human skeletal remains, but recent technological advances have enabled scientists to extract DNA from scraps of the pathogen found in teeth. Researchers were able to sequence malaria DNA from 10 individuals buried at the cemetery while also analyzing the genomes of soldiers who had been infected.
The two most prevalent malaria parasites in humans are P. vivax and P. falciparum, with the latter limited to warm climates and causing a more severe form of the disease. Analyses of pathogen DNA turned up a couple of P. vivax cases in the Belgian site’s local population, buried at the cemetery prior to the hospital’s construction in the mid-16th century.
Six cases, including several of the more virulent P. falciparum, were found in non-local individuals, all interred following the military hospital’s construction. Malaria cannot be transmitted through human contact, but mosquitos may have picked up these infections — and kept up the spread from there. “It’s even possible they ignited a local outbreak,” Michel said.
A bite from an infected mosquito transmits malaria.
Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff; source: Mayo Clinic
The parasites travel to your liver where they lie dormant, usually about 10 days to four weeks.
Parasites leave the liver and infect red blood cells. Malaria signs and symptoms typically develop.
Malaria is transmitted to an uninfected mosquito when it bites someone with the disease.
Another case study came from Peru, where a single P. vivax case was found in a person who lived at high altitude (more than 9,300 feet) in the Central Andes. “This individual was associated with the Chachapoya culture,” Michel said, “and the site we were working with spanned the period of European contact.”
For years, scientists have debated how the disease arrived in the Americas, where Indigenous populations lack genetic resistance to malaria. Reconstructing the genome of the Peruvian parasite revealed striking similarities to P. vivax strains found throughout South America today. It also resembled strains circulating in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries.
“We think this is evidence that the species was transmitted by European colonizers to the Americas,” Michel said.
No ancient P. falciparum was found in the Americas, Michel noted, and P. falciparum strains circulating there today bear little resemblance to the ancient European P. falciparum parasites recovered by Michel and her co-authors. “Instead, American strains today look very similar to strains in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Michel said. “It seems likely that P. vivax was transmitted from Europe, whereas P. falciparum was probably transmitted from Sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
“It’s the last place on Earth I would expect to find a malaria infection,” Michel shared. “It’s rocky and dry and too cold for malaria-transmitting mosquitoes to survive.”
The infected individual lived 2,800 years ago. “We know from the archaeological record that there was extensive long-distance trade in the region,” explained Michel, who partnered with co-author Mark Aldenderfer — an archaeologist working in the Mustang region for many years — to analyze the findings. “We think this was probably an individual who moved from low to high altitude, possibly for trade. They must have acquired this infection at a lower altitude where the parasite can be transmitted.”
“The site of Chokhopani is near the Kora La pass, the lowest crossing point through the Himalayas and a key trade route connecting South Asia with the Tibetan Plateau,” added Warinner, who traveled with Michel to the region last spring to share results and solicit feedback from descendent communities. “Fortunately, Nepal has been really successful in eradicating malaria in the last few years. But even as recently as 10 years ago, malaria was endemic in Nepal’s lower elevation regions.”
Making these revelations possible are the emerging tools of metagenomics, which rely on recovering and sharing as much genetic data as possible with different specialists. “When we analyze an ancient sample, we, by its nature, destroy it in order to retrieve the DNA,” Warinner explained. “We want to get as much information as possible. We really do recover total DNA.”
“Metagenomics and data-sharing allow us to find things we’re not really looking for,” Michel added. “It lets us find disease in unexpected places. I never would have screened samples from Chokhopani for malaria if they hadn’t already been sequenced by Dr. Warinner for another ancient DNA study.”
The research described in this report received funding from the National Science Foundation
Treatment holds promise for painlessly targeting affected areas without weakening immune system
BWH Communications
4 min read
Researchers have developed a novel treatment to reverse hair loss caused by the autoimmune disease alopecia areata, using a microneedle patch to painlessly target affected areas of the skin.
Alopecia areata causes hair loss when T cells mistakenly attack follicles. To restore control over hyperactive immune cells, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT delivered T cell regulators directly to sites of hair loss to halt autoimmune activity. Findings, published in Advanced Materials, demonstrated marked and lasting increases in hair regrowth in mice models of the disease.
Our immune system evolved to safeguard against the overactivation that occurs in autoimmune conditions. In alopecia areata, the specialized cells known as Regulatory T cells (T-regs) fall short in protecting hair follicles. Current immunosuppressants used to treat alopecia areata target both T cells and T-regs, failing to address the core issue and increasing the risk of disease recurrence once treatment stops. By suppressing the entire immune system, they leave patients vulnerable to infections.
Rather than globally suppressing the immune system, the approach tested in this study locally restores immune activity directly at sites of hair loss by increasing levels of T-regs. This targeted approach was achieved with a microneedle patch, which delivers drugs across the tough outer layer of skin more effectively than topical creams and avoids stimulation of pain receptors located deeper within the skin.
“Our strategy tackles two major challenges in treating autoimmune skin diseases,” said co-corresponding author Natalie Artzi of the Brigham’s Engineering in Medicine Division in the Department of Medicine. “Our patches enable local delivery of biologics, which, instead of suppressing the immune system, promote regulatory T cells in the skin. This restores immune balance and resolves the T cell attack on hair follicles, offering a potential long-term solution without compromising the immune system’s ability to defend against infections and malignancies.”
“When it comes to autoimmune-mediated skin diseases, where we have direct access to the skin, we must surpass the use of systemic immunosuppressants that shut down the entire immune system,” said co-corresponding author Jamil Azzi, an immunologist in the Brigham’s Renal Division in the Department of Medicine. “While topical therapy often fails to penetrate the skin’s outer layer, our patches improve the local delivery of biologics to the deeper layers of diseased skin and reprogram the immune system to generate tolerance at the site of antigen encounter.”
“Our strategy tackles two major challenges in treating autoimmune skin diseases.”
Natalie Artzi
The researchers, including co-first authors Nour Younis and Núria Puigmal, both of Brigham’s Department of Medicine, observed with RNA sequencing that in alopecia tissues, there were changes in the STAT-5/Interleukin-2 (IL-2), a signaling pathway that promotes T-reg proliferation. IL-2 and CCL22, which the researchers had previously shown attract and expand the presence of T-regs in a specific area, were loaded into the microneedle patch. The patches were applied to mice models of alopecia 10 times over a course of three weeks, with more than eight weeks of observation. Hair regrowth was observed as early as three weeks after the initiation of treatment. The researchers also tested microneedle patches loaded with baricitinib, a drug approved for severe alopecia areata, but found that T-reg recruitment was inferior to that associated with the IL-2/CCL22 patch.
The microneedle patch also was found to have good shelf-life stability, improving prospects of its clinical translation. While the therapy is not ready for clinical use, the researchers are pursuing further development and testing. Additionally, they are exploring the possibility of applying their approach to other immune-mediated skin diseases, such as vitiligo and psoriasis.
“Microneedles offer a promising avenue for targeted and localized delivery of therapeutics to the skin,” said Artzi. “Their ability to precisely administer drugs directly to the affected area of the skin enables more effective modulation of the immune response while minimizing systemic side effects. This targeted approach holds great potential for improving treatment outcomes and reducing the burden of autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases on patients’ lives.”
Other co-authors from Brigham include Andrew Badaoui, Dongliang Zhang, Claudia Morales, Anis Saad, Diane Cruz, Nadim Al Rahy, Andrea Daccache, Triana Huerta, Christa Deban, Ahmad Halawi, John Choi, Pere Dosta, Christine Lian, and Abdallah El Kurdi.
Funding: The Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital supported this work through the Ignite Fund Award and the Shark Tank Fund Award.
Binge eating appears more widespread, persistent than thought
New research takes broader, deeper look at common, but poorly understood, disorder
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Binge eating is one of the world’s most common eating disorders but is poorly understood. Kristin Javaras, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and instructor in epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recently shed light on the subject in a study, published in the journal Psychological Medicine. The findings showed that earlier research, which focused on younger women, underestimated how chronic the problem can be for many in the broader population, lasting for years or even decades. Javaras, who is also associated psychologist at McLean Hospital’s Division of Women’s Mental Health, spoke to the Gazette about her recent research.
What is binge eating?
Binge-eating disorder is characterized by binge eating episodes, which have two components, according to the DSM — the reference manual for diagnoses. One is an objectively large amount of food. Second — and most importantly — there’s a sense of loss of control, a feeling that you can’t stop or you can’t avoid starting. Some people feel like they’re driven by a motor, and they can’t stop until either they feel so sick that they have to or the food is gone.
These episodes are often characterized by eating quickly and eating alone and accompanied by a feeling of shame. People have recurrent episodes. So, if the person experiences marked distress around binge eating and isn’t engaged in compensatory behaviors that you see in bulimia nervosa — purging regularly, using laxatives or diuretics, extreme dieting or fasting, or engaging in excessive or compulsive exercise — there would be a diagnosis of binge-eating disorder.
“When people diet and think, ‘I’m going to try to eat as little as possible,’ that sets them up to engage in binge eating.”
When you say “an objectively large amount,” we’re not talking about Thanksgiving dinner or another holiday where we’re socialized to overeat? How do we know the difference?
If it is typical for a circumstance, it is not binge eating. Likewise, if there’s no loss of control it’s not binge eating. For instance, if I want to run a marathon tomorrow and I eat a large amount of pasta intentionally, with a sense of control, that wouldn’t be binge eating.
It can be tricky to evaluate, but the question is whether it’s an objectively large amount for that person in that context. So Thanksgiving typically wouldn’t count unless it was far beyond what other people are eating, and accompanied by a sense of loss of control.
Does it have to be every day? Once a month?
The diagnostic guidelines have changed recently. In DSM-4, it was two days a week, while in DSM-5 it is one episode a week. But there are people for whom it doesn’t happen as frequently, but the binges are very upsetting. They technically don’t meet DSM-5’s definition of binge-eating disorder, but it could still be very clinically significant, even if it’s not happening once a week. It’s important to note that the study we’re talking about was done under DSM-4.
What is the harm if you binge once a week and eat normally the rest of the week? Weight gain? Poor nutrition?
We know that binge eating does have metabolic consequences. There is a study that shows if you eat the same amount of food in a very short period of time, it’s metabolically worse for you than if you ate it over a whole day, particularly the types of foods that are consumed in a binge, which tend to be highly palatable and have metabolic consequences.
But what’s more important are the psychological effects. People are often restricting to some degree: not eating enough, not allowing themselves to eat certain types of foods. They hold beliefs like, “I should never eat X” or “This food is bad.” There’s a lot of binary thinking and people often feel extremely negatively about their bodies.
The binge eating is in the DSM, but for those of us in practice, we see it as one symptom among many in the eating disorder. Addressing restriction — getting people to eat regularly — is one of the most potent interventions. Often people feel that, because they are at a higher weight, they should be dieting all the time. And when people diet and think, “I’m going to try to eat as little as possible,” that sets them up to engage in binge eating.
“A lot of the initial studies on eating disorders were based on treatment-seeking samples, which are, by definition, not representative. Anyone can get an eating disorder.”
What’s the prevalence of binge eating in society?
That’s a tricky question because the research doesn’t entirely agree. The National Comorbidity Survey Replication, which was done in 2007 by my mentor, Jim Hudson, and Ron Kessler, suggested that the prevalence of DSM-4 binge-eating disorder was around 2.6 percent [chance over a] lifetime in the U.S.
DSM-5, because it’s a broader category, would be higher than that. A more recent study by Udo and Grilo in 2018 was just under 1 percent lifetime. There are some methodological reasons why they may differ, so it’s hard to get a clear estimate, but I’d say somewhere between 1 and 3 percent lifetime in the U.S.
So millions of people. Is it the most common eating disorder?
Yes, it is — in the U.S. and globally — though we don’t have good data from some regions of the world.
Let’s talk about your study. You were trying to settle differences in earlier studies about how long binge-eating disorder takes to resolve on its own. What did you find?
My mentors, Jim Hudson and [Harrison] Skip Pope, did a family study of binge-eating disorder in the early aughts. They subsequently followed the study participants forward for five years, re-interviewing them every 2.5 years.
They thus had really unique, valuable data on the disorder’s duration, and I suggested we look at both remission and relapse, and also use machine learning to see if we can predict whether somebody will go into remission. Our analyses showed that although there is improvement over time, the disorder doesn’t just vanish after a few months for most people in our sample.
And the key finding was focused on it resolving naturally, not with treatment?
That’s why this study is so important. We already have very good data on how people respond to treatment. But because they’re getting treatment, it’s not a representative sample of what happens in the real world.
We found that, at 2.5 years, about 15 percent of people had moved into remission, with no binge-eating episodes for three months. At five years, that was a little over 20 percent. And a little less than two-thirds of people still had full DSM-4 binge-eating disorder at 2.5 years. A little under half still had the disorder at five years. The rest were somewhere in the middle: They didn’t meet the DSM-4 criteria for binge-eating disorder, but they weren’t fully in remission.
I should also mention that this was snapshot data at 2.5 and 5 years, but people move around in between. When we looked at the in-between data, based on people’s retrospective report of what had happened over the 2.5 years, we see some people are experiencing remission, but relapse is fairly common, and the median time to remission is over 60 months.
And that is different from the other studies you looked at?
There were a couple of levels. The older prospective studies were small, under 50 people, excluded males, and the participants tended to be younger.
We know that, for younger people with eating disorders, presentations can change more rapidly than someone who’s had binge-eating disorder for 20 years. Those studies suggest that only a minority of people still had a full threshold of binge-eating disorder at two to five years of follow-up.
But also we knew that the individuals in those studies were young, were mostly at lower BMI, and there were no men. Our sample had a much wider age range, was primarily high BMI, as well as being a bigger sample.
Were the samples in these older studies representative of outdated societal perceptions about who is affected by binge-eating disorder?
A lot of the initial studies on eating disorders were based on treatment-seeking samples, which are, by definition, not representative. Anyone can get an eating disorder.
Does this work say anything about treatment?
It does, although it requires making a few assumptions. If you look at the longer-term outcomes seen in high-quality, randomized controlled trials of psychotherapy for binge-eating disorder, the percent of people experiencing remission is higher than in our study. That suggests that people would get better faster with treatment than they would under natural circumstances.
I don’t want people to feel hopeless after seeing our study. There are effective treatments for binge-eating disorder, including one FDA-approved medication, lisdexamfetamine, and multiple evidence-based psychotherapies. Although our treatments are not perfect, they do help many people.
Want to make robots more agile? Take a lesson from a rat.
Scientists create realistic virtual rodent with digital neural network to study how brain controls complex, coordinated movement
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
The effortless agility with which humans and animals move is an evolutionary marvel that no robot has yet been able to closely emulate. To help probe the mystery of how brains control and coordinate it all, Harvard neuroscientists have created a virtual rat with an artificial brain that can move around just like a real rodent.
Bence Ölveczky, professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, led a group of researchers who collaborated with scientists at Google’s DeepMind AI lab to build a biomechanically realistic digital model of a rat. Using high-resolution data recorded from real rats, they trained an artificial neural network — the virtual rat’s “brain” — to control the virtual body in a physics simulator called MuJoco, where gravity and other forces are present. And the results are promising.
Harvard and Google researchers created a virtual rat using movement data recorded from real rats.
Credit: Google DeepMind
Published in Nature, the researchers found that activations in the virtual control network accurately predicted neural activity measured from the brains of real rats producing the same behaviors, said Ölveczky, who is an expert at training (real) rats to learn complex behaviors in order to study their neural circuitry. The feat represents a new approach to studying how the brain controls movement, Ölveczky said, by leveraging advances in deep reinforcement learning and AI, as well as 3D movement-tracking in freely behaving animals.
The collaboration was “fantastic,” Ölveczky said. “DeepMind had developed a pipeline to train biomechanical agents to move around complex environments. We simply didn’t have the resources to run simulations like those, to train these networks.”
Working with the Harvard researchers was, likewise, “a really exciting opportunity for us,” said co-author and Google DeepMind Senior Director of Research Matthew Botvinick. “We’ve learned a huge amount from the challenge of building embodied agents: AI systems that not only have to think intelligently, but also have to translate that thinking into physical action in a complex environment. It seemed plausible that taking this same approach in a neuroscience context might be useful for providing insights in both behavior and brain function.”
Graduate student Diego Aldarondo worked closely with DeepMind researchers to train the artificial neural network to implement what are called inverse dynamics models, which scientists believe our brains use to guide movement. When we reach for a cup of coffee, for example, our brain quickly calculates the trajectory our arm should follow and translates this into motor commands. Similarly, based on data from actual rats, the network was fed a reference trajectory of the desired movement and learned to produce the forces to generate it. This allowed the virtual rat to imitate a diverse range of behaviors, even ones it hadn’t been explicitly trained on.
These simulations may launch an untapped area of virtual neuroscience in which AI-simulated animals, trained to behave like real ones, provide convenient and fully transparent models for studying neural circuits, and even how such circuits are compromised in disease. While Ölveczky’s lab is interested in fundamental questions about how the brain works, the platform could be used, as one example, to engineer better robotic control systems.
A next step might be to give the virtual animal autonomy to solve tasks akin to those encountered by real rats. “From our experiments, we have a lot of ideas about how such tasks are solved, and how the learning algorithms that underlie the acquisition of skilled behaviors are implemented,” Ölveczky continued. “We want to start using the virtual rats to test these ideas and help advance our understanding of how real brains generate complex behavior.”
This research received financial support from the National Institutes of Health.
Alzheimer’s disease indicators track with biological changes in brain, study finds
Researchers see self-reported memory loss may be early, preclinical warning
Haley Bridger
BWH Communications
3 min read
Using imaging reports to back up their findings, researchers have concluded that reports from patients and their partners about cognitive decline can be an early indicator of an accumulation of tau tangles, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
“There is increasing evidence that individuals themselves or a close family member may notice changes in memory, even before a clinical measure picks up evidence of cognitive impairment,” said Rebecca E. Amariglio of the Department of Neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the senior author of the study. Results are published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“We now understand that changes in the brain due to Alzheimer’s disease start well before patients show clinical symptoms detected by a doctor.”
Rebecca E. Amariglio, study senior author
Before any diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, researchers from Mass General Brigham have found changes in the brain when patients and their study partners (those who could answer questions about their daily cognitive function) reported a decline in cognition. “Something as simple as asking about memory complaints can track with disease severity at the preclinical stage of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Amariglio, a clinical neuropsychologist at both BWH and Mass General. “We now understand that changes in the brain due to Alzheimer’s disease start well before patients show clinical symptoms detected by a doctor.”
The study, led by first author Michalina F. Jadick, included researchers from across the Brigham and Mass General. The research team designed their study to include participants from the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic AD/Longitudinal Evaluation of Amyloid Risk (A4/LEARN) and Neurodegeneration studies and the Harvard Aging Brain Study and affiliated studies. Participants were at risk but cognitively unimpaired, and not yet diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Each participant and respective study partner completed evaluations of cognitive function for the participant. Each participant also underwent PET imaging to detect levels of tau and amyloid beta.
Across 675 participants, the team found that both amyloid and tau were associated with greater self-reported decline in cognitive function. The team also found that subjective reports from patients and their partners complemented objective tests of cognitive performance. The authors note that the study was limited by the fact that most participants were white and highly educated. Future studies that include more diverse participants and follow participants in the longer term are needed.
Amariglio cautions that noticing a change in cognition does not mean that one should leap to the conclusion that a person has Alzheimer’s disease. However, a patient’s or family member’s concerns should not be dismissed if they are worried about cognition.
More information on funding for individual researchers here.
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Students from the class “Vision and Justice” include Elyse Martin-Smith (from left), Toussaint Miller, Tenzin Gund-Morrow, Ryan Tierney, Marley Dias, and Anoushka Chander.
Photos by Dylan Goodman; photo illustration by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff
Dylan Goodman
Harvard Correspondent
7 min read
A photographer’s love letter to ‘Vision and Justice’
I was lucky to be one of the 50 students out of 200 who got a seat in the course through the General Education lottery administered by the College. I had no idea at the beginning of the semester how deeply the class would alter my photographic eye and perception of the world. It challenged me as a photographer to understand history through the lens of my passion.
Lewis is an art and cultural historian. In addition to the “Vision and Justice” course, she is also the founder of the Vision & Justice civic initiative, which she explains focuses on “original research, curricula, and programs to reveal the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity and justice in America.” However, “the work in the classroom is the heart of it all,” she said, as she loves “seeing transformation in my students before my eyes. The sense of empowerment, heightened awareness, and joy is like nothing else.”
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Photo by Dylan Goodman
Dylan Goodman ’25, story author and photographer.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Her primary teaching goal was to “compel” students to understand and see the power of visual culture for justice across disciplines. “How can we define the trajectory of a country founded on the tension between slavery and freedom, liberty and genocide, equality and exclusion?” said Lewis. “We have done it and continue to do it through the work of culture.”
Leaving this course, I find myself thinking of my photographic subjects as collaborators, just as LaToya Ruby Frazier does; I think about how my photographs can be used to create counternarratives and fight for equality, just as Frederick Douglass did. With every click of the shutter, I think about Lewis’ teaching: Visual art matters.
My classmates came from a variety of concentrations and backgrounds, and they took away just as wide a range of lessons. Below, some of them reflected on their time in the classroom.
Professor and student.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Toussaint Miller ’25
Neurobiology, secondary in music
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“The pedagogy of vision and justice is more applicable than it may explicitly seem… As an aspiring surgeon, I could not help but ask how these ideals — rooted in eugenics and polygenesis — have influenced modern medicine. How do the practices of the 18th and 19th century contribute to the health disparities affecting marginalized communities even still today?”
Toussaint Miller
Miller enrolled in “Vision and Justice” for two primary reasons: He believes in the power of representation in defining who we are and what we will become, and he wanted the opportunity to discuss the legacy of art and culture with his peers.
The course has “armed me with the tools necessary to intellectually consider the underlying meanings and contexts of visual art,” he said, noting that he sees visual art as a way to honor human life and denigrate it. A standout moment from the class was discussing how Confederate monuments have come to be the “new battleground of racial contestation” and help us understand how America’s past affects its future.
Marley Dias ’26
Sociology and data analytics, secondary in African American studies
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“While I thought that American history could be divided into racial history, Professor Lewis has taught me the way these histories are constantly intertwined and has pushed my thinking toward seeing cultural movements as essential mechanisms for justice in America.”
Marley Dias
Dias enrolled in this course because of her passion for representation in media. As the founder of the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, an international movement to collect and donate books with Black girls as the main character, Dias believes capturing the “full spectrum of identity can heal the wounds of our oppressive history.”
Dias said the course changed the way she understands race. She learned how to use visual analysis and historical context to understand how sight plays an integral role in race, especially in how we can challenge oppression.
Ryan Tierney ’24
History and literature, secondary in economics
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“As a second-semester senior, I expected that I would be ‘cruising to the finish line,’ having already experienced all of the perspective-shifting classes of my College career. I was so wrong, and I have been profoundly impacted by this class.”
Ryan Tierney
Tierney said he loved the discussions Lewis led, explaining that “the way in which she amplified everyone’s perspective was really helpful to our overall understanding … When it comes to art and images, perspective matters.”
He defined the course as centering around changing the way individuals view representation in the U.S.
Elyse Martin-Smith ’25
Social studies and African American studies
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“I love that this GenEd brings together people from many different areas at the College. As someone who focuses in Black Artivism (arts and activism), it is enlightening to examine the shared struggle of other marginalized communities, exploring deep parallels and linked fate.”
Elyse Martin-Smith
Martin-Smith enrolled in the class because of her passion for the arts, primarily music, in honoring the traditions of Black people.
Martin-Smith enjoyed the lectures, engaging with guest speakers, materials from the Harvard Art Museums, and the process of hearing classmates grapple with their own opinions on the content. She said she felt inspired to “take action” and “challenge harmful histories” from what she learned.
Tenzin Gund-Morrow ’26
Social studies
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“‘Vision and Justice’ has gifted me the language to more exactingly analyze, understand, and explain the issue of citizenship and race in America. It’s provided me with the critical visual skills that are more useful than ever in our modern digital age.”
Tenzin Gund-Morrow
Gund-Murrow had heard that “Vision and Justice” was “one of those special classes that explodes how you see the world.” It changed the way he saw himself as well. Lewis has “forever altered the trajectory of my studies by elucidating the inextricable tie between visual culture, political identity, and public policy.”
Gund-Morrow, who has a scholarly interest in criminal justice, said the class forced him to question the role media and visual artifacts play in the modern carceral system.
He was most struck by the unit on lynching. He said he learned lessons about the “liberatory potential of Black contemporary artists” in addressing its legacy.
Anoushka Chander ’25
Social studies and African American studies
Photo by Dylan Goodman
“The class asks us to understand that visual culture — through art, photos, and monuments — has created a narrative of who does or does not count in American life.”
Anoushka Chander
In high school, Chander interned with the Smithsonian Institution museums. She had always viewed these artistic spaces as a place for fighting social injustice. “Museums reckon with ugly histories of oppression, celebrate the beauty and resilience of diverse Americans, and challenge racist beliefs,” she said. Additionally, as a singer and performer, she has always been interested in how art can further representation.
Chander connected the course to her concentration, focusing especially on visual representations of Black motherhood. “In my midterm paper, I discussed how Serena Williams’ pregnant cover photo of Vanity Fair presented Black motherhood as powerful and beautiful, challenging racist assumptions.”
New study finds Earth collided with dense interstellar cloud, possibly affecting life on planet
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Call it the Milky Way mystery.
Evidence of a long-ago collision involving the Earth was there in the form of specific radioactive isotopes deposited across the Earth and Moon. There were, however, skeptics.
But now researchers have tracked the sun’s path through the Milky Way back to a crash 2 to 3 million years ago with a dense interstellar cloud. The event was so violent it appears to have collapsed the sun’s protective bubble around the solar system and possibly even affected life on Earth.
Merav Opher, a Boston University astronomy professor and director of BU’s SHIELD NASA DRIVE Center, made the discovery in work conducted during a 2021-22 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and published recently in Nature Astronomy.
Her project explored whether the Earth might have come in contact with the interstellar medium outside of the heliosphere, the protective bubble around the solar system created by the sun’s magnetic field and the solar wind.
Though the Earth is often thought of as a planet circling a stationary star, the sun is constantly in motion. In fact, it travels through the galaxy at about 56,000 miles per hour — bringing with it the planets, asteroids, comets, and other bodies of the solar system.
Researchers believe that during those travels a collision may have happened between 2 million and 3 million years ago, and another around 7 million years ago. The evidence exists in the form of noticeable peaks in the deposition of two radioactive isotopes: iron 60 and plutonium 244. Both are very rare, created when massive stars explode in supernova. Those isotopes are thought to be more plentiful in the interstellar medium.
“It is everywhere, in the deep ocean, on the moon, on ice in Antarctica,” Opher said. “These papers describe a global phenomenon. Something happened. And iron 60 is not produced on Earth. So I knew that somehow this iron 60 got trapped in dust, and somehow, 2 to 3 million years ago, we had more dust delivered to us.”
For the interstellar medium (ISM) to be the source of the deposition spikes, however, something unusual must have happened, because today the ISM is nowhere near Earth. The heliosphere’s outer fringe — where the interstellar medium begins — is 11 billion miles away, well beyond the orbits of the outer planets.
Opher started her exploration of potential Earth-ISM contact by reviewing research on the sun’s galactic neighborhood, the “nearby” space out to 65 light-years away.
She initially found mostly empty space. But when she factored in the sun’s own movement, she realized that the solar system exits its interstellar neighborhood after about 1 million years.
And, as she looked farther down the path that the sun and its planets might have taken, her gaze settled on a string of dense clouds of interstellar dust and hydrogen atoms, called the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds, 2 to 3 million years away as the sun flies.
“I got so excited,” Opher said. “This will collapse the heliosphere and then the Earth is in interstellar medium, collecting more dust, and that can explain this peak that I’ve seen in iron 60.”
Opher got in touch with Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, who directs Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, where Opher spent a sabbatical year from 2017 to 2018. The two used computer models to examine the movement of both the solar system and the interstellar dust clouds themselves, which are also in motion.
They tracked the sun’s path back to a potential collision with the densest cloud in the ribbon, called the Local Lynx of Cold Clouds, holding more than half of the ribbon’s total mass.
“We don’t often discuss the impact of astrophysics on Earth because the astronomical timescales are very long, and the human species emerged on Earth just a few million years ago,” Loeb said. “But a few million years ago there was the potential for us to be passing through a very dense cloud. We didn’t work out the biological implications, but it’s clear that if you shrink the heliosphere to within the orbit of the Earth around the sun, we are not protected anymore. It could have significant implications for life on Earth.”
For confirmation, they turned to Joshua Peek, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Webb and Hubble telescopes. Peek, who had published research on the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds, cast a dubious eye on their work.
The relative movements of the bodies involved were complex, the statistics required to understand them advanced, and, he thought, the chances were vanishingly small that the sun passed through that Lynx cloud at the same time that the isotope depositions happened on Earth.
“It’s a pretty complicated thing to study,” Peek said. “So I thought, ‘I’m just not going to pay attention to this. This is some crackpot nonsense.’”
But Opher didn’t give up. She repeatedly reached out until Peek, on a pandemic-era trip to California, found himself with time on his hands. He had tested positive for COVID and, though he felt OK, was in self-imposed quarantine, far from home and the daily demands there.
So Peek decided to take a closer look at Opher’s idea. And the more he looked, the more plausible it became.
“It’ll be so easy,” Peek described his thinking. “I’ll just do a quick analysis — in one day — prove that this is impossible, and we can all move on with our lives. But after the very quick analysis, I thought, this is actually possible. I was just flabbergasted. I wrote back and said, ‘I thought I was proving you wrong, but it turned out I proved you right.’”
Interstellar space beyond the solar system is very heterogenous, Peek and Opher said.
In some places, like just outside the heliosphere, it is nearly a vacuum, averaging just 0.1 particles per cubic centimeter. By contrast, inside the heliosphere, near Earth, there are between three and 10 particles per cubic centimeter, 30 to 100 times denser. Inside a cold cloud, according to Peek’s prior research, particle density could reach 3,000 particles per cubic centimeter.
A collision with a cloud that dense would have collapsed the heliosphere to about 0.2 astronomical units, or about one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the sun, Opher said. That would leave the Earth outside the sun’s protective influence as the solar system traversed the cloud.
Recent measurements by Voyager 1 and 2, the only crafts to have crossed from the heliosphere into the ISM, showed that the Earth would have likely experienced a spike in galactic cosmic radiation.
It also would have experienced a rain of particles — some interstellar dust, but mainly hydrogen atoms — through the atmosphere.
The particles would likely have changed the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, possibly affecting cloud formation, depleting ozone in the middle atmosphere, and cooling the climate.
Though outside the scope of their study, the three authors said the impact on life on Earth might have been substantial and recommended further exploration.
“Our work should trigger more studies into this question,” Loeb said. “It draws attention to our cosmic neighborhood as having potential influence on life on Earth. We usually tend to just look at it and enjoy it, but we are actually moving through interstellar space, and there could be risks along the way.”
Opher’s work is supported by the NASA DRIVE program.
New successful, expanded trial of groundbreaking therapy for genetic deafness suggests it may be available relatively soon
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
A toddler in a bright yellow shirt stands unsteadily, grasping the arm of a chair with one hand while playing with a toy on the seat with the other. His father calls from behind, but the child doesn’t react.
Six weeks later, the same child stands holding onto a table. When his grandfather calls, he spins, nearly toppling over, saved by the older man who reaches over to steady him. The dramatic change, highlighted in two video clips, documents the effectiveness of a new gene therapy for a type of inherited deafness, researchers say.
The advance was first reported in January after a trial of six children deaf since birth. The children received treatment in one ear, with five of the six gaining the ability to hear. Scientists reported Wednesday they’d expanded the trial to five more children, this time delivering treatment in both ears. All five, ranging in age from 1 to 11 years, were able to hear in both ears, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.
The team reported only minor side effects such as fever and higher white blood cell counts and cholesterol. While those side effects were transitory, the children became responsive to family members’ voices and some spoke their first words in what researchers hope is a permanent fix. Two children danced to music — which requires complex sound processing — and all were able to localize sound and recognize speech in noisy environments.
“I think this gene therapy is a game-changer,” said Zheng-Yi Chen, associate professor of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School and associate scientist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary’s Eaton-Peabody Laboratories. “I have no doubt it will become the standard therapy down the road.”
That journey, said Chen, one of the study’s senior authors, may not take long. Further studies are needed to refine the therapy, he said, but it could be ready in as soon as three to five years.
The work was led by researchers at Mass Eye and Ear and at the Eye and ENT Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai, where a team led by Yilai Shu, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen’s lab, conducted the trial beginning in July 2023. The report provides a snapshot of changes after 13 and 26 weeks, though researchers are continuing to follow the subjects.
Yilai Shu’s research team.
Credit: Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University
“Children’s lives will be profoundly impacted by the therapy,” Shu said. “It provides a paradigm shift in the treatment of hearing impairment.”
More than 5 percent of the global population — 430 million people — have some kind of deafness, a figure that includes 34 million children, according to statistics cited in the paper. About 26 million have been deaf since birth, with about 60 percent of those due to genetic factors.
The children in both trials suffered from DFNB9, a type of deafness caused by a mutation in the OTOF gene. The mutated gene causes the body to produce a dysfunctional otoferlin protein. Otoferlin is produced by cells in a snail-shaped part of the inner ear called the cochlea, where sound waves are translated into electric signals.
Those signals are normally transmitted to the nerves and then travel to the brain for interpretation. Otoferlin is important in the handoff of the signal from the cochlea to the nerves. Without it, the signal generated in the ear never makes it to the brain.
Chen said in January that DFNB9 is an attractive target for the therapy because the structures of the ear are intact and the mutated protein can be traced to a single gene that, if repaired, would restore communication between the ear and brain.
A complication remained, however. The gene that encodes otoferlin is large enough that it doesn’t fit inside the neutered virus that researchers used to transport the corrected gene into the cochlear cells.
Researchers solved that problem by breaking the gene in two and sending it in two viral packages instead of one. Though the virus inserted the gene into the cochlear cells’ genome in two pieces, it still produced functional versions of the otoferlin protein.
In the current trial involving two ears, Chen said safety of the treatment was an important consideration. Because they used a virus to deliver the therapy, they had to be on guard for the body’s natural immune reaction. To keep that response from derailing the trial, they decided to treat both ears at once. That prevented a situation where, if the injections were given sequentially, an immune response primed by treatment in the first ear could affect the success of the second. Researchers recorded no toxicity and saw no serious adverse reactions.
“This would suggest that maybe there’s some plasticity in the brain in a patient that we could remodel somehow in the future. This opened up a new field for us to explore.”
Zheng-Yi Chen
Shu said he was both relieved and happy when results showed children being able to respond to sound cues and speak their first words. As gratifying, however, was the reaction of the children’s parents, who sometimes cried or expressed disbelief at the changes they saw.
This second trial also revealed an intriguing wrinkle. One participant was 11, an age considered outside the optimal range for language acquisition, thought to be from birth to around 6 or 7, Chen said. After hearing was restored, however, the 11-year-old did begin to use single words.
“This would suggest that maybe there’s some plasticity in the brain in a patient that we could remodel somehow in the future,” Chen said. “This opened up a new field for us to explore.”
While hearing impairment stems from an array of causes, Chen said there are 150 genes known to play a role in genetic deafness. The vast majority of those could be treated using a similar regimen, he said. With the success of these trials, he added, it may begin to make sense for children who show difficulty hearing to undergo genetic testing at an early age.
“For us it’s a watershed event,” Chen said. “Personally, I have no doubt we’re going to have a new therapy down the road.”
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Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, now the inspiration for a new A.R.T. musical, never reads the same
Why rewrite a perfect novel? The prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925,is one of the most memorable things about it:
“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.”
This is when we first meet Gatsby’s lost love, Daisy. Her perpetual breathlessness, her ability to evoke the expensive frivolity of balloon rides, the illusory innocence of the white dress: It’s all there, not a word wasted. But the scene is also a great example of Fitzgerald’s genius for conjuring a tableau one can step into. It goes on: “I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.” As an artist who works with visuals and sound, how could you not itch to reimagine that on film or on stage?
In the adaptation of this scene in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013movie, Toby Maguire’s wide-eyed Nick pushes his way through fluttering white curtains like a child in a castle of bedsheets. Weighed down by its length and sentimentality, Luhrmann’s adaptation nonetheless contains flashes of genius. The casting of an aging Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, with the magic he held for the girls of my generation evaporating from his still-slim shoulders; the updating of the 1920s soundtrack from jazz to hip-hop, a subtle nod to the appropriation of Black music by the novel’s WASP elite — in snatches, it succeeds in translating something of the novel’s spirit to the big screen.
Nghi Vo’s strange, fantastical 2021 novel “The Chosen and the Beautiful,” one of a cluster of retellings since “Gatsby” entered the public domain three years ago, builds its world of 1920s magic and wealth outward from the ballooning dresses. Narrated by Daisy’s best friend, Jordan, who in this version is a Vietnamese adoptee raised among wealthy white ingenues, the metaphor of flight becomes literal:
“The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down. […] Daisy cracked open a small charm that she purchased on a whim in Cannes a few short years ago […] there was a gust of wind of a different kind, and then we were airborne, moving with languid grace along the high ceilings of her house.”
“The Chosen and the Beautiful” inhabits “Gatsby” in a different way than Luhrmann’s more straightforward adaptation. Its Jordan is coming of age into the realization that she can never truly belong in the wealthy white world in which she was raised, while the illusory quality of wealth in Fitzgerald’s work becomes real magic in Vo’s. Jordan’s perspective allows Vo to explore the growing societal tensions in an America barreling toward the Great Depression and the Second World War, just visible through the cracks of Fitzgerald’s novel. Vo also reads Fitzgerald’s characters through queer lenses. Nick’s fascination with Gatsby has been often interpreted as queer, but here the bisexual Jordan’s unacknowledged obsession with Daisy parallels — and illuminates — Gatsby’s. Early in Vo’s novel, Jordan helps the teenage Daisy get an abortion. Daisy’s desperation, her vulnerability, the cost of her performance of wealthy, white femininity — so enchanting to Gatsby and Nick — are more visible here as the flip side of her selfish cruelty.
“The Great Gatsby”holds a strange place, to an outsider like me, in American literature. I read it first as a teenager in England. It was an oddity, a beautifully written novel about awful people from another country’s history, and I found its characters’ emotions and choices inexplicable. In the U.S., its inclusion in the high school curriculum has transformed it from a novel into a reflection on the glamour and the hollowness of the American Dream. I am fascinated by the implications of a nation’s choice to install it in its young people’s consciousness. “Gatsby” is a story about young people in a young nation, to be sure, but it is also a story about the imminent loss of that youth and the emptiness of everything afterward. “I felt,” Nick says about Daisy’s husband, “that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Revisiting “The Great Gatsby”in adulthood is always nostalgic, as the reader encounters its characters from an ever-greater distance in a way that enhances the novel’s longing for its own past. In my late 30s, I find it almost unbearably sad.
The pragmatic reason, the boring reason, that “Gatsby” keeps being adapted is that it can bank on an audience of readers. The commercial viability of adaptations is why the media landscape has shifted so dramatically toward remakes and sequels since the 2008 financial crash. But amid a dreary, endless landscape of cynical cash grabs (Marvel universe, I’m looking at you), “Gatsby” adaptations stand out, because “Gatsby” is not just a novel — it is America’s imagining of itself.
Fidelity can be an artistic trap. Luhrmann’s film most succeeds when it conjures spectacle from visuals and soundtrack; the narrative voiceover, adapted closely from the novel, drags. Vo’s book, in contrast, updates Fitzgerald’s questions about who gets to inhabit the American Dream, and uses the fantasy genre to reflect on the nature of the fantasies at the heart of “Gatsby.” Just as rereading Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is richer and more poignant from the perspective of age, a good adaptation allows one to reread a beloved novel through the eyes of an artist, seeing what they see. Next time I open “Gatsby,” I will have seen the A.R.T. musical it inspired. I will not be the same, and the novel will not be the same, and that is its brilliance.
Anna Wilson is an assistant professor in Harvard’s English Department.
“Gatsby” runs through Aug. 3 at Loeb Drama Center.
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Expert in law, ethics traces history, increasing polarization, steps to bolster democratic process
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Israel is a Jewish state. Israel is a democracy.
“These two conceptions, nowadays, pull in divergent directions,” argued Issachar Rosen-Zvi, professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.
In a recent lecture titled “The Precarious State of Israeli Democracy and Pathways Forward,” Rosen-Zvi spoke to this friction, which “risks compromising the fundamental principle of equality among citizens” in an era of rising polarization. His talk, held last month at Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, also covered recent controversial efforts to limit Israel’s Supreme Court as well as concrete steps for democratic renewal.
Judaism and democracy are what philosophers call “essentially contested concepts” with no consensus definition, Rosen-Zvi emphasized. Nevertheless, the two were in tension from the start. The word “democracy” does not appear in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, signed upon its founding in 1948. But the document contains language that calls for Jewish immigration while also establishing “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.”
Over time, attempts have been made to reconcile Israel’s Jewish and democratic identities, Rosen-Zvi said. He cited a 1995 decision by the Israeli Supreme Court, authored by Chief Justice Aharon Barak. Israel has no written constitution for the judges to scrutinize. But it does have a Basic Law, passed in 1992, which was drafted “to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to embed the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
Barak saw no “contradictory elements” between these conceptions, writing: “In my view, the concept of ‘Jewish’ should be understood at a high level of abstraction, one that unifies all members of society and finds common rights among them.”
That opinion also expanded the Supreme Court’s role, given the limits of that nation’s system of checks and balances. Most of the power resides in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, which consists of a single chamber that selects the prime minister, passes laws, and oversees the government. It effectively serves as both legislative and executive branches.
“The conclusion was that the only check on the government’s power is a strong judiciary with the power of judicial review,” Rosen-Zvi said. The court could now strike down laws it deemed unreasonable.
Barak’s opinion elicited what the professor called “vehement backlash” from religious and nationalist camps on the Israeli right, culminating in judicial overhaul legislation, part of which was passed in July 2023 with the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruling coalition.
“This reform proclaimed itself as seeking to restore power to the people, power that was allegedly usurped by the Supreme Court from the time of Aharon Barak,” said Rosen-Zvi, who clerked for the justice in the mid-’90s. “But the way they did it, it was clear they did not want to create a healthy democracy that brings power to the people. What they actually wanted to do was make sure the government is all-powerful.”
During the lecture, the legal scholar took a few minutes to outline the extent of polarization today, with new extremes reached by conservatives and liberals alike. He enumerated the recent history: five rounds of elections in three years following Netanyahu’s 2019 indictment on corruption charges.
“In November 2022, they now managed to form a government with extreme right and ultra-Orthodox parties,” Rosen-Zvi said.
Protesters took to the streets early last year to oppose the judicial overhaul. A contingent of reservists joined in, threatening to be no-shows for military duty. But the movement all but disappeared after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7.
Late last year, the Supreme Court used its judicial review powers to strike down the reform law.
How to advance democracy in the face of these compounding challenges? Rosen-Zvi proposed five measures to mix and match should a new government be installed. Among them are formalizing a constitution, complete with a strong bill of rights, and strengthening checks and balances, perhaps by instituting two houses of parliament. Also mentioned was the urgency of ending the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
Rosen-Zvi, a scholar of local governments, spoke in more depth on the possibility of federalization, which would involve empowering the municipalities he studies.
It’s already happening on an informal level, he noted, due to the “vacuum” left by the current Israeli government. “This is not true for all localities; but this is true for several localities, the ones that are more powerful financially,” he said. His hometown of Tel Aviv provides just one example, with the city having partnered with neighboring communities to roll out bus service on Saturdays, which is the Sabbath day of rest.
In a question-and-answer session, attendees pressed Rosen-Zvi on everything from military conscription to the place of occupied territories in his federalist vision. One audience member painted a particularly dark picture of Israel’s future, raising the possibility of mass exodus should the current political trajectory continue.
Rosen-Zvi responded by lamenting the lack of engagement from Israel’s left and center-left, given the urgent need for political action today. “This is a tragedy,” he said.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Sunny skies greeted the thousands of alumni who gathered in Tercentenary Theatre last Friday to take part in Harvard Alumni Day — an annual event celebrating alumni community, citizenship, and impact.
Coinciding with Harvard and Radcliffe class reunions and other alumni programs, the day’s events included musical performances, awarding of the Harvard Medals, and a keynote address by award-winning actor, producer, and writer Courtney B. Vance ’82.
The program kicked off with the traditional alumni parade from the Old Yard to Tercentenary Theatre, this year led by Emmy-nominated TV host, writer, comedian, and commentator Baratunde Thurston ’99, the 2024 chief marshal of alumni, and the four oldest alumni in attendance — Bert Huberman ’44, Henry Ashworth ’44, George Post ’45, and Linda Black ’51.
The program was called to order by 2023–24 Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) President Tracy “Ty” Moore II ’06, who shared reflections from his term as president, acknowledging that the past year has been rocky for Harvard and the alumni community amid the global strife over the war in the Middle East.
Chief marshal Baratunde Thurston ’99 (in top hat).
“The only way through is with,” he said, noting the importance of working with one another to stay connected and engaged with the Harvard community — especially during times of disagreement.
Citing his undergraduate years at Harvard as the first time he felt he could truly be himself, Moore spoke of “real community,” which he described as a “safe place” where people “know they will be respected and valued regardless of their perspective and experiences.” He pointed to genuine curiosity, open dialogue, and an open mind as key building blocks in establishing real community.
Moore also introduced incoming HAA President Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93, calling her an “impactful, courageous, and gracious leader.” A family physician, Savard is the first person of South Asian descent to serve as alumni president.
Sarah Karmon, associate vice president and executive director of the HAA, expressed her gratitude for the support and contributions of all alumni volunteers, including the Harvard and Radcliffe college reunion chairs, who oversaw the planning of 14 celebrations for more than 10,000 alumni and guests. She also commended the Class of 1989, who set a new fundraising record for 35th reunions.
Interim President Alan M. Garber ’76, Ph.D. ’82, recognized what a difficult year it has been for the Harvard community but also noted how grateful he is for “what usually happens here” — the learning, research, innovation, and innumerable ways Harvard expands the boundaries of knowledge to “make the world a better place” — with this year being no exception. Despite the challenging circumstances of these last months, Garber said, “Harvard never stopped humming with the energy of possibility.”
For the Harvard community to emerge “better and stronger,” Garber noted the urgency of thinking “creatively and ambitiously” about expanding efforts to foster a culture of civility, respect, and reasoned debate.
He pointed to the University’s recent decision to issue public statements only on issues that affect its core functions — an approach he said is “intended to preserve open inquiry and academic freedom by making it easier for all members of the community to express their views.”
Garber concluded by sharing his gratitude for members of the alumni community, calling them “islands of calm through change and through storm.”
That assessment could very well be applied to the interim president himself, as his speech was briefly delayed when an apparent animal-rights protester unaffiliated with the University accosted him on his way to the podium.Despite the interruption, Garber continued with his remarks and the program. Moore later reflected on Garber’s “remarkable demonstration of composure” and his “words filled with insight and appreciation for this brilliant alum community.”
Following a brief musical interlude by beatboxer Eliot Min ’23 and cellist Eugene Ye ’25, Garber presented this year’s Harvard Medals to Scott A. Abell ’72, former Harvard executive vice president Katherine N. Lapp, and M. Lee Pelton, Ph.D. ’84, who were recognized for their extraordinary service to the University.
Vance, an award-winning actor who serves as chair of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, began a sweeping keynote address with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”
Vance, who also co-founded Bassett Vance Productions with his wife, Angela Bassett, touched on a number of difficult global issues, noting what a challenging time it is, especially for young people who may be struggling with reconciling their idealism with a sobering understanding of the world.
The author of “The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power,” Vance spotlighted the importance of mental health, sharing his family’s own struggles, and urged the audience to “make choices in this short time we have here on this earth that lift up” others.
He ended by pressing those in attendance to “make room for the tender heart” as a way to counteract cynicism.
Having sung “Radcliffe, Now We Rise to Greet Thee” earlier in the program, the audience once again joined alumni members of the Harvard University Choir, Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, Radcliffe Choral Society, and Harvard Glee Club to sing “Fair Harvard” before gathering with friends old and new for the all-alumni Yard Party.
Scientists sequence complete genome of bush moa, offering insights into its natural history, possible clues to evolution of flightless birds
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Using ancient DNA extracted from the toe bone of a museum specimen, Harvard biologists have sequenced the genome of an extinct, flightless bird called the little bush moa, shedding light on an unknown corner of avian genetic history.
Published in Science Advances, the work is the first complete genetic map of the turkey-sized bird whose distant living cousins include the ostrich, emu, and kiwi. It is one of nine known species of moa, all extinct for the last 700 years, which inhabited New Zealand before the late 1200s and the arrival of Polynesian human settlers.
“We’re pulling away the veil across the mystery of this species,” said senior author Scott V. Edwards, professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “We can study modern birds by looking at them and their behavior. With extinct species, we have very little information except what their bones looked like and in some cases what they ate. DNA provides a really exciting window into the natural history of extinct species like the little bush moa.”
Bush moa were the smallest species of moa, weighing about 60 pounds and distributed in lowland forests across the north and south islands of New Zealand. Genomic analysis has revealed their closest living relatives aren’t kiwis, as was originally speculated, but rather tinamous, a Neotropical bird group from which they diverged genetically about 53 million years ago.
The research offers new genetic evidence for various aspects of bush moa sensory biology. Like many birds, they had four types of cone photoreceptors in their retinas, which gave them not only color but also ultraviolet vision. They had a full set of taste receptors, including bitter and umami.
Perhaps the most remarkable trait of these flightless birds is their complete absence of forelimb skeletal elements that typically comprise birds’ wings, the researchers wrote. Studying the moa genome could offer new clues into how and why some birds evolved to become flightless.
Little bush moa (third from left) are related to the ostrich, rhea, and tinamou. Wing bones are greatly reduced in ostrich and rhea and completely absent in moa. Ostrich, rhea, and moa also have sternums with no keel, a hallmark of flightless birds.
Credit: Wren Lu ’19
The scientists used high-throughput DNA sequencing, which allows rapid sequencing of short DNA fragments. To produce the bush moa genome, the team sequenced the equivalent of 140 bird genomes, or about 140 billion base pairs of DNA, only about 12 percent of which was actual moa DNA (the rest was bacterial).
They then pieced together the genome, taking each snippet of DNA and mapping it to its correct position. Assembly of extinct species is painstaking work, which has gotten a big boost from technologies like high-throughput sequencing. Other species that have been mapped similarly are the passenger pigeon, the woolly mammoth, and our close relative, the Neanderthal. Using an existing emu genome as a guide, researchers strung together the bush moa’s genetic sequence by finding overlaps between each genetic snippet, essentially reconstructing a long puzzle of 140 billion pieces.
The project originated more than 15 years ago in the lab of the late Allan J. Baker. An expert in ancient bird DNA at the Royal Ontario Museum, Baker was the first to extract and sequence the bird’s DNA from a fossil recovered on the South Island of New Zealand.
Also involved in the initial DNA processing and sequencing was Alison Cloutier, a co-author of the new paper, who formerly worked with Baker and later became a postdoctoral researcher in Edwards’ lab at Harvard, which inherited the data/research.
Reconstructing the genome of a long-extinct bird fills in a new branch of the avian family tree, opening doors to study avian evolution, or even someday, to possibly resurrect these species through de-extinction technologies.
“To me, this work is all about fleshing out the natural history of this amazing species,” Edwards said.
Large study shows benefits for cancer, cardiovascular mortality, also identifies likely biological drivers of better health
BWH Communications
3 min read
In a study that followed more than 25,000 U.S. women for up to 25 years, researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that participants who closely followed the Mediterranean diet had up to a 23 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality, with benefits for both cancer and cardiovascular health. The researchers found evidence of biological changes that may help explain the longevity gains. Results are published in JAMA.
“For women who want to live longer, our study says watch your diet,” said senior author Samia Mora, a cardiologist and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Following a Mediterranean dietary pattern could result in about one-quarter reduction in risk of death over more than 25 years with benefit for both cancer and cardiovascular mortality, the top causes of death in women and men in the U.S. and globally.”
The Mediterranean diet is rich in plants (nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes). The main fat is olive oil, usually extra-virgin. The regimen includes moderate intake of fish, poultry, dairy, eggs, and alcohol, and rare consumption of meats, sweets, and processed foods.
The authors of the current study investigated the long-term benefit of adherence to a Mediterranean diet in a U.S. population recruited as part of the Women’s Health Study, and illuminated biological mechanisms that may explain the diet’s health benefits. Investigators evaluated a panel of approximately 40 biomarkers representing various biological pathways and clinical risk factors.
Biomarkers of metabolism and inflammation were most important, followed by triglyceride-rich lipoproteins, adiposity, and insulin resistance.
“Our research provides significant public health insight: Even modest changes in established risk factors for metabolic diseases — particularly those linked to small-molecule metabolites, inflammation, triglyceride-rich lipoproteins, obesity, and insulin resistance — can yield substantial long-term benefits from following a Mediterranean diet,” said lead author Shafqat Ahmad, an associate professor of epidemiology at Uppsala University Sweden and a researcher in the Center for Lipid Metabolomics and the Division of Preventive Medicine at the Brigham.
The authors noted some key limitations of the study, including that it was limited to middle-aged and older, well-educated female health professionals who were predominantly non-Hispanic and white. The study relied on food-frequency questionnaires and other self-reported measures, such as height, weight, and blood pressure. But the study’s strengths include its large scale and long follow-up period.
The authors also note that as the concept of the Mediterranean diet has gained popularity, the diet has been adapted in different countries and cultures.
“The health benefits of the Mediterranean diet are recognized by medical professionals, and our study offers insights into why the diet may be so beneficial,” said Mora. “Public health policies should promote the healthful dietary attributes of the Mediterranean diet and should discourage unhealthy adaptations.”
The Women’s Health Study is supported by the National Institutes of Health. More information on funding for individual researchers here.
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Why row from Boston to London? Because it’s there.
Spaulding Rehabilitation physician, team taking new route, aim to set records
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
John Lowry, a physician at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation at Mass General Brigham, recently set off on an attempt to row across the North Atlantic on a route that begins in Boston and has never been tried before. He and his crew are doing so to raise funds for various charities, and hopefully to break some records. Lowry, who is also an instructor at Harvard Medical School, spoke with the Gazette about the upcoming quest and shared why it’s always a good idea to push yourself to do hard things. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Has anyone rowed across the Atlantic Ocean before?
The whole endeavor of ocean rowing got its start back in the 1960s. Two individuals crossed the North Atlantic in opposite directions and became the first people to cross the Atlantic solo. They both finished relatively close to the Apollo 11 moon landing, so it kind of got lost in the news.
But since then there have been subsequent trips taken across, although it was still viewed as a fringe sport, not really sponsored by anybody, just people who were interested in adventure. Everything was sort of DIY.
In the last 20 years, it has become more of an established — probably still fringe — sport. But the technology has improved tremendously. The boats are purpose-built for ocean rowing. They’re more seaworthy, lighter, more durable, and also able to carry modern electronics aboard, including for communication and GPS. Navigation has made this more accessible to broader participation.
In the Atlantic, the primary route is off the coast of Africa to the Canary Islands to Barbados to the Caribbean. It’s part of a larger race series that takes place, usually December into January. And every year a couple of hundred people go. It’s a well-supported, sponsored, sanctioned event. The South Atlantic is warmer, and it’s a bit calmer than the North Atlantic.
Tell us about what makes your trip unique.
What we’re doing is unsanctioned. We’re going as an independent team, not under the auspices of a larger race or organization. There are four of us. I’ve known Capt. Bryan Fuller since we were about 5 years old. And he did the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge in the South Atlantic about 12 years ago. Before the pandemic, he hatched the idea of doing the North Atlantic journey — going west to east — but the pandemic locked things down. There were shifts in the original crew, and I joined the effort about a year ago. We’re also joined by champion rower Elizabeth Gilmore and Klara Anstey, a rower from Wales.
If we’re successful, we’ll be the first human-powered crossing from Boston to the U.K. [Past North Atlantic crossings began in New York.] We will also be the first mixed crew (in terms of gender) ever to cross the North Atlantic. We’re hoping to break the North Atlantic record for speed.
How long do you expect it to take?
The London Calling Row Team pushed off for a 24-hour test run. The crew includes Captain Bryan Fuller, First Mate John Lowry, Elizabeth Gilmore, and Klara Papp Anstey.
Photo Courtesy of Jennifer Powell
We leave on June 1 and hope to reach the Isles of Scilly — which are the first U.K. territory we’ll encounter, just south of Cornwall — in or under 42 days. From there, we stop the clock. Then we proceed up the English Channel and up the Thames to downtown London. We expect that will take us another week or so. Technically, it will be the most difficult part of our row because the currents and tides in the English Channel will make it especially arduous.
Logistically, how do you manage rowing as a four-person crew for that long?
We’ll be on a seagoing schedule, meaning that there will be watch time — where we’re also rowing — and time off watch. The shifts will be anywhere from one to four hours, with the average shift length being two hours of rowing, two hours off. At night, in the interest of getting a bit more sleep, we’ll be on for four hours and off for four hours. But the boat will be rowed 24 hours a day.
How big is the boat?
The boat itself is 28 feet long and not quite 5½ feet wide. There are compartments in the bow and the stern. We’ll be hot bunking, so if one person is rowing the other can have the compartment. That being said, at 5’ 10”, I still have to pretty much be in the fetal position to be able to get in and sleep. There is room for two people in each compartment if conditions become rough or unsafe and we must take refuge.
What will you do for meals?
Each of us — for the length of the trip — is budgeted 180 freeze-dried meals, just like you would buy at REI. We’ll have a jet boil to boil water. You add it; wait 10 minutes; and then have a meal for which hunger increases your appreciation.
We’ll probably be consuming up to 4,000 calories a day, but we’ll be burning through close to twice that. We’ll all be losing quite a bit of weight as we go across, so right now we’re all trying to gain as much as we can. Probably the last time in my life I’ll have that luxury.
You recently went on a 24-hour test row. How did that go?
We rowed out of Boston on a Saturday, went north about as far as Marblehead, and turned around. But it was an opportunity for us to test the two-on-two-off schedule and to get a feeling for navigating, especially at night. It went well. I think we gelled as a crew, and it was important to learn how the boat handled.
But I think equally if not more important is to know how we work together as a team, to maintain safety and have a good flow. If somebody is walking down the deck from one end to the other, they can’t just do that because it would tip the boat over. There must be a really tight, cohesive coordination. I think that trip gave us a lot of confidence.
Why did you decide to participate in this endeavor?
Personally, I thrive when I’m challenged. Professionally, I take care of persons who have various disabilities. And one thing that society often does, intentionally or inadvertently, is deny people with disabilities the opportunity to dare to do new things, to take new risks in life.
For example, for a wheelchair user, that might mean buying an airplane ticket, figuring out how to travel by air, how to access a hotel transportation. It’s daunting, and for some people, it’s way more daunting than rowing across an ocean.
So I’m doing this to bring awareness to the idea that as physicians, it’s a good and healthy thing to help your patients stretch themselves a little bit and to problem-solve ways of pulling things off. And if things don’t work out, understand that “failure” is an opportunity to learn what did not go right and to rectify that.
What will the funds you raise support, beyond the trip itself?
I’m supporting the Spaulding Adaptive Sports Centers [a part of Spaulding Rehabilitation], whose mission is very closely tied to taking individuals who’ve had various injuries or impairments and putting them in an environment where they may be a little bit uncomfortable and enabling them to succeed. And not only to succeed but have fun doing it.
We want to engender the skills and the confidence that transfer into their larger life, to live fuller, more complete lives. The funds will help support the Spaulding networks and the adaptive sports program to help people access equipment and programming.
There’s quite a bit of risk associated with this trip. Why is it worth it, to you and the team?
As they say, without risk there is no reward. I can’t wait to meet the person I am when I come back. I think I will have a deeper appreciation for just about everything. And the only way to achieve that is by assuming that risk.
I have college students who tell me they are thinking about medical school. And I tell them the last thing you should ever do is try to talk somebody into becoming a doctor. If you can’t talk them out of becoming a doctor, it’s probably the right choice. And for me, the decision to take this trip was very similar.
I think my other motive in doing this trip is for professionals, particularly healthcare providers and physicians, we get really caught up in the day-to-day routine of what we do. It can be all-consuming, almost to the exclusion of the rest of our lives. And who hasn’t gazed out the window and wondered about that big trip or that project that they wanted to do, but have almost immediately dismissed the idea because they thought it impractical.
I want to challenge that assumption. With careful planning, patience, and commitment, it actually is possible to pull off a big project. And it can be a positive force in one’s career trajectory.
If people want to follow your voyage, is there a way to do so?
Our website is londoncallingrow.com. Through the website, there will be a link to our dot tracker that will tell you down to about a meter of resolution where we are on the ocean. We also will have Starlink access onboard, so we’ll be able to upload posts and hopefully some photos and video to keep people apprised of our progress.
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He just needs to pass the bar now. But blue-collar Conor’s life spirals after a tangled affair at old-money seaside enclave in Teddy Wayne’s literary thriller
long read
Excerpted from “The Winner” by Teddy Wayne ’01, published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
John had told him the cabin also had an outdoor shower in the back, so Conor decided to try it out. He’d never taken a real shower outside before. Wind channeled through the wooden stall’s eye-level window, which showed the blue-green water in the distance. His mom’s windowless bathroom in Yonkers was cramped to begin with, and they’d been too afraid of Covid to have someone come in and repair the exhaust fan that had malfunctioned in April; every shower now produced a claustrophobic sauna.
He couldn’t believe his good fortune — not only to have a desperately needed job, but for it to include an open-air shower with an ocean view.
A few minutes before six, he tucked a button-down into his lone pair of khakis and headed over to the party. He felt himself growing nervous as he approached, uncertain if he was dressed appropriately. (Should he have packed his blazer? Where did you even buy pink shorts?) His work as a tennis pro had thrown him together with plenty of well-off older people in his life, and he knew how to act around them: be exceedingly polite, good humored, and deferential, like a waiter at a high-end restaurant. Cutters Neck, however, was the most rarefied stratum he’d encountered, and more to the point, he’d never lived among them on their home turf.
A few dozen guests milled about behind the party house by an infinity pool that appeared superfluous, surrounded as they were by near-infinite ocean. The crowd was composed predominantly of boomers who, like John, had sought refuge from the virus here, along with a clique of college-aged or high-school kids and several gaggles of frolicking children and their parents.
Conor immediately noticed that there wasn’t a mask in sight. Even if the recent George Floyd protests had suggested that outdoor gatherings might be safe, a crowded party was risky enough to make him consider turning around. If he contracted Covid, no one would take a lesson from him for two weeks, minimum.
But he also needed to rustle up more work. Not wanting to draw attention as either a hypochondriac or as someone who might have symptoms himself, he kept his mask pocketed and beelined for the hors d’oeuvres, as he hadn’t eaten anything substantial since breakfast. When the two people before him plucked deviled eggs from a tray with their bare hands, though, he pivoted away from the food and fixed a gin and tonic.
John found him and led him into the fray. The men, a couple of whom also wore pink shorts, with one in tomato-red pants, all gave their first and last names as they shook hands, so Conor adopted the custom. He met John’s friendly wife — who said she got her exercise in not by playing tennis but by cutting invasive plants on the neck — and the three people who had already signed up for lessons. To everyone else John introduced him as the exceptional tennis pro from Westchester (not Yonkers, Conor noted) whose slots were filling up rapidly. Most of them commented, discouragingly, that they didn’t play or hadn’t in years. Many residents bore a family resemblance to one another, save for one rumpled, wild-haired eccentric who spoke at length about the dangers of toxins in water.
Other than him, the Cutters residents were gregarious and welcoming, and Conor began to relax. Very rich people were still people. “Good God, you’re handsome!” gushed their hostess, the gray streaks in her hair betraying a recent disruption of regular salon appointments. “Are you sure you’re a tennis pro and not a movie star?” “My last acting role was in second grade,” he said with a self-conscious lowering of his head. The embarrassment was real, even if the abashed smile and deflective modesty were effectively habit by now. He knew, from experience, this was the only acceptable response, because to dismiss the compliment altogether was almost more egotistical than embracing it.
His effect on women was the one area of life where he’d never had to put in much effort. It was pure genetic luck, absolutely a perk, but, on occasion, it gave him a partial understanding of the drawbacks that he imagined beautiful women felt more often: being desired and objectified at once, ogled yet not seen at all. Some people — his professors, especially — assumed he was an idiot until he disproved them.
He certainly wasn’t complaining, but if he could have chosen a natural-born advantage, he would have taken money. So many things, from his mother’s health to his career prospects to the basic convenience of not having to haul his luggage across four states by bus, would have been much easier.
“Then how about politics?” the woman, whose name Conor didn’t catch, was saying. “You look like you could be the president. Doesn’t he look like a president, John?”
“He does have a certain Kennedy-esque air,” John said. “Before I give you my vote, you got any skeletons in your closet? Drive anyone off a bridge?”
“No one they’ve found yet,” Conor said, even more uncomfortable now under John’s scrutiny. “You have a beautiful pool, by the way,” he added, hoping to change the topic.
“Thank you,” she said. “You know, Suzanne Estabrook actually stayed at the same hotel with Teddy Kennedy on Martha’s Vineyard the weekend of Chappaquiddick?”
The conversation naturally swung around to the presidential election. “Tom Becker’s voting for him,” she confided.
“You’re kidding me — again?” John asked. “He hasn’t learned his lesson?”
“He wouldn’t admit it at first. Sally had to practically pry it out of him.”
“Don’t worry,” John told Conor. “There are only five or six Trump voters on the entire neck. We’d love to get rid of them, if you have any ideas.”
After some discussion of Covid (the hostess: “I hate to say it, but it’s a class thing more than anything else. I’d be absolutely shocked if anyone on Cutters dies from it. I don’t even think anyone here will get it”; John: “Oh, we’ll all get it. Eventually we’ll all get it. The only question is when”) and gossip about a postponed wedding on the neck and the couple’s extravagant registry (a Tiffany fork — a single fork, the hostess clarified, not a set — cost three hundred and sixty dollars), John left to say hello to someone. The hostess peeled off, telling Conor that she and her husband were going out of town on Monday for two weeks but that he was welcome to use the pool in their absence.
“Thank you,” he said. “Though I’m not much of a swimmer.”
The young girl he’d seen driving the golf cart skipped by in a floral dress and joined a group of similarly attired children. Amid the snowy tundra of white skin at the party was a single Black family, the popular-looking father and son in near-matching polo shirts.
The event had been a bust for drumming up business. He should slip out now, while John was occupied, but the cocktail he’d been nursing had only emphasized how empty his stomach was. He returned to the hors d’oeuvres when no one was around and, prudence chipped away by his gin and tonic, gobbled four of the creamy halved eggs in succession. Then he picked up the bottle of top-shelf gin to wash it down but, before tilting it into his glass, held it deliberatively with both hands. He had to make up for the day of exam prep lost to the bus ride, and one drink was his limit for retention of his books.
The college kids chatted in a circle by the pool. Though few of them looked old enough to drink legally, they all held tumblers or wineglasses with body language that suggested a lifelong familiarity with seaside cocktail parties. They laughed the carefree laughter of young people who don’t have to study for anything, who don’t have jobs they have to wake up for in the morning, who can drink as much as they want without consequence. Conor couldn’t imagine ever feeling the way they did. There had always been a morning tennis practice or a workplace to punch into, money to earn to help with rent, a looming test or paper or thick book. Although that was mostly all right by him. He felt best when he was working hard. Downtime made him restless. But his alienation from his peers wasn’t just from the gap in responsibilities. Nor was it the fact that he was always a little lost when they gossiped, in slang he was behind the curve on, about a new TV show or song or celebrity or something trending on the internet. It was how they spoke about themselves, what they freely divulged to anyone who would listen, flaunting frailty as a show of strength, taking pride in wounds and weaknesses that had once been shameful. Good for them, Conor supposed, but broadcasting one’s vulnerability to the world was unfathomable to him. In a tennis match, you never revealed an injury to your opponent if you could help it.
An unsettling image flashed into his head of himself barreling into the group, like a bowling ball into a cluster of blond wood pins, and knocking the rich kids into the pool.
As he was about to set down the gin in favor of sparkling water, a voice behind him, low but distinctly feminine, asked, “Are you going to pour that bottle or cradle it to sleep?”
The woman was tall, close to Conor’s height. Oversize sunglasses reflected the setting sun, and the wide brim of a straw hat shaded a bloodlessly pale face whose pointed features carved the air before her like the prow of a ship. Her medium-length hair was almost as yellow as that of the ubiquitous children. A network of blue veins peeked through the nearly translucent skin of her sinewy arms.
“Sorry,” he said. “Did you want — May I pour you some?”
She held out her quarter-full glass as if he were a caterer. “Don’t be shy,” she said, crooking her finger after he made a modest pour. “I’m not driving.”
He obliged and topped her off with a splash of tonic, then, when she nodded at the ice bucket, plunked in two cubes with a pair of tongs.
“So,” she said. “I don’t recognize you. Are you a bastard?” “Excuse me?” He was thrown off enough by the obscenity that he wasn’t sure if he’d misheard her.
“A bastard is someone’s illegitimate son. I’m asking if that’s the reason I don’t recognize you.”
Her odd question, delivered without the inflection of a joke, made him momentarily forget why he was there. “No, I . . . I’m the tennis . . . pro.” Technically, he was certified only as a recreational coach, not a pro, but his former boss had recommended he stretch the truth to get this job.
“The tennis . . . pro,” she repeated robotically. “Do you go by your vocation, or do you also have a name?”
“Conor. O’Toole.”
“Oh, yes. There was an email about lessons.” She cocked her chin up; behind her sunglasses she was probably squinting with suspicion. “You’re not trying to con us all, are you, Conor O’Toole? You’re not a con man impersonating a tennis pro for some nefarious purpose?”
The woman said this without a smile and took a drink, training her sunglasses on him the whole time. Women rarely made Conor self-conscious, but within a minute of talking to her he felt fidgety and diffident, as though a clutch of pedestrians were watching him parallel park.
“Just here to give lessons,” he said.
“Quite utilitarian. Well, then, how does one receive a lesson from the very serious Conor O’Toole?”
“All my info’s in the email John sent around.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “It’s a hundred and fifty dollars for an hour-long lesson.” (Conor had initially proposed a hundred dollars per lesson, the going rate at his old tennis club, but John had said he would attract more takers if he charged a hundred and fifty, as “no one here will think you’re worth it if you don’t cost enough.”)
“It’s gauche to talk money,” said the woman.
This line was spoken more cuttingly than the rest of her teasing. He’d always believed transparency was for the benefit of the customer, but at the moment it was apparent that he’d grossly overstepped one of this world’s unspoken lines of conduct, exposing himself as every bit the impostor she’d labeled him.
“I’m so—rry,” he said.
A few weeks into eighth grade, Conor had developed a stammer, seemingly overnight. It began innocuously, a brief pause inserted into words here and there. But within a couple of months it invariably appeared if he spoke more than a few sentences, the delay extending tortuously; his mind would know what the next sound was, yet his tongue and lungs refused to cooperate.
His mother assured him that it would eventually go away on its own, but he was terrified it wouldn’t. He’d heard that Joe Biden, then soon to become vice president, had overcome a childhood stutter by reciting Irish poetry for hours in front of the mirror. Conor decided to do the same, but with the medical journals his mother brought home from the gastroenterologist’s office where she worked. He figured if he could negotiate the arcane jargon, then he could handle everyday speech.
It was almost comic in hindsight, a thirteen-year-old boy studiously enunciating until bedtime upper endoscopy and management of anal fissures from back issues of Diseases of the Colon & Rectum, but it had worked. By the time he entered high school, he’d conquered it — almost completely. The key was to stop thinking about it as soon as it happened, because if you didn’t, if you kept worrying it was coming back at full strength, it had a chance of taking root.
The woman’s sunglasses remained locked on him, as if privately documenting the existence of a defect, a marker of some innate inferiority. His body’s thermostat spiked, his hairline prickling with sweat. “I’m available Tuesday at five o’clock.” It sounded like she was setting the time, not asking if he were free.
“Sure,” he said, keeping his syllables to a minimum.
“I’ll see you then, Conor O’Toole,” she said and walked away.
Only later, when he was brushing his teeth at home, did he realize he hadn’t gotten her name.
“Con man with some nefarious purpose,” he said to himself in the mirror. He would be making six hundred dollars off these people his first week. If he was a con man, then he was a low-rent one.
Building refresh aims to boost accessibility, preserve historic character
Eliot House, known for its iconic belltower and southwest gate that opens to the Charles River, will be the next undergraduate residence to undergo significant renovations as part of Harvard’s long-term House Renewal project.
The design phase of Eliot House renewal began in January, with architecture firm KieranTimberlake. Exploratory work will be conducted this summer and if all goes according to plan, construction is expected to begin in the summer of 2025. Eliot’s reimagining follows the three-phase renewal of Adams House, which is slated to finish its final leg in 2025.
“The overarching principles of House renewal are to strengthen the modern student experience while preserving the University’s treasured assets, along with the culture and spirit of the House,” said Cameron Borgasano, deputy director in the Undergraduate House Renewal Project Management Office. “Our goals are many: to maintain the character of the House, eliminate overcrowding, build community, provide accessibility, strengthen the tutor and student interaction, increase student-faculty interaction, and expand social, study, and academic spaces.”
First opened in 1931, Eliot, named after former Harvard President Charles William Eliot, is one of the College’s seven original Houses. Beloved for its annual fête spring formal and fall charity ice skating show, Eliot boasts a tower room with a piano donated by Leonard Bernstein ’39, a woodshop, a photography darkroom, and a late-night grill nicknamed “The Inferno.”
Updates to the House will make the building accessible, adding corridors to connect the neo-Georgian House’s traditional vertical entryways, as well as elevators, modern mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, and air conditioning for common spaces.
The process is being led by the Eliot House Renewal Advisory Committee, which includes representatives from the Undergraduate House Renewal project team, Harvard College Dean’s Office, and Eliot House’s residential dean, faculty deans, House administrator, and building manager.
“The process of working together as a group has been a very rewarding experience,” said Borgasano. “It’s really bringing in all of the voices of the House, and I think it’s going to make the design of Eliot House that much stronger.”
Eliot’s student residents have shared their renovation ideas through a student survey and a well-attended town hall event.
Helen Scarborough ’25, who lives in the House and co-chairs the Eliot House Committee, has helped gather resident input as a member of the Student Renewal Committee. She hopes the renovations will bring improved accessibility, as well as upgrades to the House’s gym and dance studio.
“I really appreciated that we had that opportunity to give our feedback,” said Scarborough, who is concentrating in history and science on the medicine and society track, with a secondary in global health and health policy. “As students who have friends in other Houses, we have been able to see what’s worked in Houses that have already been renovated, allowing us to make informed suggestions for Eliot.”
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
“My dream is to have us walk out of Eliot in the summer of 2025 as the strong community that we are now, and preserve that over the two years that we’re not in Eliot.”
Sue Weltman, House Administrator, pictured above
Suggestions from students prioritized maintaining the traditional feel of the building. Some of Scarborough’s favorite spaces in the House include the grand dining hall (widely considered the “heart” of Eliot), the grassy courtyard, and a study nook in the library that can only be reached via a narrow spiral staircase.
“We will maintain the historic nature of those truly historic spaces,” Borgasano said. “When you walk into the dining hall, it’ll just feel a little fresher. We will restore the beautiful millwork, we will refinish the historic light fixtures, and strategically insert modern mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. Essentially, they’ll look like they do now, just a little cleaner and brighter.”
When construction gets underway, students will live in the Inn at Harvard and in apartments on Prescott and Mount Auburn streets, and Massachusetts Avenue.
Sue Weltman, who has been Eliot’s House Administrator for 24 years, said maintaining camaraderie among students will be her top priority.
“My dream is to have us walk out of Eliot in the summer of 2025 as the strong community that we are now, and preserve that over the two years that we’re not in Eliot, so that when we come back in the fall of 2027, we will have never missed a beat,” Weltman said.
Even though she will graduate before Eliot’s renewal begins, Scarborough still feels invested in helping shape the vision of the House for future students.
“Even though I won’t get to live there, I’ve seen how important House life has been to my experience at the College,” Scarborough said. “Getting to be part of a community for three years is really nice. You make a lot of really great relationships, and it’s just improved my time at the College immensely and I want future students to have the same experience I have had, if not a better one, so I want to contribute to this process in any way I can.”
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FAS receives gift to bolster arts, humanities, and strengthen financial aid
File photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
3 min read
Business leader Joseph Y. Bae ’94 and novelist Janice Y. K. Lee ’94 expand upon three decades of supporting academic excellence, opportunity at Harvard
Harvard announced today that Joseph Y. Bae ’94 and Janice Y. K. Lee ’94 have made a $20 million gift to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Their generosity will endow the inaugural Bae Family Dean of Arts and Humanities and support undergraduate financial aid, helping ensure the University can continue to attract talented students from all backgrounds.
“Joe Bae and Janice Lee are eloquent advocates for higher education and devoted citizens of the University,” said interim President Alan Garber. “This new gift will advance arts and humanities scholarship at Harvard and broaden financial support for our undergraduate students — two aims that are near to Joe and Janice’s hearts. I am, as always, deeply grateful for their generosity, which is surpassed only by the time and effort they have dedicated to help ensure our continued academic excellence.”
The new gift strengthens 30 years of support the couple have shown Harvard since their first contributions as undergraduates to their own Senior Gift campaign. Bae, who became a fellow at Harvard College this year, and Lee have been two of Harvard’s most engaged alumni leaders. Both serve on the FAS Dean’s Council, the University’s Global Advisory Council, the FAS Committee on Financial Aid, and as current co-chairs for the Class of 1994 Gift Committee.
In 2021, Bae and Lee spearheaded a philanthropic drive to support an FAS initiative in Asian American studies scholarship and education. As part of that effort, they endowed the Bae Family Professorships of Government and of History, now held by Taeku Lee and Erika Lee, respectively. In 2015, the couple established the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Arts Lectureship in creative writing, currently held by Claire Messud. As undergraduates, Bae concentrated in social studies, and Lee studied English. Lee has since written and published two best-selling novels.
“Joe and Janice have, again and again, shown the power of investing in people to drive Harvard’s mission forward,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS. “And their support couldn’t come at a better time for the Division of the Arts and Humanities. As Sean Kelly begins his tenure as the new divisional dean this July, he will have the resources to advance a bold and affirmative vision for the disciplines at the historic heart of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And their support for Harvard’s long-standing commitment to financial aid means we can continue to recruit the most promising students from around the world, regardless of their ability to pay. Bringing extraordinary people together and giving them the resources to do their best work is what sets Harvard apart.”
This weekend, Bae and Lee will celebrate their 30th reunion on campus with hundreds of classmates, having helped raise $140 million to date and engage seven new Class of 1994 co-chairs. With a total of 25 co-chairs who have made exceptionally generous gifts, the class is on track to earn a place in the Harvard College Fund record books.
“We are thrilled to continue our support of Harvard in the important areas of financial aid and the humanities, both of which are critical to the University’s long-term success as an academic leader in the world. Harvard has made a tremendous impact in our lives, and it is a privilege to support the FAS’s key priorities,” Bae and Lee said.
Harvard-led study IDs statin that may block pathway to some cancers
Cholesterol-lowering drug suppresses chronic inflammation that creates dangerous cascade
Tracy Hampton
MGH Communications
3 min read
Statins, commonly used cholesterol-lowering drugs, may block a pathway that leads to the development of cancer from chronic inflammation, according to a new study led by investigators from Harvard-affiliated Mass General Cancer Center.
The team’s experiments showed that environmental toxins, such as those caused by exposure to allergens and chemical irritants, create a cascade effect that stimulates inflammation in the skin and pancreas that, when chronic, can result in cancer. Their findings suggest that using statins to suppress this pathway may have a protective effect.
The findings are published in Nature Communications.
In mice, pitavastatin suppressed environmentally induced inflammation in the skin and the pancreas and prevented the development of inflammation-related pancreatic cancers.
“Chronic inflammation is a major cause of cancer worldwide,” said senior author Shawn Demehri, a principal investigator at the Center for Cancer Immunology and Cutaneous Biology Research Center of Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School and theBob and Rita Davis Family MGH Research Scholar 2023-2028.
“We investigated the mechanism by which environmental toxins drive the initiation of cancer-prone chronic inflammation in the skin and pancreas. Furthermore, we examined safe and effective therapies to block this pathway in order to suppress chronic inflammation and its cancer aftermath,” Demehri said.
The study relied on cell lines, animal models, human tissue samples, and epidemiological data. The group’s cell-based experiments demonstrated that environmental toxins (such as exposure to allergens and chemical irritants) activate two connected signaling pathways called the TLR3/4 and TBK1-IRF3 pathways. This activation leads to the production of the interleukin-33 (IL-33) protein, which stimulates inflammation in the skin and pancreas that can contribute to the development of cancer.
When they screened a library of U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs, the researchers found that the statin pitavastatin effectively suppresses IL-33 expression by blocking the activation of the TBK1-IRF3 signaling pathway. In mice, pitavastatin suppressed environmentally induced inflammation in the skin and pancreas and prevented development of inflammation-related pancreatic cancers.
In human pancreas tissue samples, IL-33 was overexpressed in samples from patients with chronic pancreatitis (inflammation) and pancreatic cancer compared with normal pancreatic tissue. Also, in analyses of electronic health records data on more than 200 million people across North America and Europe, use of pitavastatin was linked to a significantly reduced risk of chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer.
The findings demonstrate that blocking IL-33 production with pitavastatin may be a safe and effective preventive strategy to suppress chronic inflammation and the subsequent development of certain cancers.
“Next, we aim to further examine the impact of statins in preventing cancer development in chronic inflammation in liver and gastrointestinal tract and to identify other novel, therapeutic approaches to suppress cancer-prone chronic inflammation” said Demehri.
Research support was provided by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the LEO Foundation, the Sidney Kimmel Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Hoekstra, Faust, colleagues laud Robin Kelsey, who will step down from arts and humanities deanship
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Robin Kelsey.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Robin Kelsey prepares to finish his term as dean of arts and humanities and return to full-time teaching as the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in the fall, an appreciation for the last eight years had come sharply into focus.
“I have loved this job,” Kelsey said. “Lately, I’ve realized even more profoundly what this job has meant to me. I have loved this job because of the people I have had a chance to work with, and the dreams that we’ve been able to dream together and, sometimes, bring to fruition.”
Kelsey, who took the role in July 2016, leaves behind a legacy of championing the humanities while striving to bring the arts into the heart of the undergraduate curriculum. Kelsey’s colleagues gathered at Loeb Hall earlier this month to honor his tenure, with a celebration that included a performance of Beethoven and Debussy by the Parker Quartet.
“Robin has dedicated himself to thinking about the arts and humanities and their place within higher education in new and innovative ways,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS. “We can look almost anywhere on campus and see the impact of Robin’s vision and influence. Robin has helped create new spaces, new frameworks, new mechanisms for putting the arts in intentional dialogue with academic community. He has been instrumental in blazing new trails to amplify the ways in which the humanities contribute to public discourse.”
Hopi Hoekstra.
As dean, Kelsey is known for his positivity even in the face of adversity, his collaborative nature, and his infectious laugh.
“We have loved Robin’s optimism and his ability to find the positive in almost every situation,” said Gretchen Brodnicki, administrative dean for arts and humanities. “We love his can-do approach to solving problems and how he regularly asks each of us for our advice and help in finding creative solutions. We love his sincerity, his honesty, his integrity, his patience, his humility, his innate goodness, and tireless dedication for our community and to our team.”
In recent years, Kelsey led the division in a thorough and extensive strategic planning process, a multitiered, multiyear initiative to assess the structure of the Division of Arts & Humanities and to make sure its organization is equipped to support the intellectual interests and administrative needs of its future community.
Suzannah Clark, director of the Mahindra Center and Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music, called Kelsey an inspiring model of leadership. Clark co-taught HUM90 with him in 2020, and said the students from that cohort still turn to Kelsey for advice, both personal and professional.
“You have worked behind the scenes to really change the idea that Harvard had about what it meant for arts to be fully incorporated into an institution like ours, and that is a real legacy,” Clark said.
As interest in the humanities declined, Kelsey has worked tirelessly to reconfigure the boundaries of academic disciplines and come up with innovative ways to bring humanities education to students.
His love for arts and humanities extends beyond his role. Chair of the Department of English Glenda Carpio, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, shared an anecdote about how she checked in on Kelsey during a particularly challenging time and found him reading about America’s Reconstruction period while listening to Erroll Garner’s complete album “Concert by the Sea.”
“He doubles down on truth and beauty precisely at the moments of most crisis,” Carpio said.
When he leaves his post June 30, he will pass the divisional baton to Sean Kelly, the Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy, and return to the classroom and to his research.
Drew Gilpin Faust, president emerita of Harvard and the Arthur Kingsley Porter Research Professor, said in a statement read by Hoekstra that Kelsey, with whom she worked to implement the young Theater, Dance & Media concentration, has changed the “place and the meaning” of the arts at Harvard.
“You have made this place different and better in ways that will endure,” Faust said. “Your deanship itself has been a work of art, I would venture to say, a masterpiece.”
Portrait honors Harvard’s first Black lacrosse player, whose 1941 benching in the South sparked outcry
Nicholas Economides and Philip Tor
Harvard Correspondents
4 min read
In 1941, the Harvard men’s lacrosse team drove south for a game against the U.S. Naval Academy. But when the Crimson arrived at Annapolis, Navy team officials notified the Harvard coaching staff they would not play the contest if Lucien V. Alexis Jr. ’42 — the team’s first Black player — took the field.
Head coach Dick Snibbe and Alexis’ teammates refused to bench him and decided to forfeit the game in protest. But the following day, Harvard administration ordered Alexis to travel back to Cambridge and the game was played as scheduled.
As newspapers reported on the incident, public outrage was directed at both Harvard and Navy. When Harvard’s lacrosse team traveled to West Point, New York, a week later to play a game against the U.S. Military Academy they were welcomed by a cheering group led by Black cadets. Alexis played that match.
“We honor Lucien’s dedication to his team and institution, and recognize the hardship that Alexis unjustly endured while at this institution.”
Habiba Braimah, senior director of the Harvard Foundation
This fall, Alexis’ legacy will be honored when his portrait — painted as part of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations’ Portraiture Project — is installed in the Gilman Room at Agassiz Theatre.
“We honor Lucien’s dedication to his team and institution, and recognize the hardship that Alexis unjustly endured while at this institution,” said Habiba Braimah, senior director of the Harvard Foundation.
Launched in 2002, the portrait project aims to better reflect Harvard’s diversity on walls around campus.
Midfielder Fred Asare-Konadu ’24 said Alexis’ story was immediately relatable. “As a lacrosse player, there have been so many situations where I was the only African American person on a team or in a room. I was able to understand how he may have felt in many of these situations.”
“He had to make a lot of hard decisions for the betterment of his team,” defender Jaden Jernigan ’25 said. “His fortitude and ability to push through an unfortunate situation is something I try to pull from in my everyday decision-making process. He has been a huge influence on me.”
Members of the Harvard College Men’s Lacrosse Team and their coach.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Last spring, Frisbie Family Head Coach for Harvard Men’s Lacrosse Gerry Byrne reached out to Asare-Konadu and Jernigan, asking them to help get the Alexis portrait across the finish line. From there, the pair have worked with the Harvard Foundation to help raise awareness of Alexis’ story.
“I saw a sense of complexity in his face. This portrait is about dealing with change and being in the middle of it.”
Stephen E. Coit
“In any group, your identity is the culmination of stories that you continue to share,” Asare-Konadu said. “I think Coach Byrne does a phenomenal job of talking about our history. Knowing that Lucien’s story will be brought back into these conversations is important for the culture we are continuing to instill.”
“The importance of representation in portraiture cannot be overstated, as it serves as a visual narrative of our shared history, values, and contributions,” Braimah said. “Through these portraits, we honor the legacies of those that have made significant contributions to Harvard and highlight the importance of representation in creating a more equitable and diverse environment.”
Artist Stephen E. Coit ’71 spoke at the unveiling of the portrait last month. “My goal is to not to give my impressions of people, my goal is to give their impressions, so they communicate to you what they want to say. I saw a sense of complexity in his face. This portrait is about dealing with change and being in the middle of it.”
Asare-Konadu and Jernigan say they hope more people across the athletics program and the wider campus community can learn from Alexis’ sacrifices.
“I think it will help foster growth,” Jernigan said. “Not only between teammates, but across lacrosse and different sports. I think it’s an amazing thing to share, and I’m glad we are a part of it.”
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New Alzheimer’s study suggests genetic cause of specific form of disease
Neurons with amyloid plaques.
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
9 min read
Findings eventually could pave way to earlier diagnosis, treatment, and affect search for new therapies
A recent study published in Nature Medicine offers evidence that genetics may be a direct cause of a specific form of Alzheimer’s disease and not merely a risk factor. While most patients currently do not have a clearly identified cause of this devastating illness, researchers found that people with two copies of the gene variant APOE4 are at extremely high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. The finding led them to recommend a new designation that takes this into account, which could lead to up to a fifth of Alzheimer’s patients being classified as having a genetically caused form of the disease. The shift eventually could lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment and affect the search for therapies. Reisa Sperling, a neurologist at Mass General Brigham and an author of the study, explains the importance of the findings. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your study highlights a new, clearly identified genetic component to Alzheimer’s disease worthy of a new designation. Could you explain why that’s significant?
Designating this form of Alzheimer’s disease means a group of people who are extremely likely — I won’t say absolutely, but extremely likely — to develop Alzheimer’s could be treated earlier. This could really have an impact on preventing dementia.
The second thing is there’s been an ongoing debate about whether Alzheimer’s disease has anything to do with amyloid plaques or not. And in this group, they begin to have buildup of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in their late 50s and early 60s, and the likelihood that they will develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease is extremely high. So it creates another link in our understanding of the disease process.
And finally, this is a bridge between the rare forms of genetically determined Alzheimer’s disease that are 100 percent penetrant and often affect people in their 40s and 50s. Those cases are often considered such a rarity that they’re not representative of Alzheimer’s disease. So people with two copies of APOE4 are a bit in the middle. This new study really suggests that their biomarkers are similar to what we see in these rare autosomal dominant diseases, and over 90 percent will develop Alzheimer’s pathology in their brains. It links the rare genetic forms of Alzheimer’s to what we call sporadic late-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Part of this new classification would also make this type of Alzheimer’s one of the most common genetic disorders in the world. Are there benefits to having it classified that way?
I don’t know that I’m the best person to opine on that, but I certainly think there may be important reasons. For example, eventually getting insurance coverage for individuals who are below the age of 65 and need rapid evaluation and treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease often doesn’t get diagnosed in these individuals because people think they’re too young. Additionally, they may not have insurance coverage for all of the medications required for treatment.
I do think it is important that this is recognized as one of the more common genetic links to Alzheimer’s disease and leads the way to one day being able to treat people who have a strong family history and genetic predisposition. Then we can really think about being aggressive and treating patients early.
“Somehow, we have to turn these findings to — instead of being scary for people — being a sense of hope.”
Reisa Sperling
Courtesy of Brigham and Women’s Hospital
We’ve known for a long time that there is a genetic component to Alzheimer’s disease. Is this one of the first studies to show such a specific genetic link?
No. As I mentioned there are these rare genes that we’ve known for more than 20 years that are very specific and cause Alzheimer’s disease at a much younger age. But this data really suggests that people who have two copies of this particular allele, APOE4, have such a high likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
So it’s not the first genetic link, but it is the first large study that convincingly says having two copies of this gene really increases the likelihood you will have Alzheimer’s disease. And it’s a more common gene; these other known genes are very rare. But with APOE4, it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of Alzheimer’s patients carry two copies of these alleles (although I will say that estimate is a little different across studies). It is much more common than these very rare autosomal dominant forms.
How common is it in the general population to have two copies of that gene?
Estimated, about 2 percent of the population, so it’s not that common. People having at least one copy of APOE4 is fairly common. Depending on which part of the world you’re from, that can be up to 25 percent. But having two copies is still pretty rare.
There is still so much that we don’t know about Alzheimer’s, but it does seem to be fueled by both genetic and environmental factors. In what ways does this research help push our understanding of the disease overall?
That’s a great question. And for me, this research really does provide support to both camps. One, the likelihood that people with these genes will develop amyloid plaque by the time they’re age 65 is somewhere between 75 and 95 percent. To me that suggests that it is genetically driven.
But there is a variability in the range of when people develop symptoms. And that suggests that there might be environmental or lifestyle factors that can make people’s brains more resilient, or conversely, more vulnerable. This research really supports both ideas that genetics is a major driver in Alzheimer’s disease, but you can modulate your risk of showing symptoms.
Would it be beneficial for people to know early on if they are carriers of these genes?
At this moment, I do not recommend that people who don’t have symptoms get genetic testing or blood-based biomarker testing. I hope that recommendation will change greatly over the next few years.
There are large-scale clinical trials, including the one I run. We’re recruiting people who have evidence of amyloid buildup, but don’t yet have symptoms, and we’re recruiting a lot of people with a family history and have copies of APOE4. If that study and other studies like it succeed in treating people before they have symptoms, then I would recommend testing and trying to get treatment as soon as possible.
But we don’t have that available right now, and I just think we don’t yet know what to do with that information before people have symptoms.
If this new classification did occur, what areas of further research would you be most excited to pursue?
Number one for me is we need to be able to offer treatments to those patients. Right now, there’s actually a black-box warning on some currently approved Alzheimer’s treatments that cautions treating people who have two copies of APOE4 because the risk of side effects is so great. I want to redouble my efforts to make sure we can offer disease-modifying medications in a safe way.
Number two is about the environment. I’m quite interested in what it is that modulates whether people get symptoms sooner rather than later, with this buildup of amyloid that’s genetically determined. How do we understand what factors were protective? That’s a very important area of research to help us understand what can modulate people’s risk of symptoms in the setting of a very strong genetic predisposition.
We talk about this in the study, but I think it’s also important to mention that these studies mostly observed white majority populations. And one of the things we desperately need to know is whether these findings are also true in more ethnic and racially diverse populations. There is some evidence that APOE4 might have a slightly different effect on amyloid in populations who come from communities of color.
Similarly, there are slight differences in the sex effects: Women APOE4 carriers have more likelihood of developing symptoms. I think it’s really important to get more information on representative populations, especially from communities of color, and really help us develop treatments that will work best for everybody.
For people who have Alzheimer’s or loved ones with Alzheimer’s, how do these findings offer hope or shed light on the disease?
This is another tool to be able to find people who have Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage and treat them earlier. My dad and my grandfather died of this disease, and I’m a clinical neurologist. When I see people with symptoms, I think this is helping us learn about the underlying causes and will help us in accelerating to find good treatments.
I think it will both help the next generation of people who are likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, but it will also help us treat people who already have Alzheimer’s disease symptoms because every little bit of information helps us develop better treatments for all.
I really hope this research doesn’t have the effect of just scaring people. I hope it will instead say, “These are important clues so that we can treat people earlier and hopefully prevent dementia.”
Somehow, we have to turn these findings to — instead of being scary for people — being a sense of hope. I hope this means we will be able to find people and treat them before they develop symptoms.
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One way to help big groups of students? Volunteer tutors.
Research finds low-cost, online program yields significant results
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
It’s well established that tutoring programs can make a big difference in student outcomes.
A recent study by Harvard researchers Eliana La Ferrara, Ph.D. ’99, and Michela Carlana looked specifically at the effectiveness of a low-cost, online model staffed by trained college student volunteers, one that could potentially be deployed on a wider basis.
The two found the program showed strong efficacy in improving academic performance for a range of students, including economically disadvantaged ones. And they discovered some unanticipated social, psychological, and attitudinal gains for the students — and even some for the tutors.
La Ferrara said the low cost could make this kind of approach “appealing for some governments.” In the study, the two noted, “Volunteer tutors represent a viable and cost-effective solution to reach a large number of students in need of support.”
The program showed strong efficacy in improving academic performance for a range of students, including economically disadvantaged ones.
La Ferrara is a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is president of the Econometric Society and program director of development economics for the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Carlana is an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Their study, which matched middle school students in Italy with volunteer tutors from several universities, began in the spring of 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We found ourselves in the middle of the pandemic that hit Italy immediately after the China outbreak,” Carlana said. “Within two weeks, schools closed, and everything became remote.”
Tutors were recruited from Bocconi University, where La Ferrara held the Invernizzi Chair in Development Economics at the time, directing the Laboratory for Effective Anti-Poverty Policies (LEAP), as well as Bicocca University and University of Milan, and trained with education specialists for three weeks to instruct students in math, Italian, and English.
“We had this program running where the pedagogical experts provided the training and also counseling in case the tutors had issues that they wanted to discuss one-on-one,” La Ferrara said.
The study was then repeated in 2022 with a new set of students and tutors at 10 different universities in Northern Italy. “So we were trying to test out and understand both during the pandemic, but also afterwards, whether this is an effective way to improve learning for the most disadvantaged,” La Ferrara said.
Of the 2,196 students in the sample, 42 percent were female, 23 percent were immigrants, and 29 percent had learning disorders.
The researchers looked at administrative data from the Italian Ministry of Education, long-term standardized test scores, the results of a standardized test administered by the research team, and surveys of parents, students, tutors, and teachers. They found that performance, especially in math, improved for nearly every student both during and after the pandemic.
Surprisingly, Carlana said they also found the tutoring had “very strong effects on these other soft dimensions, like psychological well-being, aspiration, and social emotional skills, even if our program is not directly targeted to those.”
Researchers surveyed participants about their aspirations for college and high school and their belief in faith or luck as the key to success. To measure well-being, researchers used the Children’s Depression Screener. They found that the most disadvantaged pupils, especially immigrant students, had the greatest improvement in soft skills.
“When we look at the effect on happiness and depression, those improvements are driven by immigrant children,” La Ferrara said. “Their ability to be in touch with peers when schools are closed, these are students who probably have fewer social networks — maybe they don’t get the call, they’re not on the same WhatsApp groups, or whatever. So for these more disadvantaged or more isolated students, the tutor becomes a very important window outside the family.”
However, as in-person learning resumed, the soft skills benefits for students lessened.
“I feel like in part it could be related to the fact that now the students have a wider set of opportunities outside [of tutoring] either to improve the soft skills that could be the more beneficial in in-person interaction compared to online interaction,” Carlana added.
One thing that proved eye-opening for the researchers was the effect on tutors. La Ferrara and Carlana surveyed participating tutors and those who applied but were not selected due to capacity. They asked questions attempting to gauge empathy and attitudes about the role of hard work, luck, and social connections in achieving success.
“We found that the volunteers who had had become tutors had significantly more empathy toward others, but no different beliefs on the importance of luck versus effort,” La Ferrara said. “So we think this is an aspect that deserves more work, because all the existing studies on in-person tutoring tend to focus on what tutoring does to the recipient, the student, but it’s an important experience for the tutor, especially when they are volunteers … it could be a life-changing experience for some of these younger tutors.”
The researchers are currently in the process of following up with tutors to see how and whether the program impacted their post-graduation career paths.
The two also are working on studying the program in different countries and with different experimental designs to better target and assign students to tutors.
“We like the idea that this could be implementable in many settings, and in fact, one of the settings where we ran the program for two years was the Dominican Republic, which is very different from Italy,” La Ferrara said. “And so it created challenges in adapting the program in recruiting tutors from a very different institutional setting. But in the future, this could be picked up more.”
Claire Messud’s autobiographically inspired new novel traces ordinary lives through WWII, new world orders, Big Oil, and rise and fall of ideals
During World War II, as Nazi troops advanced on France, Claire Messud’s grandfather, a French naval attaché based in Greece, penned a letter to his children to be opened if he did not survive the war.
“It is important for you to know,” he wrote, “we are Mediterranean; we are Latin; we are Catholic; we are French.”
Messud, who is North American and a non-practicing Protestantwas struck by the expansiveness of the divide in identity and values between relatives just two generations apart.
“I was suddenly realizing that the world in which I had been brought up and the ideals that had been instilled in me in an unthinking way, now seemed historical to my children, and seemed of a bygone moment,” she said.
Claire Messud’s aunt Denise Messud, grandmother Lucienne Messud, and father François-Michel Messud, pictured in 1940. They inspired characters in her new novel.
Photo courtesy of Claire Messud
Patriarch Gaston Cassar, his devoted wife, Lucienne, and their children, François and Denise, are “pieds noirs,” people of French origin living in Algeria during French colonial rule. The family leaves the country amid the Algerian War of Independence, and their story grapples with rootlessness, sense of culture, and belonging.
“One of the feelings that I had as I was working on this novel was a Zelig-like sense that this little family of no consequence in the wider world was encountering the forces of history at every turn,” Messud said of the Cassars, whose lives span World War II and its aftermath, the rise of oil (and the climate crisis), and the spread of English as lingua franca.
“This idea that where we are now doesn’t come out of nowhere,” Messud said. “Even 70 years ago the patterns were beginning that have shaped the lives and the challenges that we have now.”
Messud has authored six other works of fiction, including “The Emperor’s Children,” “The Woman Upstairs,” and “The Last Life,” which was also inspired by family history.
“I’ve often felt that I have a faith in stories,” Messud said. “The things that we read shape us and change our lives. Even when we don’t fully remember them, we internalize them and the characters that we’ve loved or hated or grappled with become part of a world in our heads that shapes how we understand the world.”
The Cassars are inspired by her grandparents, parents, aunt, and even herself. When 8-year-old François writes his father a letter, telling him that the Germans have invaded Paris, it’s modeled after one Messud’s father wrote as a boy in 1940. Gaston’s visit to an oil drilling site in the Sahara Desert reimagines a similar one Messud’s grandfather took in 1953.
A handwritten letter dated June 15, 1940, sent from Messud’s 8-year-old father to his father. The second-to-last line of the letter says, “The Germans have crossed the gates of Paris.”
Photo courtesy of Claire Messud
Messud also wanted to capture the optimism many families felt at the end of World War II, a belief that the future was cosmopolitan, a dissolving of national, racial, bordered identities. It’s a worldview that later generations have had a difficult time conceptualizing, Messud believes.
“In 1989 when the wall came down and the Soviet Union was dissolving, people thought, ‘All wars will end now,’” Messud said. “We really hoped that the world would be entering a new and better time. And that seems pretty far away now.”
The novel’s final pages reveal a shocking taboo in Gaston and Lucienne’s marriage — one that did not perturb them since their marriage was approved by the pope and considered “ordained by God.” Messud uses this example of blind religious faith to draw a comparison to colonialism — something else previous generations unquestioningly accepted.
“There was a sense not only that it wasn’t a bad thing, but that the colonial project brought good things,” Messud said. “We have the opposite perspective now, and that too is part of the story. These were people, as we all are, born into the beliefs of their times.”
Messud said this book felt “different” from past projects, as it allowed her to feel close to her late family members as she was writing.
“They’re all gone now, and at the time I was writing, they weren’t.”
“They’re all gone now, and at the time I was writing, they weren’t,” she said. “It was a joy to be with them and to be trying to understand their thoughts. It felt like the opposite of passing judgment.”
The character in the novel who most resembles Messud is Chloe, the Cassar granddaughter, who is the narrator of her own sections. Chloe says in the prologue her goal as a writer is to “save life.” Messud agrees.
“Being a writer, for me, feels like taking seawater between my hands and trying to run up to the top of the beach — the water is running through my hands the whole time,” Messud said. “What is life like? What is it like to be a person on the planet in a time in a place? It’s an endless curiosity about what it’s like to be alive.”
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Digging into the Philippines Collections at the Peabody Museum
Photo by Jeromel Dela Rosa Lara ’23.
Faith Sutter
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture Communications
7 min read
Filipino American archivist offers personal perspective to exhibit
As part of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and to mark the digital launch of its exhibit “Balikbayan | Homecoming: Filipino Perspectives on the Philippine Collections,” the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology spoke with Associate Archivist Marie Wasnock, a Filipino American from Hawaii who worked on the exhibit.
You’re currently helping curator of Oceanic Collections Ingrid Ahlgren with her upcoming online exhibit “Balikbayan | Homecoming: Filipino Perspectives on the Philippine Collections,” launching Wednesday.You’re also one of the participants who is reflecting on the collections. What has that been like?
I’m usually busy helping researchers search for information or access collections, so I rarely get to do research myself. But the online exhibit has given me the perfect opportunity to dig into the collections at the Peabody Museum and at Harvard University libraries, learn more about my cultural heritage, and reflect on my own identity as a Filipino-American.
Looking through the photograph collections about the Philippines can be a powerful experience, evoking many feelings, emotions, and questions. Many of the images are heavy reminders of the American colonization of the Philippines in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and those can be difficult, disturbing, or offensive to see. However, beyond the colonial lens of these images, there are also photos that show the cultural and geographical diversity of the Philippines. There is very little information accompanying these photographs, so many questions come to mind when I look at these images — about the people, the land, the languages, art, culture, and traditions — encouraging me to explore them further to find answers.
“Growing up in America, you do not usually learn about the Philippines’ complicated colonial history or the complexities of Filipino culture and identity in your standard social studies class.”
Girls embroidering traditional Filipino piña fabric made from the fibers of the pineapple plant.
Gift of William Cameron Forbes, 1912. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Tell us more about those images.
More than 5,700 Philippines photos in the Peabody have been scanned and made available in the Peabody Museum’s Collections Online. When these photos were taken between 1899 and 1912, the Philippines was still a new and unfamiliar place to most Americans and perhaps the rest of the world. The photos were created by a team of American photographers and amateur anthropologists who were hired by the U.S. government to document the Philippines in hopes of learning more about their new colonial acquisition after the Spanish-American War. Although the photos come with limited information about the ethnic groups and provinces that were photographed, viewers can see how culturally and biologically diverse the Philippines is just by looking at the breadth of these images.
There are still several photo albums in the collection that are unidentified and not digitized. For example, I found one mysterious photo album containing many unidentified portraits of Filipina women in traditional Filipiniana dress. This album struck my curiosity when I showed it to former Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo during her visit to the museum. Some of the women appear to be students, nurses, musicians, etc., but there is little to no information about them in the Peabody’s archives. I wanted to be able to identify at least one of these women and get a sense of what it was like being female in the Philippines in the early 20th century.
The photo collection was donated by former U.S. governor-general to the Philippines and Harvard alumnus William Cameron Forbes. Many of his journals and personal papers are held at Harvard’s Houghton Library, so I continued my research there. I hoped to learn more about Forbes’ service in the Philippines, the provinces he visited, and the people he encountered. He kept very thorough and detailed journals during his 10 years living there — and even created an index for his 10 volumes of journal — so that was extremely helpful to understanding many of the photos. In the exhibit, I take readers on my archival journey to learn more about these photographs and the women in them.
Women preparing to extract oil for cooking in Nueva Ecija province, circa 1898-1912. Wasnock recalls family stories of her grandmother running the Uytingco Bakery in Gapan, Nueva Ecija, Philippines.
Gift of William Cameron Forbes, 1912. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Young lady wearing a traditional baro’t saya or “blouse and skirt,” made of pineapple fabric called piña, an indigenous textile of the Philippines, circa 1909.
Gift of William Cameron Forbes, 1912. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Three Filipina nurses who received awards for the highest averages and technique work in the operating room, circa 1909.
Gift of William Cameron Forbes, 1912. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
How has the collection research connected with you personally?
Growing up in America, you do not usually learn about the Philippines’ complicated colonial history or the complexities of Filipino culture and identity in your standard social studies class. I don’t think many people realize that there are more than 7,000 islands in the Philippines and more than 100 ethnolinguistic groups in its population. As a Filipino American who was born and raised in Hawaii, I’ve often felt like I wasn’t “Filipino enough,” especially because I don’t know the language and haven’t spent a lot of time the Philippines. But I believe one commonality that links many Filipinos are the values our elders instilled in us and the respect we have for family, culture, faith, land, and education. I feel even more connected to my Filipino heritage now that I have a better understanding of the country’s history and have had a chance to reflect on and appreciate my personal experiences and memories of growing up in a Filipino family.
My mom is from Manila, and she was thrilled to learn about this exhibit. She reminds me how lucky I am to have access to these resources at Harvard, and while that is true, really anyone can ask to view these collections at the Peabody Museum and at Houghton Library. I’m honored as a librarian and an archivist to introduce these collections to people who are interested in them. My father was from the city of Gapan in the Nueva Ecija province. I was actually able to find some photos of Gapan and it’s really great to envision the memories that my family has of the Philippines. He passed away almost 10 years ago, so I wish he could see the work I’m doing. He was a proud Filipino and would have been happy to see how we’re highlighting Philippine culture.
What’s a typical day for you in the Peabody Museum’s archives?
I help researchers in the Harvard community as well as the general public find what they’re looking for in the archives, typically photographs and papers such as field notebooks, manuscripts, and other historical documents. I also host researchers and class visits when they want to study archival materials in the museum. Most of my days are spent finding answers to research questions from people all over the world — it can be very fascinating!
Three Kings Parish and Minor Basilica and National Shrine of La Virgen Divina Pastora in Gapan, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, circa 1898-1912.
Gift of William Cameron Forbes, 1912. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
Do you have any other highlights of your time in the Peabody’s archives?
Last fall, former Philippines Vice President Leni Robredo was a Hauser Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School. Jeromel Dela Rosa Lara ’23 brought her to the museum, and I got to meet and show her some items from the collection, including that mysterious photo album.
I love my job at the Peabody Museum because it often feels like I’m an armchair anthropologist, meeting people from all over the world, learning about their research, and learning about world cultures and history along the way. Being an archivist is also almost like being an archaeologist, but we dig through boxes of papers and photographs for information about the past.
As part of ArtsThursdays, “Celebrate Filipino Heritage” at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnologyfrom 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday (May 30).
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor shared a little secret with the audience at last week’s Radcliffe Day: Despite the many ups and downs of recent court rulings, the power still ultimately belongs to the people.
“I can’t change laws — that’s not my job. I can only tell you what the law says,” she said. “It’s the voice of people, of constituents, that can change laws that you think are unfair.”
Sotomayor, who received this year’s Radcliffe Medal in a ceremony last Friday, detailed the importance of civic engagement and education in her address, and the responsibility of older generations to ensure these values are passed along. She began with a recounting of how she came to pursue a career in law and how it began with her own mother’s high expectations.
Born in the Bronx, she was the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants and lost her father at a young age. Her mother instilled in her a tenacity to pursue education — and pushed her to dream big. Working tirelessly to pay for private schooling, her mother was a driving force in her life.
“Everything that I am that’s good is a legacy to my mother,” she said.
Sotomayor, a high school valedictorian, attended Princeton University, then Yale Law School, where she was an editor of The Yale Law Journal. She began her career working for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and later entered private practice. In 1991, Sotomayor was picked for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H.W. Bush; to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton in 1997; and to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2009.
She almost turned down Obama’s offer to ensure she would be present as her mother’s health declined.
“I was hesitant saying yes to President Obama because I was worried I would have less time to spend with her,” she said. “[My mother] said, ‘Don’t you dare not do this because of me. You would take away the dream I spent my life building. I wanted you to be the very best you can. You must take that job.’”
“[Sotomayor] broke barriers as the first Hispanic and first Latina to serve on the nation’s highest court,” said Dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Tomiko Brown-Nagin. “She’s been a fearless and insightful interpreter of our laws and Constitution. Justice Sotomayor is known for her incisive decisions and for rendering her analyses in clear and powerful prose.”
Rita Moreno, who in her 80 years as a performer has won an Oscar, a Tony, two Emmys, and a Grammy, introduced the justice. She said the two have been friends for a decade and that she has been struck by the judge’s ability to “remain profoundly human in the face of inhumanity” and that she’s a force that will continue to inspire others.
Rita Moreno.
“Behind that robe and gavel lives a woman just as human and relatable as anyone else,” Moreno said. “Her compassion matches her legal acumen; her ability to see the people behind the cases and recognize the pain and humanity they live through has always set her apart.”
Sotomayor spoke of the many people who helped her along the way. In a space predominantly occupied by men, she said that “men stepped up” to become her mentors and help guide her.
And when she joined the U.S. Supreme Court, she found trailblazers such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor to support her. Sotomayor saw how much these women poured into others, and it inspired her to do the same — particularly with students and other young people.
“We adults have taken the world and messed it up. We are leaving our kids a world filled with problems,” she said. “We’ve done some good, but the young generation has to be inspired to do a better job.”
But they also need to be prepared, she noted. The late Justice O’Connor noted that the rise in partisan politics correlated with a decrease in civic education investment. Today, the federal government invests only 5 cents per student in civic education, compared to $50 per student in STEM education. Sotomayor said that is why she joined the governing board of iCivics, which O’Connor founded in 2009 to address this issue.
She challenged the audience to try their hand at playing the iCivics online education games “Win the White House” or “Do I Have a Right?” to test their own understanding of how government works.
Civics education also serves another purpose, she said. It teaches people how to talk about things that are difficult or on which they disagree. Disagreement doesn’t make people “evil or bad.” She said she should know, given the mix of the current court, a comment that garnered laughter.
“You may have different values, and you have to accept that. But every person has some good in them,” she said. “That’s what keeps me going. All these activities I do, I do to keep my spirits up, to give me hope about the future, to let me keep believing that we can make a difference.”
The Radcliffe Medal is awarded annually during Commencement Week to an individual who “embodies its commitment to excellence and impact.” It was first awarded to Lena Horne in 1987, and past recipients include Madeleine Albright, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Melinda French Gates, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dolores Huerta, Sherrilyn Ifill, Toni Morrison, Sandra Day O’Connor, Gloria Steinem, Ophelia Dahl, and Janet Yellen.
Before Sotomayer took the stage, a multigenerational panel of activists, scholars, and attorneys took part in a panel discussion titled “The Long Arc of Equality and Justice in America.”
A common theme was the importance of engaging youth in some of society’s most pressing issues. Jerome Foster II, a 22-year-old climate activist, social entrepreneur, consultant, and speaker, noted that younger generations are finding ways to bring about change that include holding elected officials accountable.
“As young people, we’re coming together and saying, ‘You have to really have a moral awakening, where there’s a sense of clarity and purpose to you being in office and using that [position] you have for actual good,’” he said.
During the event, Sotomayor shared the stage with Martha Minow, the 300th Anniversary University Professor and a former dean of Harvard Law School. Minow asked Sotomayor whom she envisions as her audience when she writes her decisions.
Sotomayor said that it’s often for the general public, to explain her thoughts in a way that someone who is not a legal expert can understand. But she also writes them for people who might have the power to “make a difference for the positive”: lower court judges who might be able to think more broadly about a decision; the executive branch, which has powers she does not; or Congress, in hopes that it will correct a ruling the Court got wrong.
But for whoever reads her opinions, she’s hoping that people will be reminded of the power we all have as citizens.
“Throughout our history, men and women have given up their lives to secure our freedom and to promote our equality. There is no one in this room who is entitled to give up now,” she said.
When asked how she stays “eternally optimistic,” Sotomayor said she has her moments when she goes into her office, closes the door, and weeps. What then?
“You have to own it; you have to accept it; you have to shed the tears; then you have to wipe them and get up and fight some more,” she said.
Institutional Voice Working Group provides a roadmap in new report
Jessica McCann
Harvard Correspondent
long read
In April, interim President Alan M. Garber and interim Provost John F. Manning announced two University-wide initiatives to explore how best to cultivate and reinforce open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and academic freedom on campus. The first, the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, is examining how to nurture and support engagement across differing viewpoints in Harvard’s teaching, learning, and dialogue. The second, the Institutional Voice Working Group, has taken up the more specific question of whether and when Harvard as a University should speak on matters of social and political significance and who should be authorized to speak for the institution as a whole. On Tuesday, Garber, Manning, and the deans of Harvard’s Schools announced that they had accepted the working group’s proposed statement of principles.
The Institutional Voice Working Group began its work by conducting a broad review of the types of public statements that Harvard and peer institutions have made in recent years. It also invited community feedback. The group has engaged in extensive outreach to members of the Harvard community, conducting a survey, soliciting input via email, and hosting more than 30 virtual and in-person listening sessions. Discussions covered the criteria by which the University and its various units should make official statements about public matters, the rationale behind these criteria, and the consequences that might arise for Harvard and its community when they do so.
The Gazette spoke with co-chairs Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons about the working group’s report. Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and chair of Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Simmons is the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy and faculty co-director, Embedded EthiCS, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you summarize the report and what it seeks to do?
Simmons: Our charge was to answer the question: When, if at all, should the University make official statements about global events, and why/why not? We leaned into the why/why not. When the University speaks on an event or issue, why? What makes speaking about that event appropriate? Recognizing that not speaking about an event or issue is itself a speech act that will be “heard,” a compelling reason needs to be given for that too. We aimed to produce a guiding document that sets out the principles underlying the decision whether or not to issue a formal statement.
Feldman: The main point of the report is that the University’s leadership can and should speak out on anything relevant to the core function of the University, which is creating an environment suitable for free, open inquiry, teaching, and research. That environment is threatened these days, and we need to defend it. At the same time, the University as an institution should not make official statements on issues outside its core function. Harvard isn’t a government. It shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy.
In the end, we believe this approach is actually more inclusive to the whole community. We heard loud and clear from many stakeholders that if we speak out some of the time on some global or national issues, then many people feel we are ignoring other issues. And on some issues, our community is divided or the world is divided in such a way that we are going to drive controversy no matter what we say.
“Given the broad consensus we heard, we hope these principles will serve the University’s diverse community well for many years to come.”
Alison Simmons
The report describes the University’s purpose as “the pursuit of truth.” Why is this the core principle that should inform the use of Harvard’s institutional voice?
Feldman: Here at Harvard, we hold firmly to our ideal of Veritas. Our charge was to think about how institutional statements affect the carrying out of this purpose. As members of a university, we pursue truth through inquiry, debate, research, and a range of other methods. Our expertise lies in our scholarship. As an institution, Harvard doesn’t add to the truth by announcing a single official position on what is true in science or politics or whatever. In fact, it undermines our mission if the University makes official declarations about matters outside its core function.
Simmons: Pursuing truth looks different in different fields of study. Some of us think we are after understanding (a text, an artwork, a religious tradition). Some of us think of ourselves as producing knowledge (scientific, social, medical, legal). Some of us think we are preserving (cultural forms, objects, ideas). And methodologies vary widely across academic disciplines and Harvard’s Schools. So, by “truth” we mean to cast a wide net.
If what we do in the University is to pursue truth — and to pursue it by reasoned argument and debate, controlled experiment, and so on — then the job of the University as an institution is to create an environment in which we can have a healthy, productive, and free exchange of ideas and argument among diverse points of view on issues of science, society, values, culture, etc. We make progress by encountering friction with the things we take to be obviously true now, so long as the friction comes from a desire to get it right and not to shut down argument. We all have to be open to being challenged and to changing our minds in the face of new evidence. And we all have to engage people who think differently from us with curiosity and openness.
Feldman: One comment from a focus group with students that stands out in my mind is, “Everyone gets the emails and then everyone feels bad.” We’ve come to understand just how unsatisfactory statements truly are and how far they stray from our core function as an institution of higher learning. Leadership cares deeply for the community and they want to respond to the community’s desire for solutions to difficult social and political events playing out all over the world — but statements can’t provide this. Even expressions of empathy, when sent to such a broad community, can fall flat. What we recommend in our report is a return to what a university does best — teaching, research, learning, and service as an answer to these events.
In this report, who is the “we” when you say “institutional voice”?
Feldman: Our report applies to anyone authorized to speak on behalf of the University officially (the president, provost, deans, and other administrative leaders). Individual faculty and students have academic freedom. But they don’t speak on behalf of the whole University. That needs to be understood by the whole world.
Simmons: It is the individual community members who have academic freedom to pursue the questions they find important and interesting, to develop expertise in their chosen field, to teach the material they think is important, and to speak out on issues they find compelling. The University does not tell us what to say or think. And when we speak, we do not speak for the University. The University (i.e., its leadership) must use its voice to protect and promote the ability of all its community members to do precisely those things.
What did you hear in the listening sessions and from those who submitted thoughts and ideas through the survey or via email? How did it inform the report?
Simmons: One thing I learned is just how much people care about this institution. They really want Harvard to be the best place it can be. In that respect, I felt we were all trying to figure out how to answer this question together. We also heard a lot from people who feel pressure to “speak for Harvard” when they do not want to (because they recognize they cannot speak for everyone).
Feldman: We also heard a lot about how institutional statements and statements by individuals are taken up by the media, including social media. In an age of social media, it is easy for the public to think that anyone who posts wearing a crimson sweatshirt speaks “for” Harvard. They don’t! And we need to make that clear.
Given that Harvard is often the subject of intense public interest, some community members have called for the University to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality. This would be similar to the University of Chicago’s policy, as outlined in a document known as the Kalven Report, which calls for the neutrality of the university “out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.” Does your report call for institutional neutrality?
Feldman: Our report has some meaningful overlap with the Kalven Report. A key difference between the Kalven Report and ours is that we’re saying that, as an institution with values, we have a responsibility to promote our core function as an educational institution and defend ourselves against forces that seek to undermine our academic values. In that sense, we aren’t neutral, and we can’t be. Another big difference is our reason for restraint, which is based on speaking where we are experts and not speaking where the University as an institution isn’t expert.
Is the report a response to the many challenges Harvard and other higher ed institutions have faced since Oct. 7?
Simmons: The University has been making statements about all sorts of things for a long time. Conversations about whether it should be making so many statements have also been taking place for a long time. But the reality in which the University operates has changed over the past 10 years or so in ways that make it pressing to form a policy on the “to speak or not to speak” question.
First, news travels rapidly and widely through social media. When the University issues a statement, it reaches the entire world (intact or in distorted pieces) in seconds. (By contrast, when Derek Bok was president from 1971 to 1991, he wrote up quite long statements that were physically slid under the doors of faculty and students!) What’s more, anyone with a social media account can appear to the public to speak for Harvard. And that makes it hard for people outside the University to know what is and what is not an “official” Harvard statement. There’s just a lot less control over University communications.
Second, we now live in a world of extreme political polarization. And that means both that people tend to react to University statements (again, intact or distorted) in a polarized way, and also put pressure on the University to speak or not speak in polarized ways.
These two changes were certainly on display in the wake of Oct. 7. But they have been in place for quite some time. And the combination of these two new realities has made it important to form a policy.
How will this work dovetail with the work of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group?
Feldman: We were fortunate that we were asked for a clear deliverable — a set of principles for when the University should and should not issue official statements. The Open Inquiry Working Group has been asked to address a broader and more complex set of issues about how we can maintain and improve the work we do as a University. The two are connected, though. Both are concerned with how we achieve the core purpose we share.
Simmons: I think that our report might help to provide a framework and some core principles that can support the important work of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group. They are already thinking hard about how to promote constructive dialogue in the classroom, in the dining hall, and in the Houses — i.e., on the ground. I think they will help us learn how best to encourage our students to learn from each other through constructive disagreement, genuine curiosity, intellectual give and take, and a desire to grow.
We think our proposal can support that and we take it as a reminder to all of us that the University must commit itself to the value of creating an environment that facilitates open inquiry, and to acknowledge that the University itself must positively promote it and take great care not to jeopardize it, even if only inadvertently.
What’s next? How does the University translate these principles into action?
Simmons: For one, the community will need some time to get used to the idea that the University will not be speaking on a great number of things.
Feldman: Absolutely. With the University’s decision to take up these principles, there will need to be a significant culture shift as people realize, inside Harvard and outside, that the University has genuinely adopted a “say less” policy.
Simmons: We have come to expect those emails from the president’s office (and then the deans’ offices and then other School-based offices) when something urgent happens in the world. It will be startling, and possibly unsettling for a while, not to get them. University leadership will have to remind us all why it is not making as many statements as it used to. Another thing University leadership will have to do is figure out how to translate our recommendation into concrete policy and how to operationalize it.
Our working group set out to provide principles for a strong foundation for the University and any other university that might find these principles valuable. We received thoughtful input from more than 1,000 people across the University. Given the broad consensus we heard, we hope these principles will serve the University’s diverse community well for many years to come.
Feldman: Our goal is for the individual, expert voices of the University to be heard loud and clear. When the University focuses its institutional voice on its core function — and only on its core function — that will highlight the extraordinary work the members of the University do. When the University flourishes, we all can make more valuable contributions to knowledge and to the world.
Had a bad experience meditating? You're not alone.
Altered states of consciousness through yoga, mindfulness more common than thought and mostly beneficial, study finds — though clinicians ill-equipped to help those who struggle
Noah Brown
MGH Communications
4 min read
Altered states of consciousness associated with practices such as yoga, mindfulness, meditation, and breath work are far more common than expected, according to new research by a team including investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital.
Although many people surveyed for the study reported positive outcomes from these experiences, for a substantial minority the experiences were negative. The results are published in the journal Mindfulness.
The experiences included derealization (the feeling of being detached from your environment), unitive experiences (a sense of unity or “oneness”), ecstatic thrills, vivid perceptions, changes in perceived size, bodily heat or electricity, out-of-body experiences, and perception of non-physical lights.
45%Of 3,135 adults surveyed in the U.S. and the U.K. reported experiencing non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness at least once
“With more people engaging in mindfulness, meditation, and other contemplative and mind-body practices, we thought that altered states and their effects might be common among the general population,” said senior author Matthew D. Sacchet, the director of the Meditation Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “We conducted a series of international surveys to investigate and indeed found that such experiences were widespread.
“Altered states were most often followed by positive, and sometimes even transformational effects on well-being,” Sacchet added. “With that said, negative effects on well-being were also reported in some cases, with a small subset of individuals reporting substantial suffering.”
For the study, a panel of experts in psychiatry, neuroscience, meditation, and survey design developed a questionnaire on the experience of altered states of consciousness.
Among 3,135 adults in the U.S. and the U.K. who completed the online questionnaire, 45 percent reported experiencing non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness at least once in their lives.
This is far more than expected from the 5 percent (U.S.) to 15 percent (U.K.) of the population estimated to have undertaken mindfulness practice.
Respondents reported a mix of positive and negative well-being following altered states, with 13 percent claiming moderate or greater suffering and 1.1 percent claiming life-threatening suffering. Of those who experienced suffering, 63 percent did not seek help.
63%Of those who had a bad experience did not seek help
“Rather than being extremely unusual and rare, our study found that altered states of consciousness are a common variant of normal human experience,” said Sacchet. “However, we’ve found that those who experience negative outcomes related to these altered states often do not seek help, and that clinicians are poorly prepared to recognize or support these kinds of experiences. This has contributed to what might be considered a public health issue, as a certain proportion of people have difficulty integrating their experiences of altered states into their existing conceptions of self and reality.”
Sacchet noted that additional studies are needed to identify individual characteristics associated with experiencing altered states of consciousness, and with potential suffering associated with these states. He also stressed the importance of applying this research to patient care.
“We should not dismiss meditation and other practices as inherently dangerous, but rather we need to better understand and support meditators to fully realize the potential of these practices,” he said. “Similar to psychotherapy, pharmacology, and other therapeutic tools, it’s important that we learn to best implement and support people when engaging with these powerful practices.”
He added, “Ancient meditation manuals from the wisdom traditions may be useful for classifying and understanding altered states of consciousness. They may provide guidance into how to better manage altered states when they may be difficult. We clearly need more research to further study and understand this possibility.
“Clinical curriculum on altered states of consciousness should be developed to better support clinicians caring for patients experiencing suffering linked to these kinds of experiences.
“Also, those who teach meditation practices should ensure that participants are aware of potential risk,” he said. “Together, these kinds of safeguards will help to ensure that these very promising and powerful practices are taught and experienced safely.”
This research was supported by funding fromMassey University and Emergence Benefactors.
If you want fame, Cass Sunstein says, it typically requires some of both — and is no pure meritocracy
The Beatles, William Shakespeare, or even Taylor Swift. The reason why these artists are so famous and admired surely must be because their talents are simply extraordinary and undeniable.
Maybe … maybe not, says Harvard Law School’s Cass R. Sunstein in his forthcoming book, “How to Become Famous.”
Sunstein examines the career paths of ultra-successful individuals, bands, movies, and even the Mona Lisa in order to distill what separates the winners from everyone else. (Hint: Talent, ambition, and hard work matter, but so do luck and timing, among other factors.)
The Gazette spoke to Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, about the ingredients of fame. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What are the biggest misconceptions that the public has about achieving fame?
I think the biggest misconception is this: Many of us believe that people become famous because they’re amazing in terms of quality. It’s tempting to think that if someone makes it big, it’s because they are musically extraordinary, or they have a fantastic business sense, or they’re politically gifted, or “Gosh, can they write a novel!” And while those things certainly are very helpful, it’s a misconception to think those will allow you to get to the top of the mountain.
Do the successful and famous share common set of characteristics or circumstances?
There is no set of shared characteristics that famous people have. Success and fame depend on 1,001 different factors, and there isn’t a unifying set.
We see books and academic articles that purport to show that if you have certain characteristics, you’re highly likely to make it big. These extremely impressive works depend on a common error: They ask what are the unifying characteristics? But the unifying characteristics of the successful or the famous are often something that people who have failed and never become famous also have.
If you can show that famous people in business, for example, are impatient or are good listeners, or that they are decisive, you have not shown that those characteristics account for fame or success in business. There are plenty of people who are impatient or decisive, for example, who never make it.
“If you look at Jane Austen’s success or The Beatles’ success or blues legend Robert Johnson’s success, they had a network of supporters who were pretty relentless.”
To isolate the ingredients of fame or success is a fool’s errand. Having said that, it is true that people who become famous typically benefit from a network of enthusiasts. If you look at Jane Austen’s success or The Beatles’ success or blues legend Robert Johnson’s success, they had a network of supporters who were pretty relentless. That network of supporters could also have done very well if they’d been enthusiastic about somebody else.
Let’s look at the example of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” It was not immediately considered a masterpiece but became famous long afterward. What were the factors that came into play?
A key moment was that it was stolen in 1911, long after DaVinci produced it. The theft was critical to the emergence of the “Mona Lisa” as the most famous painting in the world. Without that theft, it probably would now be one of a set of paintings that people think are very good.
The theft was valuable because many people thought: “Why would someone steal it if it wasn’t amazing?” Also, it made that particular painting extremely salient. It was very much the object of discussion as a result of the 1911 theft. But until the 1860s, even art critics didn’t say a whole lot about it. When it was painted in the early 16th century, it was well-regarded, but it wasn’t seen as a masterpiece.
Often, musicians or actors will point to one or two people in their lives or an incident they say put them on a path to success when talent alone had not. How did that manifest for The Beatles, whose success appears to many as having been inevitable?
For The Beatles, the most dramatic point is they couldn’t get a record deal in England. They got turned down repeatedly. EMI, a big recording company, said no; Decca said no. The Beatles thought that was the end. Their manager, Brian Epstein, went to every record company and every one of them said no to The Beatles.
What happened for them was that two people at EMI offered to pay for the cost of recording a Beatles record — two people who weren’t the bosses but who worked for the company. Without that, who knows what would have happened? It’s not clear The Beatles would have gotten a recording contract.
Of course, there were moments before that that made The Beatles possible. Paul had to meet John at a crucial moment when John was in a mood to invite Paul to join The Beatles, and at a moment when Paul was brave enough to play a song on the guitar for John. Might they have met on some other occasion? Maybe. Yes, they were in Liverpool. But would they have joined forces — who knows?
The first “Star Wars” movie was not expected to do well by the studio or the actors before its release in May 1977. Creator George Lucas thought it would bomb. Why is it so hard, even for experts, to predict who or what will succeed?
The reason it’s very hard to predict success and failure is that success depends often essentially on what happens to the product, not what happens in the product. If you release a movie, then there are things happening in the first weeks that determine success or failure, and those things are really hard to predict.
“The reason it’s very hard to predict success and failure is that success depends often essentially on what happens to the product, not what happens in the product.”
You can market it hard, but it might be that everyone’s busy and won’t take up your marketing opportunities. Or that it’s a slow time. There’s no crystal ball because there are a set of things that are going to follow a release that are extremely hard to predict.
So success is just a matter of luck or pure randomness?
Roughly, I would say that all successful persons or works have a particular narrative that overlaps with but isn’t the same as that of others — though there may be some common features (or not!).
With “Star Wars,” the phenomenal originality of the movie was a necessary condition for its success; the visual amazingness of “Star Wars” wasn’t sufficient for success but was essential to its success. The narrative exuberance of the movie was a big boost. It also had the advantage of word of mouth like crazy. That is different from what happened with Jane Austen or The Beatles, but it overlaps.
Is there a counterfactual world in which “Star Wars” didn’t make it? Because history is only run once, we don’t know. But we do know that the studio and the participants didn’t predict what happened, which raises doubts about the claim of inevitability. Because I love “Star Wars” so much, it’s very hard for me to think its success wasn’t inevitable. But what we know about success and failure, and fame and obscurity, suggests that its success was not, in fact, inevitable.
To your point about luck and serendipity. Those are good words, but they’re black boxes, and it’s very good to peer beneath the hood. One thing that the book tries to do is to say, here’s what happened with Jane Austen; here’s what happened with The Beatles; here’s what happened with Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.
But here’s what didn’t happen with the 19th-century literary figure Leigh Hunt, who’s very good, but relatively obscure, and here’s what didn’t happen with Scottish novelist Mary Brunton, who was thought by many, in her time, to be as good as Jane Austen, maybe better.
What about those you call the “lost Einsteins” — people who might have been great but never broke through or didn’t realize their full potential? Why are they important?
There are a zillion people in human history who could have been iconic, or something in that direction, who never made it. One reason is they may have been born in a time and place where they had the wrong gender or the wrong demographic or the wrong skin color or wrong religion. (By wrong, I mean unfavorable for opportunity or success.)
Another possibility is that they really produced something, but it got lost while they were alive. Maybe it will be discovered in 2038, and we’ll think, “How did we not know about that person?” There are books in attics by people who had the capacity to write and the opportunity to write but got lost. It might be any number of things.
They’re all around us — children who can do amazing things, who might do those things. The world might benefit from them if they get a chance. Muhammad Ali, one of my heroes, had his bicycle stolen when he was 12. He loved his bicycle. And he came up to a police officer and said, “My bicycle was stolen. I want to whup that guy.”
The police officer, who happened to have access to a boxing gym, said to him, “Well, if you want to whup somebody, you better learn to box.” And Ali said, “Okay.” There are people like that all around. And that might give us a sense of inspiration, from the possibilities that are all around us, and a sense of humility about the modesty of the difference between people like Stan Lee, who became iconic, and people who didn’t become iconic. The difference isn’t that big.
Brain injury waiting period should be extended, study suggests
MGB Communications
3 min read
A new study of nearly 1,400 U.S. patients with severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) found that some patients for whom life support was withdrawn may have survived and recovered some level of independence a few months after injury.
Because families are typically asked to decide whether to withdraw life support within 72 hours of a TBI, researchers suggest that delaying these decisions may benefit some patients.
The study was published in Journal of Neurotrauma.
According to the authors, the findings suggest there is a cyclical, self-fulfilling prophecy taking place: Clinicians assume patients will do poorly based on outcomes data. This assumption results in withdrawal of life support, which in turn increases poor outcomes rates and leads to even more decisions to withdraw life support. However, there are currently no medical guidelines or precise algorithms that determine which patients with severe TBI are likely to recover.
In the Mass General Brigham-led study, investigators analyzed potential clinical outcomes for TBI patients enrolled in the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in TBI (TRACK-TBI) study for whom life support was withdrawn. Using data collected over a 7.5-year period on 1,392 of these patients in intensive-care units at 18 U.S. trauma centers, the researchers created a mathematical model to calculate the likelihood of withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, based on properties like demographics, socioeconomic factors, and injury characteristics. Then, they paired individuals for whom life-sustaining treatment was not withdrawn (WLST-) to individuals with similar model scores, for whom life-sustaining treatment was withdrawn (WLST+).
Based on follow-up of their WLST- paired counterparts, the estimated six-month outcomes for a substantial proportion of the WLST+ group was either death or recovery of at least some independence in daily activities. Of survivors, more than 40 percent of the WLST- group recovered at least some independence. In addition, the research team found that remaining in a vegetative state was an unlikely outcome by six months after injury. Importantly, none of the patients who died in this study were pronounced brain-dead, and thus the results are not applicable to brain death.
The authors suggest that further studies involving larger sample sizes that allow for more precise matching of WLST+ and WLST- cohorts are needed to understand variable recovery trajectories for patients who sustain traumatic brain injuries.
“Our findings support a more cautious approach to making early decisions on withdrawal of life support,” said corresponding author Yelena Bodien of the Department of Neurology’s Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital and of the Spaulding-Harvard Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems. “Traumatic brain injury is a chronic condition that requires long-term follow-ups to understand patient outcomes. Delaying decisions regarding life support may be warranted to better identify patients whose condition may improve.”
What to do about mental health crisis among Black males
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nikki Rojas
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Symposium examines thorny, multifaceted dilemma from systemic racism in policing, healthcare to stigma attached to psychotherapy in community
Amid a mental health crisis affecting both younger and adult Black males, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research held a daylong symposium on May 13 to have critical conversations untangling the complexities of the problem and examining potential solutions.
According to the National Institute of Minority Health and Health disparities, Black men are four times likelier to die by suicide than Black women. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has seen a 60 percent rise in suicide rates among Black boys over the past two decades.
“While we see a significant rise in our young people experiencing feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, or hopelessness, we know that young people of color are having an even harder time compared to their peers,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07, J.D. ’12, said in a video message as part of the opening ceremonies. “Black boys and Black men face the additional challenges of stigma and systemic racism so entrenched that it affects the quality of mental health care they receive.”
Michael Rain, a joint fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and the Hutchins Center, said often these issues are “compounded and diluted, leading to a lack of solutions that address our particular needs.”
In various sessions, panelists discussed issues including the impact of “the talk” many Black parents have with their children on how best to safely deal with interactions with police to the stigmatization of psychotherapy in the Black community. Nearly 54 million U.S. residents age 16 or older had police contact in 2020, with Black people accounting for 18 percent.
“We are committed to ensuring that the mental health of Black men and boys is not only a conversation, but it’s at the forefront of the work that we are pursuing.”
Frank Farrow, Mayor’s Office of Black Male Advancement
Some speakers debated the role religion plays in tackling mental health issues, with some saying that God and not therapy allowed them to overcome their traumatic experiences. Participants at a session on psychotherapy, however, pushed back on the notion of religion as a cure-all to mental health challenges.
“I was raised Christian, but I see that the church — in whatever way you want to describe it — can be a stick to beat yourself with,” Bryan Bonaparte, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Westminster, argued. “If you’re not doing things in the way that the church wants you to, or you think the church wants you to, then there’s no other way.”
He continued: “Just go and pray is often the response that you get. Do not go and seek someone that has a medical degree, because you’re not going to get your answers from a book. You’re going to get your answers from up there.”
Psychologist Martin Pierre noted that Black men should be allowed to not only identify and feel their emotions, but to make connections and relationships that will allow them to cope with the stresses of being a Black American. He also called for a more culturally responsive approach to mental health issues in the Black community.
“Black Men and Mental Health” was the brainchild of the Rev. Professor Keith Magee from the University College London’s Black Britain and Beyond think tank. Magee planned the conference with Hutchins Center director Henry Louis Gates Jr. after receiving thousands of responses from Black men and those who care about Black men about his CNN op-ed. The city of Boston also partnered in the event.
“It’s an honor for us to convene this symposium, which is providing a vital public service by giving voice to the complex, often difficult, yet crucially important set of issues surrounding Black men and mental health at a time in our country that can only be described as gruesome,” said Gates, who is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor.
Attendees pushed panelists and organizers to continue these conversations and encourage policy changes that will help Black men and boys on local and national levels. In response, former Democratic U.S. Representative Kendrick Meek from Florida promised to use his connections to make positive change.
Earlier in the day, Frank Farrow, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Black Male Advancement in Boston, had also noted the importance of retaining focus on marshaling resources and finding solutions.
“We are committed to ensuring that the mental health of Black men and boys is not only a conversation, but it’s at the forefront of the work that we are pursuing,” Farrow said. “We know that Black men and boys face deep inequities, disparities, and we want to make sure that we’re leading and that our voice is at the forefront.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Thousands of graduates gathered with family, classmates, and faculty in Harvard Yard to mark the University’s 373rd Commencement. In conversations with Gazette writers, they put their emotions, and dreams, into words.
Michael Mantello ’24 holds the Pforzheimer House shield.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Finding the right guide
Maria Gonzalez said a key to finding success as a master’s candidate in management from the Harvard Extension School came down to people. Actually, one person in particular.
“The key to really having a great experience here is to be best friends with your adviser,” said a smiling Gonzalez, who was rushing through the crowd in the Yard. “They will guide you the entire way through and make it as easy as possible for you to succeed.”
Gonzalez, who is from San Juan, Puerto Rico, proudly displayed her LatinX affinity scarf, and detailed the meaningful ceremony she attended with others from the community earlier in the week.
She began her coursework at the University of Puerto Rico, then transferred to the Extension School to complete the joint A.L.B.-A.L.M. program. Being able to go back and forth between Cambridge and home gave her “the best of both worlds” as she balanced her career with pursuing her degree.
As the current CEO of IKInnovations, a renewable-energy semiconductor manufacturer, Gonzalez has her hands full licensing a patent for the company. But she admits she’s looking forward to slowing down soon and seeing what her future has in store.
“Once that’s done, maybe I’ll take a really nice, long vacation,” she said. “And then see where Harvard takes me from there.”
Being nimble as dancer, nontraditional student
Genevieve Waldorf has had to be nimble and flexible throughout her undergraduate career, forging a path for herself on a nontraditional trajectory. But being agile comes naturally to her as a professional ballet dancer.
Waldorf grew up in Los Angeles, but now lives in Seattle and is a member of the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She began at Harvard College in 2015 but took some time off after being appointed apprentice to the company in 2018, and then to the corps de ballet. During the pandemic, she completed a year of school online and eventually found a rhythm for balancing dance with her degree.
“I danced during my season and then came here during my summers,” she said. “It’s definitely challenging not consistently doing school all the time.”
Reflecting on her journey, she said she often had to relearn material during her long breaks. After nearly a decade, she’s excited to graduate with a degree in applied math with a focus on government and a secondary in computer science.
She plans to dance for a while longer but is considering a career in tech or data analysis when that chapter of her life ends. And she said it wouldn’t have been possible without the people who invested in her.
“I’m just really grateful for a lot of the people who helped me with my journey here. It was complicated and unique, and they really kept me motivated and found new pathways for me to make sure that I could earn my degree,” she said.
A lavishly decorated mortarboard.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
The Bedford Minutemen join the festivities.
Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Writing her next chapter
Maggie Kern chatted happily with her mom, husband, daughter, and friends in the Yard, relaxing on the sunny Commencement morning before she’d have to make her way back to her seat for the festivities.
“We’ve all bonded a lot,” she said, speaking of her classmates who also pursued master’s degrees in creative writing and literature at the Harvard Extension School. “It’s just wonderful to be here and see everyone coming from everywhere.”
Kern and her family made the trek to Cambridge from their home in Bend, Oregon. The program took 2½ years to complete, remote except for a three-week-long summer residency program last July.
Coming out of the program, Kern is excited to start writing novels, a process she began in school. She feels prepared not just for the process of writing but also for the world of publishing that follows.
“Now we’re being launched out to go to the wild and figure out how to get that done,” she said.
Her daughter, Zoe, who is pursuing a law degree at Georgetown, said she’s incredibly proud of her mother and all that she’s accomplished.
“It’s pretty amazing … this was her ‘empty nest’ project, which, she’s just an overachiever,” she said with a laugh. She loves that she and her mom were in school at the same time and that they can read and edit each other’s work.
Kerns and her family were planning to attending all the ceremonial events, then explore the city and enjoy a family dinner at Barcelona Wine Bar. All in all, a wonderful day.
Sam Zimmerman ’92 and Suzanne Zimmerman relax in Harvard Yard.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Law School first for her tribe, she vows not to be the last
Samantha Maltais, J.D. ’24 — the first member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to enroll in and graduate from Harvard Law School — was overcome with joy and gratitude on Thursday.
“Our community has been for so long in the shadow of Harvard University,” said Maltais, calling her achievement “a reminder of the obligations that I feel toward my community and Indian country more broadly.”
Samantha Maltais.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
The Wampanoag were the original people of the island of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard), and in 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a member of the Wampanoag, graduated from Harvard. Cheeshahteaumuck was the first Native American student at Harvard, which according to its Charter of 1650 was committed to “educate the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”
Maltais grew up watching both her grandmother and mother work to protect their tribal community, which is located on the western side of Martha’s Vineyard. Her grandmother helped the tribe gain federal recognition. Her mother is its chairperson. Their examples inspired Maltais to pursue a law degree.
“A lot of the things that drove me to pursue a career in the law was watching the injustice faced by tribal communities and seeing my mother and other tribal leaders advocate and navigate the maze of injustice that is federal Indian law,” said Maltais, who was dressed in full regalia to honor her heritage.
At the Law School, Maltais deepened her interest in environmental law, a field closely related to Indigenous rights. As part of her coursework with the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, she traveled to New Zealand and Australia to do research on Indigenous self-determination rights and environmental issues.
After graduation, Maltais will move to San Francisco to work as a clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She hopes that other Native American students will follow in her steps because their presence in the classroom, she said, fosters a better understanding of Native people and the challenges they face, the rights afforded to tribal nations, and the distinctive relationship between the U.S. government and federally recognized Indian tribes.
“Being the first is always exciting,” said Maltais, “but it’s a responsibility to make sure that you’re not the last and keep that ladder down for folks, and especially other Native youth who have these hopes and dreams of attending Harvard Law School. It’s my hope that we’ll soon get to the point in time where it’s not the first or second, but it’s the 20th and 50th down the line.”
Two graduates hold hands during the prayer.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Helping his business take off
Jeremy Hung, an entrepreneur from Jiangsu, a province near Shanghai, China, was taking selfies in the Yard before Commencement exercises.
The graduate, who received a master’s degree in management from Harvard Extension School, was elated. The School had allowed him to take online classes as he was running his budding international travel agency from his hometown. He also took some classes in person, traveling between China and the U.S.
Running a small business in China is not easy, said Hung, who received his bachelor’s degree from a Chinese university. He registered at the Extension School to learn management skills to take his travel agency, which caters to Chinese international students, to the next level. He said he learned much more than that.
“Like many Chinese students, we go outside of China to see the world because we meet people from different ages, cultures, and walks of life,” said Hung. “I learned a lot from my classmates. Some were already very experienced, and others were very successful entrepreneurs. I learned not only work skills such as how to be a good entrepreneur, I also learned about different cultures, something I cannot learn in China.”
To celebrate his graduation, Hung will travel to New York City with his parents over the weekend. But he is already planning to take more classes at the Extension School soon.
“It gives people like me the chance to further our education as we run our businesses or do our work,” said Hung. “There are lots of choices.”
Students stop to pose for a photo while processing into Tercentenary Theatre.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Walking with old, new friends
Graduation was a long time coming for Jordan Alexandra Sanchez, a math concentrator with a secondary in psychology. Originally a member of the Class of 2023, Sanchez took time off during COVID but came back to join the Class of 2024.
“I was a first-year who was kicked off campus during the pandemic,” said Sanchez, who wore her LatinX graduation stole on top of her gown as she stood in the Yard waiting for the ceremony to start.
“A good number of my friends graduated last year, but a decent amount of us stayed in to walk together this year. Being able to befriend a lot of the members of the Class of 2024 while also having some of my 2023 friends is special.”
A climate activist in high school, Sanchez remembers when she was accepted to Harvard. “My admissions officer wrote me a note saying that they really valued my student activism,” said Sanchez, who also expressed sadness over the 13 seniors who were prevented from receiving their degrees after their participation in the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard.
“Harvard is built on this idea of being a community leader in your neighborhood, in your city, in your state, but also the world,” said Sanchez. “What kind of world-changer doesn’t shake things up or break a couple of rules sometimes? As Harvard students, we’re supposed to be leaders, not only of our campus, but we’re supposed to grow up and become the CEOs, lawyers, Supreme Court justices. These are the moments in which we define ourselves.”
Moving House
The rain that hit Cambridge missed Commencement but had an impact on Adams House’s diploma ceremony, forcing a move from the House’s courtyard to the Malkin Athletic Center’s fourth-floor gymnasium.
Economics concentrator Shang Wang said that since the class missed its high school graduation because of the pandemic, it was somehow fitting that students were awarded degrees in a setting suited to a high school ceremony.
Shang Wang (right) shares the proud moment with her former teaching fellow Di Ai.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Wang and other students highlighted the return to campus after a year of online classes as a difficult turning point. Adjusting to face-to-face contact with so many people was overwhelming, she said.
“At the beginning I was just quite nervous, quite shy, especially in Adams dining hall,” she said. “We were in a new environment. We didn’t know any of the upper classmen. We didn’t even really know the people in my class, actually.” Teaching staff and tutors “helped me open up,” she said.
Isabella Meyer, an English and music concentrator, described Commencement as a “powerful” moment, full of mixed feelings. “It was an extremely happy, momentous, celebratory day for some and a deeply tragic, conflicted day for others,” she said.
She was happy to share the event with her family, who flew from Bremerton, Washington, to watch her graduate.
For Rothsaida Sylvaince of Everett, Massachusetts, the short drive from her hometown meant she had lots of support as she wrapped up four years at Harvard amid cheers in the MAC gym.
“It’s been a very long journey and I think I’m really excited,” she said.
Isabella Meyer ’24 (center) with Adams House Faculty Deans Mercedes Becerra and Salmaan Keshavjee.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Singing praises of accomplished niece
Hanan Zehry received a master’s in healthcare quality and safety from Harvard Medical School on Thursday to complement her doctorate in health sciences from Hiroshima University and master’s in nursing from Suez Canal University. She is not, however, one to toot her own horn.
Her uncle, on the other hand, was more than willing to sing his niece’s praises as the pair walked across Harvard Yard.
“I learn from her — the resilience, the commitment, the flexibility, and how to maneuver in life,” said Essam Hegazy, an assistant professor of English language and cultural criticism at Suez Canal University.
Originally from Egypt, Hegazy said in their home country, women are sometimes discouraged from pursuing their ambitions.
“She’s a smart young lady … and she’s independent. She’s the one who paid for tuition. She’s a working woman, full-time studying, and she fought a society in order to come here,” he noted.
Hegazy said that perhaps the thing that he admires most about his niece, who also spent a year as a research fellow at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital before completing her Ph.D., is her courage.
“Society says that now that you are grown, you need to get married. And why do you do that? You have a Ph.D. from Hiroshima. That’s too much money to spend on education. It’s not worth it.
“This is the fighter personality in her,” he said.
A mortarboard spells it out: “My turn to teach.”
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
From engineer to entrepreneur
Siddhant Pardeshi wants to help small-business owners make their dreams come true. Immediately following his conferral of dual master’s degrees from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard Business School, Pardeshi said he was excited to get to work on the startup he founded with co-graduate Brian Elliot.
“It’s hard to just have one day to digest everything we’ve gone through for all these years. But I feel proud to be graduating finally, and I feel even more responsible for what it entails now that the degrees have been conferred, and the lens of the world now changes from a student to an alumnus, and everything you do has much more weight,” Pardeshi said.
Pardeshi was formerly a software architect with the tech company NVIDIA and had planned to return there after grad school. But that was before he landed on the idea for his AI company Blitzy, a web-based service that helps small businesses streamline the creation of software, including easy-to-use apps.
“It’s about creating software using generative AI and helping businesses afford to hire top talent and letting them benefit from high-quality software done right and at the right price,” he said. “I’m happy that starting a founder’s journey and graduating have coincided.”
Born and raised in India, Pardeshi said he has long been planning his permanent move to the U.S. and will be staying in Boston to start his business.
“NVIDIA transferred me to the U.S. in 2020, but I could not move because of the travel ban. And then I came here thinking that I will go back to NVIDIA after completing my two years,” he said. “But then I’m in the M.S./M.B.A. program and the program is designed to train entrepreneurs. I got converted to be an entrepreneur.”
Spectators fill the steps of Widener Library in Tercentenary Theatre.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Becoming a citizen of the world
Egbe Enobakhare had experience treating patients suffering from sexual and gender-based violence in her home country of Nigeria and decided Harvard could help her make a greater impact.
But in her time earning her master’s of medical sciences in global health delivery at Harvard Medical School, part of Enobakhare’s focus shifted to delivering healthcare to communities in need across the globe.
“I want to do a lot of advocacy for persons suffering physical and sexual violence,” she said. “But I also want to do a lot of advocacy for health equity worldwide. I believe that wherever you are, no matter what part of the world you are in, equitable health care is not available to everybody.”
In Nigeria, Enobakhare served as a coordinator for the Edo State government Sexual Assault Referral Center as well as working in family medicine in the state capital of Benin City. There, she provided medical care to patients, helped represent them in legal matters, and “advocated for policy changes in relation to violence.”
Enobakhare said her time in graduate school broadened her view of herself as well as her work.
“I thought that I was a citizen of Nigeria. Now, I think I’m a citizen of the world. I’m a global citizen,” she said.
Enobakhare’s sister, brother, sister-in-law, and nephew traveled from Nigeria to see her graduate. She said she was grateful for her time at Harvard.
“My fellow students, I owe them a lot,” she said. “A lot of gratitude for helping me imbibe the Harvard culture of diversity and inclusiveness. And the faculty, I owe them a lot. For the knowledge they’ve imbued in me is not just about the knowledge in the academic work, but in the whole essence of life. And I’m looking forward to changing things in the world.”
The senior Valediction in Harvard Yard between Phillips Brooks House and Holden Chapel.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Heeding a voice from the past
“The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard.”
Philosopher and psychologist William James spoke these words at a Harvard Commencement dinner more than 100 years ago. On Thursday, they were repeated by Stephanie Paulsell, Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at the Divinity School and an outgoing faculty dean at Eliot House.
Paulsell was the featured speaker at this year’s Valediction, an early morning ceremony set on the courtyard between Phillips Brooks House and Holden Chapel. The event invites graduates to look back on their years at the College while bidding the community a proper farewell.
Paulsell used the occasion to invoke James’ “invisible Harvard.” James, who taught one of the University’s first psychology courses in 1875, reflected upon a place of “independent thinking and undisciplinable thinkers,” where students stay up late to pursue fresh ideas or wake up early to solve equations. “The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and most richly fed,” he said.
Stephanie Paulsell.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students arrived in neat procession for the outdoor ceremony, blowing bubbles and waving to faculty members. Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, poked his head from an upper-floor window of Phillips Brooks House, iPhone camera pointed squarely toward the Class of ’24.
“This event is only 15 minutes long, but it is based on the College’s oldest traditions,” Khurana said from the podium a few minutes later.
Paulsell taught at the Divinity School for 20 years before arriving at Eliot House. A friend from the English department helped orient her by sharing James’ 1903 lecture, which was titled “The True Harvard.”
“I don’t want to pretend that there’s no tension around this Commencement,” Paulsell said after reading a few excerpts. “We all know there is. But during a year where Harvard has been hyper-visible, I hope you have found some joy and some ease in James’ invisible Harvard.”
In her speech, Paulsell also offered an expanded definition of “The True Harvard.”
“What Harvard means in the world will depend upon the way you live your life, the way you treat other people — the communities into which you pour your creativity, your brilliance, and your skill,” she said. “The families you nurture. The art you make. The institutions you build. The work to which you devote your best energy. All the ways you find to help others feel less lonely, positively furthered, and richly fed.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
The world that awaits the Class of 2024 is one in which misinformation fueled by AI and social media is deepening conflict, distorting reality, and eroding democratic norms. That’s why it’s vital that students identify their values and then hold onto them dearly, Maria Ressa told Harvard graduates Thursday.
“You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in,” said Ressa, principal speaker at the University’s 373rd Commencement. “Character is created in the sum of all the little choices we make. If you’re not clear about your values, you may wake up one day and realize you don’t like the person you’ve become — so choose your best self.”
Ressa, an investigative journalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, addressed thousands of graduates at Tercentenary Theatre. She spoke from her experience as a reporter covering the government of Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte and urged students to join her in the fight against enemies of democracy.
Rather than feeling angry or afraid about the state of the world, graduates should reflect on who they are and what they stand for, Ressa said. From there, she told the audience, go out and use your Harvard degree to create the world you want to live in.
“Harvard says it educates the future leaders of the world,” she said. “If you future leaders don’t fight for democracy right now, there will be little left for you to lead.”
Isabella E. Peña ’24 sings “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Interim President Alan Garber gives his welcoming address.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Honorary degree recipient and former Harvard President Larry Bacow is congratulated by Marc Goodheart, vice president and secretary of the University.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Before Ressa spoke, interim Harvard President Alan Garber in his welcoming address acknowledged campus disagreements and the possibility for protests. “It is their right to do so,” he said. “But it is their responsibility to do so with our community and this occasion in mind.”
He also called for a moment of silence in recognition of global conflict and suffering.
“Sympathy and empathy atrophy without exercise,” Garber said.
Later in the ceremony, students staged a walkout in protest of the University’s decision to withhold degrees from 13 participants in the recent pro-Palestine Yard encampment who are not in good standing. The decision had been criticized earlier in the ceremony by two student orators.
A native of the Philippines, Ressa came to the U.S. with her family in 1973, graduating cum laude from Princeton University in 1986. For nearly two decades, she was a correspondent for CNN and oversaw its news bureaus in Manila, Philippines, and Jakarta, Indonesia, before co-founding Rappler, an online news outlet in Manila, in 2011. She was a 2021 fall fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Center for Public Leadership. In July, she’ll join the faculty of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
During her address, Ressa relayed some of the lessons she learned as a journalist exposing state-sponsored disinformation campaigns and corruption under Duterte. She remains out on bail for criminal charges linked to her reporting.
She described for graduates an online “outrage economy” that is misleading and dividing the country purely for profit and power, and urged them to resist it. Enlist in the “battle for facts,” she told the students.
“Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these … we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy, [and] we can’t begin to solve existential problems like climate change,” Ressa said.
Instead, show compassion to one another and open your minds and hearts to others, she told graduates, even if it feels uncomfortable. “Alone we accomplish very little, no matter how bright or talented you are,” she said. “It’s about what we can do together.”
Ressa ended with a call to action.
“This is about what we can do together to find what binds us together. Our world on fire needs you. So, Class of 2024, welcome to the battlefield. Join us.”
The University presented honorary doctorates to Ressa (Doctor of Laws) and five others:
Lawrence S. Bacow (Doctor of Laws), the 29th president of Harvard University; Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez (Doctor of Music), the acclaimed conductor; Sylvester James Gates Jr. (Doctor of Science), an eminent theoretical physicist; Joy Harjo (Doctor of Literature), a renowned poet and writer who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2019-2022; and Jennie Chin Hansen (Doctor of Humane Letters), a registered nurse and leading advocate for improving the care and well-being of older adults.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Students and families connected at Class Day ceremonies while speakers, including leaders in business and government, offered graduates perspective, inspiration, and the wisdom born of experience. Here’s a selection from Wednesday’s remarks:
Harvard Kennedy School
Nicholas Burns, U.S. Ambassador to China, former HKS Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations
“It’s not, ‘What will I gain?’ It’s not, ‘What will I profit from?’ It’s not, ‘What’s in it for me?’ It’s, ‘Ask what you can do to make this a better world.’ The Kennedy School asks that you not just be involved in the world but be great in the world. As you graduate, consider how you, in small and big ways, can be a force for civil discussion, civil debate in a democracy. Can you be a force for unity in a world that sometimes it appears just wants to divide and even disintegrate? Be that voice for compassion, learning, understanding, and unity.”
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Harvard College
William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
“I think the Class of 2024 is truly one of the greatest classes in Harvard history, but it’s not all their doing. What’s interesting is that many of them actually wrote essays about their parents, or their aunts and uncles or their grandparents or other significant people, but it usually came back to family and how family shaped them. … As amazing as the Class of 2024 is, we have to remember that Michael Sandel and my mother were right. My mother always told us we were born on third base, given the great family we had. And Michael Sandel always reminds us to be humble, which is great advice. … I think we have to understand exactly what our achievements are and what they aren’t. I think it’s also good for us to be reminded that there’s an enormous amount of talent outside of 02138.”
Photo by Steven Lipofsky
Harvard Medical School/Harvard School of Dental Medicine
Melissa Gilliam, M.D. ’93, incoming president, Boston University
“You have discovered abilities that you did not know you had. You speak new language — words like ‘bezoar,’ ‘satiety,’ and ‘caries,’ they roll off your tongue. To push yourself when you are very tired, you will tell yourself that you are strong, you do not need sleep, you do not need food, you do not need to sit, you do not need to rest. But one thing is for certain: you do need other people. Without the support and comfort of your relationships, it’s just not a long-term strategy for achieving your goals. So, my second message to you is, love your family and friends. And, really, that is not enough. It is easy — mostly — to love your family and friends. But I would challenge you to seek to love people who are not known to you and, even more so, who are different than you. If we are going to care for people, make scientific discoveries for people, then you must see people and hold their humanity in the highest regard.”
Lorin Granger/HLS
Harvard Law School
Deb Haaland, U.S. Secretary of the Interior
“Seize your newfound power, your influence, your hearts, and your expertise and put it to good use. Good use that will outlive each of us. Good use that will ensure future generations can live the prosperous lives they deserve. Good use that will make you proud to be a lawyer, because we can’t build the world we deserve without each of you. Be grateful for the gifts in the universe that have been prepared just for you so that you can regift. And remember that you are part of a community, today and every day, that is rooting for your success.”
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Melissa Hoffer, Climate Chief, State of Massachusetts
“The worldview that conceives of humans as somehow exempt from the laws of chemistry and biology and physics — it is that idea that is now destabilizing the climate and threatening the ecosystems that support all life. That mindset allows many of us, especially the most privileged among us, to continue to live as if in a trance.”
Hensley Carrasco/HBS
Harvard Business School
Desiree Rogers, M.B.A. ’85, CEO of Black Opal
“I kept my mouth shut and did not speak in that first marketing class, but sitting through a few more classes and getting to know my classmates, I realized that what felt like a weakness was actually a strength. It was important that my voice was heard — and I did learn to comment in class — but it was also key that I listen. I already knew what I thought about a case, so hearing what others thought broadened my base of understanding. And that included opinions that I did not agree with. And as it worked out, that impulse to listen would not only make me a better leader, but help to make me a better friend and parent.”
Honorary degree recipients Jennie Chin Hansen (clockwise from top left), Sylvester James Gates Jr., Lawrence S. Bacow, Joy Harjo-Sapulpa, Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez, and Maria Ressa with interim President Alan Garber and interim Provost John Manning.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
7 min read
Recipients include an educator, conductor, theoretical physicist, advocate for elderly, writer, and Nobel laureate
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
The University will confer the honorary degrees during Thursday’s Commencement ceremony in Tercentenary Theatre.
Lawrence S. Bacow
Doctor of Laws
President emeritus of Harvard University, Larry Bacow is widely admired for his decades of distinguished leadership in higher education. As Harvard’s 29th president from 2018 to 2023, he worked to advance interdisciplinary initiatives in areas including climate change, quantum science and engineering, the future of cities, natural and artificial intelligence, and the legacy of slavery. He is known for his efforts to expand educational opportunity, to promote international exchange, to encourage public service, and to guide Harvard through the COVID-19 pandemic. A scholar of environmental studies, Bacow served as president of Tufts University from 2001 to 2011, strengthening its commitment to academic excellence, inclusion, and civic engagement. He previously served for 24 years on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he led centers on environmental initiatives and real estate and rose to become chancellor. He has served as chair of the Association of Governing Boards’ council of presidents, chair of the executive committee of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, a member of the American Council of Education’s executive committee, and a Fellow of Harvard College. His numerous honors include the ACE’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez
Doctor of Music
Known for his dynamic musicianship and his devotion to the power of the arts, Gustavo Dudamel is an internationally renowned conductor. Currently the music and artistic director of both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, he will become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. He has conducted major orchestras worldwide, featuring works by composers from Beethoven to Mahler to John Adams, and his discography includes more than 65 recordings. Born in Venezuela, he began violin studies as a child through the celebrated El Sistema program. By his teens he had distinguished himself as a conductor, becoming music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela at 18 and winning the inaugural Gustav Mahler Competition at 23. He is a passionate advocate for music education through his work with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as well as the Dudamel Foundation. Named one of Time’s most influential people in 2009, he has received such honors as Spain’s Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts, the Konex Foundation Classical Music Award, and the International Society for the Performing Arts’ Distinguished Artist Award.
Sylvester James Gates Jr.
Doctor of Science
Sylvester James (Jim) Gates Jr. is an eminent theoretical physicist known for his contributions to supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory and for his dedication to promoting public understanding of the wonders of science. With two S.B. degrees and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gates holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science and a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also a Distinguished University Professor and a University System of Maryland Regents Professor. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Gates also received the 2011 National Medal of Science. He served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) under Barack Obama and was the vice president of the Maryland State Board of Education. Gates was the recipient of the American Institute of Physics’ 2021 Andrew Gemant Award, given in recognition of contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics. In addition, he has served as Ford Foundation Professor of Physics and director of the Theoretical Physics Center at Brown University, as well as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Howard University. He is past president of both the American Physical Society and the National Society of Black Physicists. He co-authored both “Superspace,” a groundbreaking book on supersymmetry, and “Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe.” He has appeared in numerous documentaries about science.
Jennie Chin Hansen
Doctor of Humane Letters
Jennie Chin Hansen is an innovative and influential leader in care for older people. Raised in Boston, she received her B.S. at Boston College and her M.S. in nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. She served for more than 25 years as the leader of On Lok, a California nonprofit that pioneered new models of comprehensive community-based care for older adults. Its programs became a prototype for the federal Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), available to states nationwide. She went on to serve as president of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), playing a key role in advocating for the Affordable Care Act. She next served as CEO of the American Geriatrics Society, dedicated to the care of older adults. She continues her work on issues important to older Americans, such as dementia, emergency medicine, and health equity. Past president of the American Society on Aging and a former member of the U.S. Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, she has been honored by such organizations as the American Academy of Nursing, the American Society on Aging, the National Council on Aging, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Joy Harjo-Sapulpa
Doctor of Literature
Joy Harjo is an acclaimed poet, educator, author, playwright, and musician. She served as the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, only the second Poet Laureate to serve three terms (2019–22). A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, whose work draws deeply on Native histories and traditions and on themes of remembrance and transcendence, she is the author of 10 books of poetry, including “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years.” She has also written several plays and children’s books, and two memoirs. Her many honors include lifetime achievement awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the Poetry Foundation, as well as Yale University’s Bollingen Prize and the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and former chair of the board of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She is also an award-winning musician who has released seven albums. A graduate of the University of New Mexico and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught at UNM and several other universities, and she is the inaugural artist-in-residence of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Maria A. Ressa
Principal speaker Doctor of Laws
Maria Ressa is an intrepid journalist and media innovator known for her fierce commitment to safeguarding freedom of the press and advancing the pursuit of truth. Her many honors include a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her efforts to promote free expression, to combat disinformation, and to expose abuses of power in her native country, the Philippines. She is co-founder and CEO of Rappler, a digital news outlet in the Philippines focused on investigative journalism, editorial independence, and building communities of action for a better world. Before launching Rappler online in 2012, she served as chief of CNN’s bureaus in Manila and Jakarta and as senior vice president of multimedia news operations at ABS-CBN, the largest news organization in the Philippines. She is the author of books on terrorism, social media, and defending democracy against authoritarianism. A graduate of Princeton University and a former Shorenstein Fellow and Hauser Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she will become a professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in July 2024. She was named a Time Person of the Year in 2018.
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A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
For the 37th year, neighboring churches and institutions will ring their bells in celebration of the city of Cambridge and of Harvard’s 373rd Commencement Exercises.
In a bow to earlier history when bells of varying tones summoned people from sleep to prayer, to work, or to study, this joyful noise will begin at 12:15 p.m., just after the sheriff of Middlesex County declares the Commencement Exercises adjourned. The bells will ring for approximately 15 minutes.
The deep-toned bell in the Memorial Church tower, for years the only bell to acknowledge the festival rites of Commencement, will be joined by the set of bells cast to replace the original 17-bell Russian zvon of Lowell House that was returned in 2008 to the Danilov Monastery near Moscow; and by the bell of the Harvard Business School, the historic 13-bell “Harvard Chime” of Christ Church Cambridge, the Harvard Divinity School bell in Swartz Hall, and the bells of the Church of the New Jerusalem, First Church Congregational, First Parish Unitarian Universalist, First Baptist Church, St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, University Lutheran Church, Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church, and St. Anthony’s Church.
Bells were already in use at Harvard in 1643 when “New England’s First Fruits,” published in London that year, set forth some College rules: “Every Schollar shall be present in his tutor’s chambers at the 7th houre in the morning, immediately after the sound of the bell … opening the Scripture and prayer.”
Three of the 15 bells known to have been in use in Massachusetts before 1680 were hung within the precincts of the present College Yard, including the original College bell and the bell of the First Parish Church.
Of the churches participating in the joyful ringing today, one, The First Parish, has links with Harvard that date from its foundation. The College had use of the church’s bell, Harvard’s first Commencement was held in the church’s meetinghouse, and one of the chief reasons for selecting Cambridge as the site of the College was the proximity of this church and its minister, the Rev. Thomas Shepard, a clergyman of “marked ability and piety,” according to the late Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison.
Another church ringing its bells in celebration is Christ Church Cambridge. The oldest church in the area, it houses the “Harvard Chime,” the name given to the chime of bells cast for the church in anticipation of its 1861 centennial. Two fellow alumni and Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” arranged for the chime’s creation. The 13 bells were first rung on Easter Sunday, 1860: each bell of the Harvard Chime bears in Latin a portion of the “Gloria in Excelsis.”
Referring in 1893 to the Harvard Chime, Samuel Batchelder wrote, “From the outset the bells were considered as a common object of interest and enjoyment for the whole city, and their intimate connection with the University made it an expressed part of their purpose that they should be rung, not alone on church days but also on all festivals and special occasions of the College, a custom which has continued to the present time.”
The old Russian bells of Lowell House, in place for 76 years, rang on an eastern scale; the more newly cast bells give out a charming sound as do the bells of the Cambridge churches joining in concert today. A thoughtful student of bells wrote in 1939, “… church bells, whether they sound in a tinkling fashion the end of the first watch in the dead of night, announce the matins a few hours later, or intone the vespers or angelus, have a peculiar fascination. Chimes affect the heartstrings …”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
A class of 23 new military officers took their oath of service at Harvard’s Memorial Hall on Wednesday against a backdrop of sacrifice and honor.
Surrounded by family and friends, along with plaques honoring Harvard’s Civil War dead, the officers were sworn in during a commissioning ceremony ahead of Thursday’s Commencement.
“You take a sacred oath today to something that is far greater than yourself,” Navy Vice Admiral Philip Cullom, the ceremony’s guest speaker, told the group. “And you join a long crimson line that goes back to the very founding of this country.”
Before the swearing-in, Cullom offered advice to the service members.
“Showing dignity, respect for others, and humility will keep your compass headed true north.”
Vice Adm. Philip Cullom
Master Sergeant Benjamin Collins (from left), interim President Alan Garber, and Vice Adm. Philip Cullom.
“Showing dignity, respect for others, and humility will keep your compass headed true north,” he said. “Persevere, be staunch, and be bold. Like my fellow SEAL warriors, never, ever, ever ring the bell. And don’t forget, history will have its eyes on you.”
Harvard, home to the first Army ROTC battalion in the nation, formed in 1916, has lately seen a rise in students interested in military service. ROTC members this year number the most in nearly five decades.
“You inherit a vast legacy of achievement,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president, told the graduates. “May you choose both to learn as much as you can and to teach as much as you can. May you support one another, as you have done throughout your time as students, and may you return to Harvard to find your numbers still growing larger.”
Many of the commissioned grads were supported at the ceremony by a family member who served, including Air Force 2nd Lt. Milo Clark. His father, Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, helped secure the insignia of an officer on his son’s uniform.
“I’ve grown up in a military family so I’ve wanted to be commissioned and to serve my whole life,” Milo said. “So this is this is probably the best achievement and the best feeling ever.”
Elizabeth Foley, an Air Force veteran and great-aunt of newly commissioned Ens. Anne Foley, said she’s noticed a decline in young people wanting to join the military.
“I don’t know how to encourage young people to join because I had a really great experience,” she said.
Foley’s father, Robert, said his daughter has always followed her own path.
“I didn’t encourage her to do this,” he said. “Same with coming to Harvard. I didn’t say ‘Go to Harvard,’ and I don’t know how she got here. She’s been an independent thinker from an early age. I think that’s probably a good trait to have.”
Speaking for herself, Anne said that she was deeply proud of her accomplishment after four years of hard work.
“To finally be on the other side and commissioned means a lot,” she said. “And it’s still kind of daunting to enter the U.S. military as an officer because that’s a lot of responsibility. But I’m super excited.”
Army 2nd Lt. Isabel Eddy is joined by her mother Katherine Eddy.
Isabel Eddy, sworn in as an Army 2nd lieutenant, doesn’t come from a military family, but she found one at Harvard.
“This is just a really exciting ceremony,” she said. “I think we’ve all worked really hard, but ROTC has been so rewarding. I think the thing I’ll probably miss the most is just the people. They’re so supportive, and it’s so nice to have our little community, even across branches, where we’re tight and just supporting each other.”
Other Army grads were Soren Choi, Jack Cogbill, Luis Esteva Sueiro, Owen O’Connor, Ryan Kong, and Asher Spain. In addition to Clark, Air Force graduates were Jasmine Adams, Brad Campbell, Kaylee Kim, Hayden Teeter, Derek Vastola, Jack Walker, and Kayra Yaman.
Joining the Navy ranks along with Foley were Ashley Chung, Aaron Eudaimon, Zack Foltz, Christian McIver, and Ryan Tierney. Eddie Jin and Nick Marcenelle Perez were sworn in as Marines.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
On Thursday the University will award a total of 9,262 degrees. A breakdown of degrees and programs is listed below.
Harvard College granted a total of 1,742 degrees. Degrees from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences were awarded by Harvard College, the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School of Design.
All Ph.D. degrees are conferred by the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
All figures include degrees awarded in November 2023 and March and May 2024.
Harvard College 1,742 degrees
1,686 Bachelor of Arts
56 Bachelor of Science
Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1,293 degrees
326 Master of Arts
279 Master of Science
10 Master of Engineering
678 Doctor of Philosophy
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences 649 degrees
347 Bachelor of Arts (conferred by Harvard College)
50 Bachelor of Science (conferred by Harvard College)
10 Master of Engineering (conferred by GSAS)
137 Master of Science (conferred by GSAS)
25 Master in Design Engineering (conferred by GSD)
80 Doctor in Philosophy (conferred by GSAS)
Harvard Business School 1,010 degrees
869 Master of Business Administration
87 Master in Business Administration with Distinction
54 Master in Business Administration with High Distinction
Harvard Divinity School 131 degrees
55 Master of Divinity
62 Master of Theological Studies
11 Master of Religion and Public Life
1 Master of Theology
2 Doctor of Theology
Harvard Law School 804 degrees
171 Master of Laws
622 Doctor of Law
11 Doctor of Juridical Science
Harvard Kennedy School 659 degrees
87 Master in Public Administration
226 Master in Public Administration (Mid-Career)
89 Master in Public Administration in International Development
232 Master in Public Policy
5 Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government (conferred by GSAS)
18 Ph.D. in Public Policy (conferred by GSAS)
2 Ph.D. in Social Policy (conferred by GSAS)
Harvard Graduate School of Design 318 degrees
84 Master in Architecture
28 Master of Architecture in Urban Design
59 Master in Design Studies
76 Master in Landscape Architecture
2 Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design
27 Master in Urban Planning
9 Doctor of Design
33 Master in Design Engineering (conferred jointly with SEAS)
Harvard Graduate School of Education 747 degrees
717 Master of Education
1 Doctor of Education Leadership
29 Doctor of Education
Harvard Medical School 427 degrees
2 Master of Bioethics
1 Master of Healthcare Quality and Safety
2 Master in Clinical Service Operations
56 Master in Medical Science
182 Doctor of Medicine
184 Master of Science
Harvard School of Dental Medicine 56 degrees
17 Master of Medical Sciences
6 Doctor of Medical Sciences
33 Doctor of Dental Medicine
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 599 degrees
402 Master of Public Health
168 Master of Science
24 Master in Health Care Management
5 Doctor of Public Health
Harvard Extension School 1,501 degrees
170Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies
1,331 Masters of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies
‘Tell the cities about us … and tell our neighbors about what we do’
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
‘HUM SAB EK’ harvests stories of self-employed Indian women’s hardships — and victories
Balancing “the trauma of the pandemic with the resilience” of India’s poor working women, Satchit Balsari, M.P.H. ’02, found a story of hope that now forms the basis of a stirring multimedia exhibit.
The journey to “HUM SAB EK — We Are One,” on view in CGIS South until Aug. 20, began in 2022, when Balsari, an associate professor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, undertook what could have been a routine assignment for a post-pandemic healthcare worker: researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on India’s 2.9-million member Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).
“The story was not one of despair. It is about the power of these disadvantaged but very empowered women reaping the fruits of five decades of investments in their communities.”
Satchit Balsari
However, as he and his team began their interviews, they found themselves hearing about a lot more than lockdowns and lost wages. Armed with a questionnaire of “10 or 12” questions, Balsari expected the work to go quickly. “I found that I barely got through question two,” he recalled. “These women would talk extemporaneously, experientially, 45 minutes per question … And they’re just incredible stories.”
Ultimately, the team collected 30 hours of oral histories and surveyed 1,000 households, filming many of the interviews with their iPhones. Realizing that “this needs to be shared,” Balsari sought advice not only from his team but from the women they had interviewed. “They said, ‘Tell the cities about us and come to the villages and tell our neighbors about what we do,’” he recalled.
“HUM SAB EK” does just that, from its opening timeline, depicting SEWA’s 50 years of struggles and victories as well as the trauma and hardship of the pandemic. Sponsored by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, the exhibit begins with a photograph of SEWA members. The point, said Balsari, was that this was “a celebration because the story of SEWA was not one of despair.”
A video of salt harvesting in the Rann of Kutch region. Satchit Balsari (left) with co-curator Hiteshree Das showing salt samples.
Immediately following this timeline is a giant tapestry, composed of pieces woven by textile workers in different regions of India. Although embroidery and weaving are largely done by independent home-based workers, the piece documents how quickly SEWA members turned from decorative work to mask-making in 2020. A white band in the piece represents “the three days when work stopped,” explained Balsari, before the workers pivoted. “These women had so much power over their decision-making,” he said, pointing out that 90 percent of households in India received masks woven and sewn by SEWA.
This is followed by a timeline of the pandemic in India, from the first case on Jan. 30, 2020, through its deadliest day, May 19, 2021, when 4,529 deaths (probably an undercount) were recorded. Placing this timeline down the stairs from the exhibit’s opening was intentional, explained co-curator Hiteshree Das, M.Des. ’25, who joined the project in 2023. Although the original study focused on COVID-19, the exhibit aimed to “set context for our audience here to understand what a trade union of informal working women do in India and how this 50 years of organizing has helped them better respond to disasters like the pandemic,” she said.
Charged with creating visual manifestations of the material, the GSD student knew her priority was keeping the members of SEWA front and center. “We wanted to make sure that their experiences were heard in their voices,” said Das.
To do this, the exhibit team made many of the interviews accessible, via videos that play continuously and interviews that can be accessed via headphones. To add visual interest, Das focused on specific elements of several of the stories. For example, under a video in which SEWA member Jamnaben Amarsinh talks about harvesting salt in the Rann of Kutch region, which has been severely impacted by climate change, we see samples of the salt in different stages of processing as well as a screen showing the current temperature in the salt flats.
To visually depict a court case SEWA filed during the pandemic to urge the construction workers’ welfare board to pay the workers their due, Das lined up earthenware gullaks, the traditional piggy banks in which families collect their savings. While these vase-like pots are graceful objects in their own right, having one sit on a stack of just some of the 500 pages of the court petition emphasizes “the tediousness of the bureaucratic procedures that citizens have to go through in order to demand what’s right,” said Das.
What comes across throughout the exhibit is the determination and spirit of the SEWA members, even as their struggle for basic human rights continues. That, said its curators, is the point.
“The story was not one of despair,” said Balsari. “It is about the power of these disadvantaged but very empowered women reaping the fruits of five decades of investments in their communities.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust invoked Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837, calling on this year’s honorees to be “free and brave” scholars and defend American higher education during the PBK Literary Exercises Tuesday at Sanders Theatre.
Now considered a classic work of American letters, Emerson’s speech “The American Scholar” details the vital role of the scholar in society and is particularly relevant today as American universities are facing harsh criticisms, said Faust, the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor.
“I’m far from the first PBK speaker — even in recent years — to invoke Emerson and his address,” said Faust. “Many of his words about the character and duties of the scholar resonate now, long after they were first uttered. The ‘office of the scholar’ he proclaimed, is to guide others ‘by showing them the facts amidst appearances.’ A scholar he said, must not be the ‘parrot of other men’s thinking.’ A scholar, he said, must be ‘free and brave.’ As you are welcomed into the community of scholars that is Phi Beta Kappa, this is what you are asked to be.”
The exercises have been a part of Harvard Commencement since the 18th century. To be elected to the nation’s oldest academic honor society, a student needs to demonstrate outstanding academic achievement and originality, intellectual honesty, and rigor in their course of study. Undergraduates are chosen by faculty and senior staffers who are also Phi Beta Kappa members. No more than 10 percent of any graduating class can be selected. The 105 graduating seniors inducted Tuesday joined 72 members of their class elected in previous years.
In her remarks, Faust recalled that she spoke about critiques of universities in her inaugural address as president in 2007 and lamented that those in the past year have grown “deliberate” and “determined.”
“The upheavals of this past academic year arising from the tragic situation in the Middle East have provided the occasion for those already hostile to the culture of American higher education to escalate their criticism,” said Faust. “The polarizations of race, religion, and politics that grip our country have in recent months focused unceasingly on universities. One might even suggest that universities have become a primary symbol for these larger divisions, as well as the theater in which they are being acted out.
“But this is not just theater; it represents a genuine and existential threat to the foundational assumptions that have long governed American higher education.”
Partisan views about higher education are both a cause and an effect of the polarization in American society, she said, but college education benefits all.
“We must be champions of the promise and purposes of higher education — of the ‘rule of truth’ that it stands for both inside and outside these gates.”
Drew Gilpin Faust
“The lives of Republicans and Democrats alike are improved by college attendance, just as the well-being of our society as a whole is advanced by the work of free and independent universities,” she said. “The fear that higher levels of education may correlate with Democratic voting should not become a reason for advocating ignorance.”
Faust delivered an impassioned defense of universities as engines of social mobility, centers of knowledge and free speech, and entities whose purpose “transcends struggles for political power.” She lamented the influence of politics on university decisions on curriculum and faculty hiring.
“We should not be permitting, and certainly not celebrating, a governor or a legislature or a member of Congress who is designing courses or degree requirements, hiring faculty, or proudly claiming responsibility for firing university presidents,” said Faust, to resounding applause.
In closing, Faust urged students to do their part to stand firm in their support for the nation’s universities.
“American higher education is endangered,” she said. “We who have been nurtured and shaped by universities; we who proudly embrace our identities as scholars ‘free and brave’ must acknowledge, to borrow from that early PBK oration, both the ‘dangers’ and the ‘duties’ that lie ahead. We must be champions of the promise and purposes of higher education — of the ‘rule of truth’ that it stands for both inside and outside these gates.”
Yesterday’s ceremonies also featured a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, professor of English and of African and African American Studies. She offered two poems, including one she wrote for the occasion.
In addition, three members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were honored for teaching excellence: Andrew Davies, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, for his “unparalleled dedication to undergraduate research”; Gage Hills, assistant professor of electrical engineering, for his “accessible, engaging, and inclusive” teaching style that “makes learning about circuits truly electrifying”; and Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, for her “extraordinary dedication to teaching undergraduates” and for “exemplifying an ethical stance that educating students is just as much an opportunity to learn with and from them.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Amid the AI boom and relentless attacks on the global information ecosystem, democracy is now at a tipping point, says Maria Ressa, a recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and principal speaker for Harvard’s 373rd Commencement on Thursday.
An investigative journalist and co-founder of Rappler, a digital news outlet based in Manila, Ressa, 60, has long warned of malign actors polluting social media with propaganda and disinformation in service of anti-democratic goals. She built on and amplified this work during her time as a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and Center for Public Leadership in fall 2021.
Speaking to the Gazette, Ressa, a 1986 graduate of Princeton, talked about life after the Nobels, declines in press freedom, and what worries her most about democracy in the U.S. and around the world. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How has life changed since you were awarded the Nobel?
I was allowed to travel. Leading up to that, I had been denied travel four or five times. I think in 2019, I had received 10 arrest warrants. When the Nobel was announced, I had just put in a request for a Harvard fellowship. It was going to be my “This is where I’m staking the battle” moment. The Philippines is not North Korea, and I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt even though my rights had been severely curtailed. Soon after that, I was at Harvard for a month, the Shorenstein Center and the Center for Public Leadership. It was like breathing fresh air.
The government of Rodrigo Duterte charged you and Rappler with a number of crimes amid aggressive coverage of its policies and actions, including a harsh crackdown on drugs that left thousands dead. Where do those cases stand and how have you been treated under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.?
By 2020, I had been convicted of cyber libel. There were 10 criminal charges going. Under the Duterte administration, we were in hell. And I would say both in our legal cases, and in our country under Marcos after Duterte, we moved to purgatory. It’s not yet perfect, but we went from hell to purgatory, so yay! [Laughs.] We keep going. The fear has lifted, and we move forward.
Reporters Without Borders’ 2024 Press Freedom Index ranks the U.S. 55th out of 180 countries. In 2020, the U.S. was 45th. What accounts for that decline and how concerned should we be?
It’s death by 1,000 cuts and it happens fast. Democracy dies quickly. After the election of Duterte in 2016, he began a brutal drug war; fear and violence were used to chill everybody. Within six months, he was able to collapse all the institutions. He became the most powerful man within six months of taking office. Some of that comes from the people he appointed. But beyond that, I call it the three Cs: corrupt, coerce, co-opt. And what’s alarming is that we’re seeing this in the U.S.
Why is this happening? Because we don’t have a shared reality; because trust is completely broken. And that polarization was created by the algorithms of the distribution platforms of news. The very platforms that are supposed to connect us are insidiously manipulating us for profit.
This is the challenge for the class of 2024. This is a class that has been used to having their world blown up, in a way. They’re living through new times. They know it’s not business as usual. I think that is both an opportunity and danger. Because we’re going to have the struggle with independent thought, with building communities of action, moving away from the internet, the virtual world, into a world where we’re going to have to redefine what civic engagement is. We’re going to have to move beyond what we’ve done. We’re going to have to accept that a lot of what we used to think is gone and we’re going to have to build better. And we’re going to have to trust. It is all about trust.
Sixty-five countries, including the U.S. and members of the EU, will hold national elections this year. The results will potentially affect more than 4 billion people. Many experts are calling 2024 a make-or-break year for democracy. Do you share that view?
Power and money are determining what your reality is. Information operations are easy and will become industrial-grade. Right now, the fracture lines of society in the U.S. are immigration, like in Europe and other parts of the world; Hamas/Israel; and race. The goal isn’t to make you believe one thing. The goal is to make you disbelieve everything, to make you doubt everything, to make you distrust everything, because if you do, then you don’t do anything. And that, to me, is the ultimate danger. This is corrosive. It’s like termites eating wood and before you know it, you just step and fall through. That’s what I’m worried about.
This is the bleakest I’ve felt, in so many ways. I feel like it is a far harder world than when we were fighting Duterte. This is part of the reason I said yes to this speech. I want to see the Class of 2024, your future leaders. What do they want? Where will they go?
This is the tipping-point year. I don’t know if we’ll make it. It will be close.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
In his first Baccalaureate address, interim President Alan M. Garber praised the fortitude and resilience of students in the Class of 2024, who entered Harvard amid a pandemic and national turmoil in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and are ending their undergraduate years as war in the Middle East divides people around the world.
“From the moment you arrived on a half-empty campus with a half-full attitude, you made the best of things — and the best of one another and yourselves,” Garber said Tuesday at Tercentenary Theatre. “Seeing you thrive despite unpredictable and unfortunate circumstances has been, for me, a constant source of energy and optimism.
“So, if there is wisdom I can offer as you prepare to leave Harvard College, it is this: Seek inspiration in one another.”
Garber reminisced about his own undergraduate class, noting both his classmates’ successes — personal and professional — and their disappointments in the decades since College life.
“What I have found in my years since graduating is that few endeavors are more entertaining, or sometimes surprising, than watching your classmates succeed,” he said. “After all, you knew them as they once were, lit from within by youthful ambition and eager to conquer the world after graduation — or, perhaps, just stupefied by scrolling TikTok all afternoon.”
“From the moment you arrived on a half-empty campus with a half-full attitude, you made the best of things — and the best of one another and yourselves.”
Alan Garber
The Baccalaureate ceremony dates back to Harvard’s inaugural Commencement in 1642. The event includes an address by the University president and blessings imparted by several chaplains and student speakers. A procession of seniors is led by class marshals as graduates make their way through the Old Yard to the steps of Widener Library before settling in Tercentenary Theatre.
The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, conducted Tuesday’s service. “You graduates gathered in this place—you are the answers to ancient prayers, the wishes of long lost people,” Potts told students as the ceremony began. “You are your ancestors’ dreams come finally true. But it’s not just the past that lives in you; the future lives in you also.”
Tercentenary Theatre during the Baccalaureate ceremony.
Also offering encouragement and benediction to the grads was humanist chaplain Greg Epstein. “You’re here graduating from Harvard, so take a deep breath,” he said. “Not because you’ve earned it. You should never have to earn breath. You deserve it, because you are human.”
Garber urged students to maintain the friendships they made at the College while working to heal from the wounds the community has suffered in the last year.
“What happens after any Commencement will always be a mix of sun and shade, triumph and failure, joy and sorrow,” said Garber. “Your final assignment, if I can impose upon you, is to cheer and support one another through it all, whatever may come. There is no greater comfort than keeping ties with those who knew you when.”
He continued: “May the losses of this year — of human life and of human connection — of sympathy and empathy — of care — be for all of you — for all of us — an impetus to advance rather than retreat, shining brightly in shadow, and brighter still through darkness.”
Five alumni have been newly elected as members of the Board of Overseers and six as directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA). The new Overseers will assume their roles May 24, while the HAA directors will begin their terms July 1.
New members of the Board of Overseers
Modupe Nyikoale Akinola ’96, M.B.A. ’01, A.M. ’06, Ph.D. ’09 Zalaznick Professor of Business and Faculty Director of the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics, Columbia Business School New York
Nworah Blaise Ayogu ’10, M.D., M.B.A. ’15 General Manager and Chief Medical Officer, Amazon Clinic Los Angeles
Theodore D. Chuang ’91, J.D. ’94 U.S. District Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland Bethesda, Md.
Juan Antonio Sepúlveda Jr. ’85 University of Oxford, M.A. ’87; Stanford Law School, J.D. ’93 Calgaard Distinguished Professor of Practice in Political Science and President’s Special Adviser for Inclusive Excellence, Trinity University San Antonio, Texas
The new Overseers were elected for six-year terms from a group of eight candidates nominated by an alumni nominating committee whose 13 voting members were appointed by the Harvard Alumni Association executive committee. Harvard degree holders cast a total of 35,377 ballots in the election.
“We are delighted to welcome our newest members to the board. All of my returning colleagues welcome them and know each will bring thoughtful perspectives and experience,” said Vivian Hunt ’89, M.B.A. ’95, the board’s incoming president for 2024-25. “We are all looking forward to a new academic year to continue our support for Interim President [Alan] Garber and our shared commitment to Harvard’s larger mission.”
The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. As a central part of their work, the Overseers direct the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning.
More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. It also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of Corporation members.
Additional information about the board, its members, and its work can be found on its webpage.
Newly elected HAA directors
Adrian D. Blake ’88 University of Pennsylvania, M.B.A. ’96 CEO, Precision Syringe Omaha, Neb.
Dorian Orlando Burton II, Ed.L.D. ’15 Pennsylvania State University, B.A. ’06; New York University, M.A. ’08; University of Oxford, M.B.A. ’22 Managing Partner, The Southern Reconstruction Fund Raleigh, N.C.
Theresa S. Cho ’90 Columbia University, M.Phil. ’96, Ph.D. ’99 Vice President of International Affairs, Seoul National University Seoul, Republic of Korea
The new directors were elected for three-year terms. They were chosen from among eight candidates, nominated by the same HAA committee that puts forward candidates for Overseers. Harvard degree holders cast 36,363 ballots in the directors election.
The HAA Board, including its elected directors, aims to foster a sense of community, engagement, and University citizenship among Harvard alumni around the world. The work focuses on developing volunteer leadership and increasing and deepening alumni engagement through an array of programs that support alumni communities worldwide. In recent years, the board’s priorities have included strengthening outreach to recent graduates and graduate school alumni and continuing to build and promote inclusive communities.
“I’m pleased to welcome our new directors,” said Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93, the association’s incoming president. “In the year ahead, I look forward to continuing our work to enhance alumni engagement and foster inclusivity across our Harvard community.”
Research finds step-count and time are equally valid in reducing health risks
Kira Sampson
BWH Communications
5 min read
A new study suggests that both step-count and time-based exercise goals are equally effective in reducing risks of heart disease and early death.
Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital reviewed data on healthy women age 62+, who used wearable devices to record their physical activity, and then tracked their health outcomes. After a median follow-up of nine years, the researchers found higher levels of physical activity, whether in time of exercise or step counts, were associated with large risk reductions in mortality and cardiovascular disease. The most active quarter of women in the study had a 30 to 40 percent reduced risk compared to the least active quarter.
“We recognized that existing physical activity guidelines focus primarily on activity duration and intensity but lack step-based recommendations,” said lead author Rikuta Hamaya, a researcher in the Division of Preventive Medicine at BWH. “With more people using smartwatches to measure their steps and overall health, we saw the importance of ascertaining how step-based measurements compare to time-based targets in their association with health outcomes — is one better than the other?”
“Movement looks different for everyone, and nearly all forms of movement are beneficial to our health.”
Rikuta Hamaya
The current U.S. guidelines, last updated in 2018, recommend that adults engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity (e.g., brisk walking) or 75 minutes of vigorous activity (e.g., jogging) per week. At that time, most of the existing evidence on health benefits came from studies where participants self-reported their physical activity. Few data points existed on the relationship between steps and health. Fast-forward to the present — with wearables being ubiquitous, step counts are now a popular metric among many fitness-tracking platforms. How do time-based goals stack up against step-based ones? Investigators sought to answer this question.
For this study, investigators collected data from 14,399 women who participated in the Women’s Health Study, and were healthy (free from cardiovascular disease and cancer). Between 2011 and 2015, participants aged 62 years and older were asked to wear research-grade wearables for seven consecutive days to record their physical activity levels, only removing the devices for sleep or water-related activities. Throughout the study period, annual questionnaires were administered to ascertain health outcomes of interest, in particular, death from any cause and cardiovascular disease. Investigators followed up with participants through the end of 2022.
At the time of device wear, researchers found that participants engaged in a median of 62 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity per week and accumulated a median of 5,183 steps per day. During a median follow-up of nine years, approximately 9 percent of participants had passed and roughly 4 percent developed cardiovascular disease.
Higher levels of physical activity (whether assessed as step counts or time in moderate to vigorous activity) were associated with large risk reductions in death or cardiovascular disease — the most active quarter of women reduced their risk by 30-40 percent compared with the least-active quarter. Individuals in the top three quartiles of physical activity outlived those in the bottom quartile by an average of 2.22 and 2.36 months respectively, based on time and step-based measurements, at nine years of follow-up. This survival advantage persisted regardless of differences in body mass index (BMI).
While both metrics are useful in portraying health status, Hamaya explained that each has its advantages and downsides. For one, step counts may not account for differences in fitness levels. For example, if a 20-year-old and 80-year-old both walk for 30 minutes at moderate intensity, their step counts may differ significantly. Conversely, steps are straightforward to measure and less subject to interpretation compared to exercise intensity. Additionally, steps capture even sporadic movements of everyday life, not just exercise, and these kinds of daily life activities likely are those carried out by older individuals.
“For some, especially for younger individuals, exercise may involve activities like tennis, soccer, walking, or jogging, all of which can be easily tracked with steps. However, for others, it may consist of bike rides or swimming, where monitoring the duration of exercise is simpler,” said Hamaya. “That’s why it’s important for physical-activity guidelines to offer multiple ways to reach goals. Movement looks different for everyone, and nearly all forms of movement are beneficial to our health.”
The authors note that this study incorporates only a single assessment of time and step-based physical activity metrics. Further, most women included in the study were white and of higher socioeconomic status. Finally, this study was observational, and thus causal relations cannot be proven. In the future, Hamaya aims to collect more data via a randomized controlled trial to better understand the relationship between time and step-based exercise metrics and health.
“The next federal physical activity guidelines are planned for 2028,” said senior author I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist in the Division of Preventive Medicine at BWH. “Our findings further establish the importance of adding step-based targets, in order to accommodate flexibility of goals that work for individuals with differing preferences, abilities and lifestyles.”
Disclosures: Hamaya reported receiving consulting fees from DeSC Healthcare, Inc., outside of the submitted work. Co-authors Christopher Moore, Julie Buring, Kelly Evenson, and Lee reported receiving institutional support from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study.
This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (CA154647, CA047988, CA182913, HL043851, HL080467, and HL09935), the National Cancer Institute (5R01CA227122), Office of the Director, Office of Disease Prevention, and Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research; and by the extramural research program at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
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New HAA president brings holistic approach to alumni leadership
Incoming HAA President Moitri Chowdhury Savard assumes her role July 1.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
6 min read
Moitri Chowdhury Savard committed to listening deeply, respecting differences, finding common ground in shared values
As a family physician, Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93 employs a holistic approach — focusing on the emotional and psychological as well as the physical aspects of health by asking questions and listening carefully.
Now, as Savard gears up to begin her term as alumni president on July 1, she sees clear connections between her professional life and her new role leading the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) board of directors and the global alumni community.
“Physicians are taught to listen as their first step to solving problems,” says Savard, who is medical director and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics and medicine at the Long Island City center of Weill Cornell Medicine. “When you listen deeply, you can identify shared values. I bring my ability to listen deeply and to consider the whole picture to my work with the alumni community.”
Savard immigrated to the U.S. from India as an infant and grew up in New York. When the family arrived, her father had $8 in his wallet and a letter of recommendation from his employer in India.
“They worked so hard,” she says. “My acceptance to Harvard was very exciting for me, and a dream for them. After all their perseverance and the prejudice they faced, I consider my education to be an incredible gift.”
She is also honored to be the first person of South Asian descent to serve as alumni president. “It’s a serious responsibility,” she says. “This is a region that comprises a quarter of the world’s population.”
As Savard began to think about stepping into the role during a challenging time for Harvard, she reflected on the University motto — veritas, truth — but struggled with the limits of the word. “I believe in this unique moment, we have to focus on the plural nature of truth,” she says.
Curious to know whether there was a word in Latin that captured this concept, she reached out to a Latin scholar she knows very well: current HAA President Tracy “Ty” Moore II ’06, who told her about veritates, meaning many truths.
“We have to be able to simultaneously hold multiple truths and connect in dialogue across differences in the alumni community,” Savard says. “I think the many different viewpoints we’re seeing seem to clash at face value, but when we delve down into them, we find shared humanity and values. We can, as an alumni community, coalesce around these shared values, bring change, and move forward while having these difficult conversations.”
Moitri Chowdhury Savard and Tracy “Ty” Moore II.
The ability to pivot at Harvard
Savard concentrated in economics and Indian studies as an undergraduate, collaborating with her adviser — Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy — on a research project focusing on the determinants of fertility in India.
While her original plan was to pursue development economics, her involvement in a student organization soon shifted her next step. Savard joined the First-year Outdoor Program (FOP), a pre-orientation initiative that hosts wilderness expeditions across the Northeast.
Growing up in the city, she had never had the opportunity to spend much time in nature. She loved the program so much that she decided to become a FOP leader. During her training, she took a wilderness EMT course in northern New Hampshire, an experience that resonated deeply with her. When she returned home to New York, she worked as a third rider in an ambulance — and switched her concentration to pre-med.
“Harvard gave me the opportunity to explore what I thought I wanted to do, and ultimately find what I decided to do,” she says.
Between her first and second year, she received a Lamont Public Service Fellowship, which ignited a lifelong passion for civic engagement. This inspired her to create a fund, named in honor of her parents, to support undergraduates pursuing a public service program over the summer.
“What’s your why?” Volunteering as an alum
Studying abroad in India during her junior year, Savard realized that she deeply missed her class. When she returned to campus for her senior year, she was eager to rekindle her connections with classmates and was elected Radcliffe first marshal.
“My class was my primary draw to the community,” Savard says. “But now, six reunion cycles later, I have met so many alums I didn’t know during my College years, and they are among my closest friends. In addition to my class, the HAA has given me tremendous opportunities to connect with alumni all over the world.”
Years later, after she established her medical career and her children got a little older, she wanted to continue giving back to Harvard. She served as an alumni interviewer for the College and joined the Harvard Club of New York, encouraged by the Club’s commitment to supporting interviewees. Savard’s strong volunteer leadership with her class led to a role on the HAA board of directors.
As she reflects on her work with the HAA, she often asks herself, “What’s your why?” For Savard, it is essential that there are varied voices at the table. “Whenever there was an issue I felt strongly about, I raised my hand,” she says. “It’s my dream that every alum around the world could get involved.”
A network of support
Savard has been collaborating closely with the HAA’s Moore, whom she describes as “a complete force of nature and true Renaissance man.”
“He is a community-builder and inspiration to volunteers,” she says. “I’ve benefited tremendously from his thoughtful mentorship.”
As his tenure wraps up, Moore reflects on the “dedication, grit, and collaboration” of the global network of alumni rising to the challenges of the past year. He is thrilled to support Savard in her new role.
“Moitri’s email signature includes a quote by His Holiness the Dalai Lama: ‘Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible,’” Moore says. “This quote epitomizes her leadership style. She thoughtfully embraces challenging situations as opportunities, with a spirit of true kindness. I’m thrilled that our global community of alumni will learn from her courageous, optimistic, and gracious approach, which will enable us to embrace and love our fellow members — especially those who have different viewpoints.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Three graduating students selected in a University-wide competition will deliver speeches Thursday at Tercentenary Theatre as part of the one of the oldest traditions of Commencement.
The student orators are Blake Alexander Lopez, a senior from the College who will deliver the Latin Salutatory; Shruthi Kumar, also a College senior, who will deliver the Senior English Address; and Robert Clinton, J.D. ’24, a Harvard Law School graduate who will deliver the Graduate English Address.
Overcoming those 6 feet of separation
Blake Alexander Lopez Undergraduate Latin
When Lopez arrived on campus in the fall of 2020, six months into the COVID pandemic, first-year students could live in dorms, but they had to attend classes online and keep social distance as part of public health guidelines to slow the spread of the virus.
A joint classical languages and literature and linguistics concentrator with a secondary field in medieval studies, Lopez will address “that sort of nearer distance that we found ourselves within” in the Latin oration he will deliver during the Morning Exercises of Commencement.
“Being a student on campus in the fall of 2020 felt like we were in the proximity of all these things we had so long dreamed about, and yet there was an inherent separation between us,” said Lopez, a Kirkland House resident. “We were physically rather close, living in rooms next to each other and seeing each other on our computer screens because we had to stay socially distant.”
But as the pandemic eased its grip, members of the Class of 2024 returned to normal life and built closer relationships with one another. Celebrating graduation in person and together is a reason to celebrate, said Lopez.
“What I would like the audience to take away from my speech is that whatever difficulties were posed to us, we were able to meet them, adapt and exhibit a resilience that allowed us to thrive,” said Lopez. “There is so much our class has to be proud of, in view of what we faced. It is because what we faced, we faced together.”
Lopez, who fell in love with Latin in high school, said the language will serve him well to talk about both separation and closeness. Latin is considered a dead language because there are no native speakers. During his speech, subtitles will appear on screens in the Yard, and an English translation will be included in the program flyer.
“There’s a layer of separation between the reader of the speech’s English translation and myself delivering it in Latin,” said Lopez, who grew up in Chicago. “But being able to communicate my ideas and the feelings behind them across the linguistic boundary is reflective in a lot of ways of the fact that in spite of the barriers separating the Class of 2024 when we first arrived on campus, we were able to traverse that distance.”
At Harvard, Lopez strengthened his love of Latin and the classics. His senior thesis focused in part on ancient graffiti inscriptions found in Pompeii, which include jokes, riddles, literary quotations, and the customary “I was here.” The subject fascinates him because it provides a glimpse into the intimate relationship between Latin and the way common people made use of it.
After graduation, Lopez will pursue a master’s degree in classics at Oxford University. For now, he cherishes the fact that he was able to realize the dream he started nurturing when he was applying to Harvard.
“The fact that hundreds of years going on, we still do a Latin oration at Commencement really captivated me,” said Lopez. “I would sort of daydream about it. I’d like to go back to 17-year-old me and tell him, ‘Hey, we did it.’ Or as they’d say in Latin, ‘Vicimus.’”
The power of not knowing
Shruthi Kumar Undergraduate English
Kumar’s speech explores a subject she knows all too well.
Coming to Harvard as a pre-med student, Kumar took a history of science class on health disparities in the U.S., and she had a change of heart.
By embracing uncertainty, she found her passion for public health. “I didn’t know something like history of science existed,” said Kumar, a joint history of science and economics concentrator with a secondary in human evolutionary biology. “But I fell in love with that class, and I realized that history of science was what I really wanted to study to find ways to address the world’s biggest health problems.”
A Mather House resident, Kumar is glad she took risks during her time at Harvard and challenged societal and parental expectations when she switched pre-med studies for classes on health inequities and public health issues. In hindsight, Kumar said her decision made sense. After all, she had been interested in public health since high school, when she was involved in a mental health education program for youth.
In College, Kumar started a campaign to ensure that all Harvard bathrooms supply free menstrual products. Thanks to her advocacy, 817 bathrooms across the University are fully stocked with free tampons and sanitary pads on a regular basis.
Navigating the uncertainty of choosing a new career concentration could be nerve-racking, but Kumar found strength when she decided to follow her inner voice. “You’re supposed to make money, you’re supposed to have a family, you’re supposed to do this, that, or the other,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I think we owe it to ourselves to listen to that voice inside that tells us, ‘Oh, this is what I’m passionate about.’”
Kumar is confident her message will resonate with the Class of 2024, which started their first year amid the uncertainty of the pandemic. “There is a lot you don’t know in your first year, and on top of that, there was COVID,” said Kumar, who grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. “Our class had to grapple with not knowing what was going to happen in the next few years of our College experience. … We have gone through College with this chaos, and we have developed a strength to deal with uncertainty, and that’s what makes us powerful.”
The power of not knowing can be revelatory, said Kumar. After graduation, she will work on public health entrepreneurship and after that, she plans to attend law school or pursue a Ph.D.
“We are all people walking through the world, not really knowing what’s going to happen,” Kumar said. “But the power of not knowing is about how you can turn that space of fear and anxiety into something that is empowering, uplifting, and exciting. It’s a conscious shift that you must make pretty much all the time every day.”
‘Working hard’ vs. ‘doing good’
Robert Clinton Graduate English
Growing up in Richmond, California, in an African American middle-class family, Clinton felt the call to public service early on. He is not sure where it came from, but he believes that both being the child of civil servants and being Black in the U.S. may have contributed to his commitment to the common good.
In his Commencement speech, Clinton will urge students to use their privilege and power to better the lives of fellow citizens and create a more equitable society. Privilege comes with social responsibility, he said.
“Some people who graduate from Harvard are going to be presidents or senators, but most people are going to be managers, professors, and even if they are not at the very top, they will still have a lot of power,” said Clinton. “We will be people with good jobs because we went to Harvard. And that means that we must be on the lookout for opportunities to help people.”
Harvard graduates should put their education to good use, said Clinton, who found inspiration in the work of actor and activist Harry Belafonte, who used his fame to support the Civil Rights struggle. Clinton was also stirred by the words of a Law School professor who exhorted students to find something bigger than themselves and be part of it.
“There’s a difference between working hard and doing good,”he said. “People here know how to work really hard, but working hard doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making the world better or doing your part.”
Before coming to the Law School, Clinton worked for the city of San Francisco in the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs. But he began thinking seriously about the law when he became involved with efforts to remove a citizenship question from the 2020 U.S. Census questionnaire. A coalition of immigrant groups challenged former President Donald Trump’s administration before the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the petitioners.
“I got to see how lawyers can use the law to help people and to hold people accountable,” Clinton said. “It was really inspiring.”
After graduation, Clinton will clerk for Judge Dale Ho of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. By coincidence, Ho was the lawyer representing the immigrant groups that challenged Trump’s plan to include the citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Clinton is elated over that twist of fate.
“It was the first legal case that I followed from beginning to end,” said Clinton. “I read the briefs even though I didn’t know what they meant, I listened to the oral argument, and I was shocked when against all the odds, they won the case.
“And it just so happens that Judge Ho is going to be my first boss after law school. I joked with him in the interview that he was one of the reasons why I went to Law School. It feels like a wonderful full-circle moment.”
At the center is William Freeman, a mixed-race African American and Indigenous man convicted of horse thievery in 1840. Sentenced to five years of hard labor at Auburn State Prison, Freeman was forced to manufacture goods for various private entities.
Upon his release, he set about campaigning for back wages. When that failed, he lashed out with a grisly crime that would help shape how Americans came to think about race, criminality, and imprisonment.
The Gazette caught up with Bernstein, also a professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, & Sexuality, to learn more about this previously unexamined history. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Where did you find the story of William Freeman?
It was in a footnote. There, I came upon an 1846 theatrical show about how William Freeman murdered four white people, including a toddler and a grandmother.
One of my areas of expertise is theater history. I knew it was nearly unheard of at mid-19th century for a show to depict Black-on-white violence. At the time, even performances of “Othello” took great pains to avoid it, because white people did not want to see it.
I asked myself, “Why were these white people in Auburn, N.Y., behaving so differently from white people across the nation?” I knew something amazing had happened, and I had to learn what it was.
Exterior of a convict’s cell at Auburn State Prison.
Harper’s Weekly, 18 December 1858, 809.
Rendering of William Freeman, Daily Cayuga Tocsin — Extra, 19 March 1846.
William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
So how did Freeman initially land in prison?
Freeman was from a family that had just completed the process of gradual emancipation and named themselves Freeman. The name speaks to who they considered themselves to be — and what future they were choosing for themselves.
When Freeman was 15 years old, a horse was stolen. He was accused. There was no physical evidence against him, but it didn’t matter. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years in the Auburn State Prison, where he was subjected to convict-leasing. He was forced to manufacture animal harnesses and dyes and carpets, all of which were sold by private companies.
Freeman was furious at being forced to labor, as he put it, “for nothing.” By nothing, he meant no crime — because he always insisted he was innocent of the horse theft — and no pay. He was explicit about both of those meanings. He considered himself a worker, not a slave.
I understand that Auburn State Prison was itself an innovation.
The Auburn State Prison is very important, because it originated prison-for-profit. It originated the idea that a prison could function primarily to generate wealth rather than control or punish or rehabilitate criminals.
There’s a common perception that profit-driven convict leasing was invented by the South after the Civil War, as part of a white effort to re-enslave African Americans. But my book reveals how the North invented this system half a century earlier, in the wake of Northern, not Southern, slavery.
The Auburn State Prison opened in 1817. By the 1840s, it was an economic force throughout New York State. Meanwhile, the Auburn System, as it was called, was being exported. There were many dozens of prisons being built on the Auburn System all over the United States and Europe. San Quentin, for example, would soon be built on Auburn’s model.
Your book details Auburn State Prison’s innovations in another area: violence. What kinds of violence did Freeman experience there?
One of the central forms of violence was extreme social isolation. The Auburn system involved each prisoner being sequestered in solitary confinement every night. During the day, they worked in factories that were built into the prison, but they were forbidden from ever speaking.
While Freeman was incarcerated, a prison administrator invented a machine for waterboarding. Freeman was waterboarded, but he was also whipped and flogged. At one point he was beaten with a board that split on his head and he suffered a brain injury. He also became almost completely deaf.
I find it interesting that Freeman never sought a legal remedy for his physical injuries. He focused exclusively on back wages.
It was legally possible to sue for injury at the time, but he never tried. When he got out, in 1845, he tried to collect what he considered back pay. He appealed to magistrates. He was laughed at and dismissed. And then he committed an act of terrorism that was a strike against the state, a strike against the system of prison-for-profit.
Freeman stabbed to death four members of the Van Nest family in their home within hours of seeking back pay for the last time. I hesitate to rehash the details.
What was most important to me was not the blow-by-blow of how Freeman killed the family, but rather how he described it: He called it “work.” That tells us what is at the core of his concern. He had been forced to work in prison factories for no pay, and now he extracted “payback” through a murder that he called “work.” It was an immense irony.
Let’s move on to the murder trial. It was a high-profile case and the two lawyers involved were significant historical figures. Who were they and what did they argue?
Twenty years after the trial, William Henry Seward became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, which is what he’s most remembered for today. He’s also remembered for brokering the purchase of Alaska — if you’ve ever heard of “Seward’s Folly.”
At the time of the trial, in 1846, he was a recent past governor of New York state. He was living and working as a lawyer in Auburn and decided to take Freeman’s case pro bono.
Seward argued that Freeman was insane, and that he committed the crime because he was insane, and that he became insane as a result of racism. Seward was not ventriloquizing arguments that were already widespread. He was crafting them. Seward basically made the social pathology argument that [Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson] Daniel Patrick Moynihan would make a century later [in his 1965 report on Black poverty].
It’s an argument that continues to have enormous purchase today. And let’s name it clearly: It is a racist argument that criminalizes Black people.
Who was Seward’s adversary, and what did he argue?
The prosecution was led by John Van Buren, who was the son of recent President Martin Van Buren. What we know right away is that this was a clash of the titans. This was a former governor versus the son of a president and a grisly crime, an enormously disturbing crime. Newspaper readers across the nation were riveted.
Van Buren made a different racist argument. His argument was that Freeman committed this murder because of inherent racial savagery. In different ways, Seward and Van Buren were both arguing that Freeman committed these crimes because he was Black and Native American, which is completely contrary to everything that Freeman ever said. Freeman said that he did it because his wages were stolen from him by the emerging system of prison-for-profit.
Why did nobody hear what Freeman said about his actual motive?
On some level, they did hear it. They were just enormously threatened, the white population in particular. We need to understand Auburn as a kind of company town. Every person, every business, every physical aspect of the town was connected to the prison. So people had an economic interest in protecting it. The fact that they went to such lengths to invent other reasons for Freeman’s crime, that tells us how hard they were working to not hear what Freeman was saying.
Auburn later emerged as a hub of abolitionist thought. Was there any connection to Freeman?
It’s worth mentioning that the Black community also felt threatened, but for different reasons. Their problem was, how to live in a world in which Freeman had committed these crimes, and how to live with the racist libels that the trial developed and unleashed.
One of the answers became activism. One of the arguments Seward made in court was that Freeman committed his crime because he had been excluded from white schools — and there were no Black schools in Auburn. Afterwards, the Black community very cannily raised money for Black schools.
Also striking was that prior to Freeman’s trial in 1846, there was very little abolitionist activity in the town. All of a sudden, after the trial, Black abolitionist lecturers including Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet become very interested in Auburn.
The first edition of “Twelve Years a Slave” [1853] by Solomon Northup was published there. The first edition of Douglass’ “My Bondage and My Freedom” [1855] was published there. And then Harriet Tubman moved to Auburn — she spent the second half of her life there — and the first edition of her dictated autobiography [1869] was published in the town.
I understand this as a strike against the trial. Freeman was silenced; he never took the stand. His actual argument was buried under the narratives Seward and Van Buren invented and amplified. So how did Black communities respond? They responded by telling their own stories.
Robin Bernstein will be joined by Brandon M. Terry, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, to discuss “Freeman’s Challenge.” 7 p.m. Friday (May 17) Harvard Bookstore.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Harvard Commencement has long been an important day for Katarzyna Hanley. Over the decade that she worked in the Registrar’s office at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she had essential responsibilities to ensure the event went off without a hitch, such as maintaining the official list of graduates, and ordering and preparing the diplomas.
Next week, Commencement will once again be an important day for her, but for a very different reason. Hanley, who goes by Kathy, will finally receive a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Harvard Extension School 13 years after she started.
“I can’t wait. It’s a celebration of a lot of years of commitment, so yes, I’m very much looking forward to it,” said Hanley, 45. “I feel like I’ve been a student for so long, I’m not sure what life after being a student looks like, but I think it’s great. I’m ready to be done.”
She pursued a bachelor’s degree taking one course per semester while working full-time at Harvard, first in the Registrar’s office and now as a graduate program coordinator in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at FAS, where she provides support for 50-60 graduate students, making sure things run smoothly so they can focus on learning and teaching.
Hanley, who came to the U.S. from Poland when she was 12, had an associate degree from MassBay Community College and was employed for a time as a branch operations manager at a local banking chain, then processed paperwork at a medical records firm. None of it felt fulfilling.
“I just felt like I needed to find a career,” she said about applying to Harvard. “I wanted to get in at the ground level at Harvard University and see where that would take me.”
“I knew it was going to be a long road ahead and I just kept taking courses, just nose to the grindstone, and kept going.”
Hanley joined the FAS Registrar’s office, keeping student records up to date, ensuring University diplomas were printed correctly, and providing administrative support for the graduate program coordinators at various Schools.
Though not required to do her job, Hanley started to feel that a bachelor’s degree was the “bare minimum” she should have working at an institution of higher learning like Harvard, where everyone seemed to already have a college degree or be working toward one. So she began looking into offerings on campus with an eye toward perhaps one day getting a bachelor’s degree.
She attended an open house at Sanders Theatre where Davíd Carrasco, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America and professor of Anthropology at FAS, spoke movingly about Harvard Extension, its students, and the importance of education.
Hanley took her first course in 2011, where her routine involved getting up at 4:30 a.m. to do some reading for class before putting in a full workday on campus and doing “a lot” of coursework on weekends. “I haven’t really had a proper weekend in a long time,” she said.
She credits the Extension School’s robust online learning program with making a difficult work/school/life balance feasible. “The flexibility has made it possible for me to get a degree.”
Hanley wasn’t always confident she’d reach this milestone. Five years ago, she couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and wasn’t sure she could continue.
“I contemplated stopping the program just because it was so much work all the time,” she said of juggling her home life with work, commuting three hours a day roundtrip from Billerica to campus, keeping up with schoolwork, and planning for the next semester. “It was just too much.”
Though overwhelmed at times, Hanley wasn’t ready to bail. “I also felt that I’ve already invested so much time into it, it would be a shame to just throw it away,” she said. With the help of an academic adviser, Sarah Anne Stinnett, she reviewed her progress toward fulfilling the degree requirements and put together a game plan.
“She is amazing,” Hanley said of Stinnett. “She sat down with me and we kind of parsed out what else needed to be done, the options that I could explore, like taking some exams to offset some of the credits, transfer credits. She has led me through the last three to four years and how I could get that accomplished.” Stinnett’s guidance “was critical for me to finish the degree.”
With the path suddenly clear, Hanley put her head down and pushed ahead. “I knew it was going to be a long road ahead and I just kept taking courses, just nose to the grindstone, and kept going,” she said.
Fittingly, Hanley said, she is closing out her time as a student this semester with a course taught by Carrasco, the person who first inspired her academic journey, called “Quests for Wisdom.”
“Wisdom has a lot of definitions,” she said. “And I think to finish my career as a student with a quest for wisdom, where the course itself asks you to find your own ways toward wisdom, I think is just — cosmic design.”
Hanley is thrilled to finally be able to join in the Commencement festivities, this time wearing a cap and gown.
“For a long time, I found it almost embarrassing that it has taken me this long,” said Hanley, who took a couple of brief breaks over the 13 years. She advises other staff contemplating going back to school to just make the leap.
“Life happens, things will happen. So, I think if you want something, just do it. Commit to it, and just be persistent and do it.”
Class of ’24 gets a do-over on high school prom that pandemic took away
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer<br>
4 min read
When schools closed in March 2020, Ilana Kofman ’24 kept up her spirits by summoning one thought.
“I was so excited for my senior prom,” she recalled. “I had bought a dress and started practicing makeup in my free time, because there was not much else to do.”
Kofman was “devastated” when the event was canceled weeks later. For four years, her unworn dress hung in a closet back home in western Massachusetts.
An occasion to don the sparkly green number finally arrived last month. Thanks to efforts of the Harvard College Class of 2024 Committee, Kofman and her friends got to attend a properly posh senior prom, corsages and boutonnieres included.
“It was obviously bittersweet,” said the double concentrator in economics and psychology. “I didn’t get to wear the dress in high school, but I’m very happy I got to wear it in College.”
Of course, a night out in gowns and tuxedos wasn’t the only tradition this year’s seniors missed out on as teens. They settled in as first-years amid the social distancing era, with online learning and 6 feet of separation from any interesting new peers.
“If you speak to most students in the Class of ’24 — not just at Harvard, but around the country — the lack of closure to high school and the difficult start to college makes people feel like they’re lacking something,” said Class of 2024 first marshal Fez S. Zafar, a government concentrator from Iowa.
As a result, the 33-member Class Committee resolved to play up the fun factor from the start of classes last fall.
“Our class has been through so much,” offered second marshal Chibuikem C. “Chuby” Uche, a native Texan studying government. “We felt like, you know what? It’s time to wrap things up on a high note.”
Prom King Jeremy Ornstein.
Prom Queen Saylor Willauer.
First marshal Fez S. Zafar.
Program marshal Madison Pankey.
Program marshal Shruthi Kumar.
Second marshal Chibuikem C. “Chuby” Uche.
That meant throwing a series of gatherings, not just on campus but also at venues in Boston. It also meant heeding calls to host something like a prom.
Demand was high for the April 25 event, held at a nightclub near Boston’s Government Center. The tickets, which ranged from $20 to $40, sold quickly.
Nearly 500 students partied past midnight in their fancy prom attire. One of Kofman’s favorite memories was dancing with her Leverett House roommates to a mix of pop and hip-hop spun by friend and classmate Hanna Pak ’24. For Zafar and Uche, it was watching musician Prazul Wokhlu ’25 — who enrolled with the Class of 2024 before taking time off during the pandemic — perched with his saxophone atop the DJ stand to offer a few riffs on “Careless Whisper,” Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” and more.
“The venue was packed to the brim,” Uche said. “There were so many smiling faces, so many people singing ‘Dancing Queen’ at the top of their lungs.”
Also part of the festivities was a court of prom royalty. Jeremy Ornstein, a social studies concentrator and climate activist known for work with the Sunrise Movement, was voted king by the Class of ’24. The evening’s queen was Saylor Willauer, an applied math concentrator from Maryland who’s known about campus for running intramurals. Ironically, both pack a little extra prom experience under the crowns, having graduated from high school in 2019.
“It was just a really nice, really special thing for the class marshals to do for us,” Kofman said, of the whole evening. “I’m extremely grateful that I did get my prom in the end.”
Leaders at Harvard in and out of the classroom tell their stories in the Experience series.
When George Whitesides started as a teenage technician in his father’s Kentucky lab in the early 1950s, the bond was immediate — and lasting.
Today one of the world’s most influential chemists, Whitesides, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Research Professor, has worked on a wide array of scientific problems, shifting focus periodically to uncharted territory. Over the course of his long career — Harvard College, Cal Tech, MIT, and more than four decades as a researcher and teacher back at Harvard — he’s explored nuclear magnetic spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft robotics, unconventional data storage, microfabrication, nanotechnology, and the origin of life. He has published more than 1,200 scientific articles and holds more than 100 patents, and his many honors include the National Medal of Science. He’s also known for his ability to spin discoveries into new companies, including biotech giant Genzyme, purchased in 2011 by Sanofi.
In a conversation with the Gazette, Whitesides looked back on his life and career. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Your interest in chemistry starts in your father’s lab?
I don’t know where it came from. It was always interesting to me that the world was made of atoms and how those atoms combined, and I was a good chemist from the very beginning, so studying chemistry seemed like a sensible thing to do. I assumed I would end up working in the chemical industry.
It must have been a cut above the typical teenage summer job.
It was much more boring than that. I measured the pour-point viscosity of coal tar. You heat it up and put it in a cup. The cup has a hole of calibrated size in it and this very thick liquid dribbles out of the hole. You measure how long it takes for a given amount of liquid to dribble out and record that, then you can calculate from those data pour-point viscosity. It was part of the process of producing a standardized product and was boring to do, but it was also satisfying and something a high school student could manage.
You were at Phillips Andover before enrolling at Harvard. How was that experience?
I enjoyed Andover. I had a couple of teachers who were very good. I learned how to study and I certainly learned some chemistry. It was pretty standard for students who’d done well in prep schools to get early admission to Harvard, which I got. But I was not a star student. I got advanced placement in one course, maybe analytical chemistry. I took the first hour exam and got an F. I took the second hour exam and got an F. That same thing happened for the third hour exam. I don’t remember exactly how long the string went on, but I went to the teacher and said, “What do I do to salvage this? It’s going really badly.” And he looked at me very briefly and said, “Learn the material.” That was a very useful lesson. So I went away and learned the material.
What was Harvard like in the late 1950s?
It was the usual undergraduate experience. I knew it mostly from the collection of courses that I took. I had a good time while I was here but most of the good time came from courses I took and people who took the same courses. The one woman I met would eventually become my wife, Barbara. Her brother was my roommate, arbitrarily assigned at some point.
With wife Barbara at home.
After Harvard, you headed to Cal Tech.
I ended up in the lab of a guy named Jack Roberts, who turned out to be a perfect fit for me. He was in physical organic chemistry, which made sense. You looked at previous reactions and you learned how they went. Then, if you had a new reaction or a new process, you asked “What is it analogous to?” And you predicted that if all the pieces were the same, the reaction would probably go roughly the same way. And it often did, which made it a pretty logical discipline.
The nice thing about Roberts was that, unlike many research directors, he never told me what to do. I would come up with an idea and do the research. Then I would write a draft of a paper and send him the draft, and he would look at it, correct it — largely the grammar but sometimes the chemistry — and give it back to me. After I’d done the necessary work, I’d give it back to him. This would usually go on for a couple of cycles and then we’d send it off to the journal.
It’s easy to look back at a career and imagine that one step led to another. But when you’re living it, the next step is often not clear. Were there times when you wondered whether you should be doing something other than chemistry?
No. I thought chemistry was pretty straightforward, very general, very interesting, and a good thing to do. I was enjoying it and making some progress.
“I prefer to think that, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s because we do stuff that’s simple and useful and solves problems.”
Your focus has shifted periodically from one major area to another. Were those shifts intentional, evolutionary, or accidental?
It was intentional. My central point of instruction to students is this: If somebody else is working on something, don’t work on it. There’s an old saying in chemistry that if somebody else has developed something and you work on it, you are working for them. If you produce an idea and someone else works on it, they’re working for you.
An example of where this has succeeded is in something called self-assembled monolayers. There is a very highly developed chemistry focused on making and observing the smallest causal structures: nanostructures. This fits in a peripheral way with the general importance of nanoscience in making electronic components. But if there are billions of dollars being spent by industry making electronic components, why should a little university research group do that?
So we worked on an alternative way to do this without expensive equipment. We worked out a technique in which you basically take a gold film and dip it in a solution of appropriate chemical. You reliably get a monolayer film one molecule thick. That can then be manipulated using the tools of physical organic chemistry to give you very, very small structures. We’ve made structures that are a couple of angstroms wide and connected in various ways. The reason that’s important is it makes it possible for organic chemists, inorganic chemists, and biochemists to use this technique to enter nanoscience. It’s a technique that everybody can use. I’m a believer in problems and a believer in easy.
You gave a TED talk on the importance of simplicity. With so much science focused on complex problems, how did you come to that view?
Something that’s simple is easier to work with than something that is complicated, and you’re going to make more rapid progress with a simple technique than a complicated one. I don’t like competition just for the sake of competition, but in a sense it’s obvious that if you work on something somebody else is working on, then it’s a competition and you want to be making more rapid progress. But I don’t choose to compete. I choose to work on problems because I think they’re interesting and important.
Is there a philosophy there?
Yes. Do things that are easy to do rather than things that are complicated. You’ll find our laboratory is just like ordinary chemistry laboratories, while a physical chemistry laboratory that works on nanostructures has elaborate equipment that sometimes takes years to build. I don’t want to build elaborate equipment — that’s not my skill.
Is this approach part of the reason you’ve been successful?
Success is in the eye of the beholder. I prefer to think that, to the extent that we’ve been successful, it’s because we do stuff that’s simple and useful and solves problems.
You also do it frugally. You’ve talked in the past about the importance of frugal science in an era when the price tag for science is rising.
You don’t need much more than an evaporator and a beaker. You buy the chemicals you need or you make them yourself because they’re easy to make. And then, the underlying principles are the principles of physical organic chemistry, which makes it relatively easy to predict outcomes and which contributes to the simplicity. What we do is apply physical organic chemistry through techniques that we develop to solve complicated problems, problems that in other hands require complicated equipment or complicated ideas.
Receiving the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton in 1998.
Courtesy of George Whitesides
How does idea-generation work in your lab?
We make a list of the 10 most important things we can think of. I’ll suggest specific problems and the students will come up with ways of attacking them. The initial ideas may be mostly mine, but the important ideas are often mostly the students’. The scientist is not in the business of following instructions. Students should experience coming up with an idea and pursuing it themselves.
What do we work on now? We work on the origin of life. We work on “what is magnetism” and what can you do with it? We work on a series of problems related to small structures. And we work on soft robots. Those are all areas that are important, for one or another reason, to some community in the technical world.
You’ve said that the real product of your lab is the students. Your team has generated 1,200 papers, more than 100 patents, and several commercial enterprises. Why is teaching more important than the generation of knowledge?
They’re both important, but the students go out themselves and teach, so there’s an amplification there. Students come to the group and learn a particular style — or develop their own variant of that style. Then they go off and many get academic jobs. They have students, who they teach in their own way, and it goes on from there.
“One of the wonderful things about science is it gives you an enormous scope in not only what you do, but also how you want to do it.”
You’ve had a hand in starting a number of companies and have clearly put an emphasis on making sure things get commercialized. Do you help launch a company and then step back or do you stay involved?
It’s not straightforward. You have to have an idea, you have to have a market, and you have to have people who can deal with the exigencies of a small company.
One thing that’s never been quite clear is how you take bright young people and teach them to be entrepreneurs. You may have a technology but you won’t know whether it has an application until people take your technology and pay you — or the company — to use that product. That’s not what universities do particularly well, but it is what CTOs, CFOs, and CEOs — the people who run the company — do well. So there’s an entirely different part of the story that’s important, which concerns the identification and recruitment of people who can make a small company prosper. And it can take a long time for that to happen.
There are many variables in that process. Is one more important than the others?
People ultimately run the company, but it’s as complicated a problem as doing the research. Often at a small company that is succeeding you find a good application, a good product identification, and a good CEO. And the CEO may often be the one who comes up with a product identification and all the rest. Money is also critical.
And in the end it’s important — with respect to guiding principles — that since funding for your work comes from your neighbors, a benefit goes out to them in some way?
In jobs, which provide income, or in some other way. People generally don’t like just giving away money if they’re going to get nothing in return. We have a system of taxation — and we could argue about its fairness or lack of fairness — but the fact of the matter is people prefer to see something come from their money.
Lecturing at Harvard in 2005.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students are sometimes told that failure is good for learning. Do you agree?
Certainly, a failure is good for instruction. If you look at the companies we’ve started that have done well, you would find an equal number that have not prospered. Those failures often come from a bad understanding of how the market works.
We recently developed a method for storing information that doesn’t involve electronics but instead uses dyes. That was based on my sense that information storage is an extremely important area but consumes a lot of energy and is subject to hacking. I thought that if you could provide an alternative which didn’t use energy and was not subject to hacking, people would be very interested in finding applications for it. I have so far been wrong. Nobody has shown an appropriate level of interest.
Might that take time to find its application, or is it just a miss?
A lot of small companies don’t go anywhere for quite a while after they get started. When they finally do, what changed is never entirely clear.
A big question you’re working on that has resisted explanation is the origin of life. Why is this problem so difficult?
For starters, you’re not going to make bugs in a test tube, so how do you tell whether you’ve succeeded or not?
The “RNA world” is a leading hypothesis for a plausible way of going from random chemicals — basically generated in outer space and then raining on the Earth — to the components of a living organism. A prime proponent, John Sutherland, thinks that RNA came first, then the RNA somehow propagated the DNA, and you go from there. It makes perfectly respectable sense on paper but you don’t know that it actually happened that way.
We do know, though, that you can make an RNA that way. If you have pools that are acidic and have sulfur in them — because they’re near volcanic fumaroles — and then it rains on them, the rain forms other chemicals. If these pools sit on hot rocks so that there’s heat to do chemistry with, then chemistry will occur and some of it may well produce RNA. But does that mean that that’s the origin of life? Does that mean that that’s the right hypothesis? No, it doesn’t.
These are very legitimate questions and they’re good scientific questions, but there’s a difference between something that could plausibly happen and something that probably did happen.
Do you have a favorite theory?
We’re working on an approach where our preferred source of energy is lightning and we’re learning all sorts of things about chemistry going on in lightning. Instead of making lightning, we make sparks that are energetic, very hot, and have curious things associated with them. A lot of lightning strikes occur over oceans and all around the ocean there are cavities in rocks, which if they get hot, are good places to think about chemistry happening. Now, whether that is the solution to the origin of life is another question.
“My central point of instruction to students is this: If somebody else is working on something, don’t work on it.”
Have your teaching methods changed over the course of your career?
No. We do our own approach and the students, whether they’re graduate students or undergraduate students, are free to say, “I think that is an interesting way of doing things” or “That’s not for me, that’s not the kind of problem I want to solve.” One of the wonderful things about science is it gives you an enormous scope in not only what you do, but also how you want to do it.
Let’s close with the areas of science you find most interesting right now.
You can make a list of maybe 10 or 15 problems and you’ll find that each requires separate ideas to solve. I won’t make any broad generalization about what’s more interesting and what’s less interesting, but I don’t think I want to leave to my grandchildren a world which is significantly hotter than it is now. I do think that it’s a good thing to think about whether the countless stars with planets around them also have countless intelligences on them. There are a wide variety of problems that can make the list. They’re all interesting but they’re all different and it’s not obvious how to solve or even contribute to many of them.
Indian economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, talks about his life as the son of distinguished Hindu academics and how the inequities all around him in colonial India of the 1930s would shape his intellectual destiny.
As he prepares to retire after 52 years, Harvard Law School’s Laurence H. Tribe retraces his journey from awkward immigrant math whiz to leading constitutional law scholar and admired professor.
Harvard School of Dental Medicine’s dean of 28 years, Bruce Donoff, steps down in January. He discusses his years in leadership and life lessons learned along the way.
Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture announces funding recipients
Flowers highlight a beautiful spring day on Harvard Divinity School’s campus.
Kristie Welsh/Harvard Divinity School
4 min read
Three major events, including Psychedelics Bootcamp 2024, to be hosted over summer
Celebrating its successful launch, the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture, an interdisciplinary effort that reaches across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School, has named its first group of funding recipients.
The Mahindra Humanities Center announced the 16 projects, which will explore psychedelics and their many implications. The projects span disciplines and topics and will be spearheaded by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates across the University. The Mahindra Center is collaborating with a similar initiative at the University of California Berkeley, which announced its first cohort of psychedelics researchers this week.
Among the projects is an anthropological study of psilocybin use in cancer patients at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a magazine exploring psychedelic art and literature (Elastic), an animated film exploring psychedelic use in later life (“Gray-Tripping”), and undergraduate research on a CIA-funded 1956 expedition to Mexico to collect psychotropic mushrooms. A full list of funded projects can be found on the newly launched Psychedelics Study website.
“Psychedelics are still often associated with the 1960s countercultures, but they have been recurrent in human experience, all across the world and throughout history,” said Bruno Carvalho, interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center. “This first funding cycle reflects the exciting diversity of approaches to the study of psychedelics today, as well as our goal of fostering collaborations between different fields.”
During the past academic year, the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture has convened experts in discussion around far-reaching scholarship. At HDS’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), scholars explored the intersection of psychedelic study and religion and spirituality through more than a dozen events and research into how psychedelics have been used historically and culturally as tools for spiritual exploration and transformation.
“I am thrilled to see how psychedelics are encouraging the humanities to embrace concepts like ‘transcendence’ and ‘transformation,’ and to take religion and spirituality seriously. I am learning a great deal from our colleagues at the Law School about the complicated legal and regulatory landscape, and the ethical questions that arise,” said Charles Stang, Professor of Early Christian Thought at HDS and director of CSWR.
Building on the year’s momentum, Petrie-Flom plans to hold three major events this summer. In June, it will host “The Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine,” funded by a previous grant from the Saisei Foundation, Tim Ferris, and Matt Mullenweg. The conference will bring together more than 20 scholars to explore legal, ethical, and policy topics surrounding the challenges and opportunities resulting from the increased clinical research, private investment, and political interest in psychedelic medicines. The public kickoff event of the conference, “Speaking of Psychedelics: A Conversation with Ayelet Waldman,” will feature the novelist (HLS ’91) in conversation with Petrie-Flom’s Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen and senior fellow Mason Marks.
At the end of July, Petrie-Flom will host Psychedelics Bootcamp 2024, an intensive training on legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding psychedelics in medicine and society.
“The Petrie-Flom Center’s expanding work in psychedelics law and policy is intended to produce rigorous scholarship, provide education, and help the public and policymakers understand what’s at stake with potential therapeutic use of psychedelics. We are thrilled to work with a broad group of stakeholders, and look forward to thinking and learning together,” said Cohen.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
When Uganda native Ananda Birungi immigrated to Northglenn, Colorado, in 2016 with her parents and two brothers, one of the first things she noticed was the difference in resources.
“It was very clear that the reason why my parents made the decision for us to come [to America] was for us to have better educational opportunities and employment opportunities,” said the Greenhouse Scholar concentrating in social studies and psychology.
That wasn’t the only big change that Birungi navigated as a high school student adapting to a new country and culture. “Being in the U.S. was my first time being exposed to racial difference. [I was] seeing myself as Black for the first time.”
At first, she felt out of place and saw her family struggling similarly to navigate their new lives. But never losing sight of her parents’ sacrifices, Birungi found a haven in academics. She excelled in school and after some initial adjusting, started to hit her stride.
Soon, she discovered a passion for empowering others, especially women and girls. She joined the student government, the Colorado Youth Advisory Council, and started a local chapter of Girl Up, an organization that raises awareness and funds for young women globally.
Both in Uganda and in the U.S., Birungi observed that the expectations of the boys around her differed from those for the girls. Girls were expected to help more around the home and not prioritize their education. “Those early experiences? I was frustrated, infuriated, because women are just as capable,” she said. “How do we make sure that women are able to be in schools and have the resources and opportunity to thrive?”
In 2019, she received the Dottie Lamm Leadership Award, awarded annually by The Women’s Foundation of Colorado to a student who demonstrates “resilience and leadership on the path to economic security.” She also became a Cooke College Foundation Scholar, a prestigious award that provides financial aid to 50 high-achieving high school seniors each year so they can attend a top college or university.
During her first year at Harvard, she received a call from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis informing her that she had received the 2020 Governor’s Citizenship Medal, the highest honor in the state, for her advocacy work and community leadership in high school.
As an intern at Harvard College Women’s Center, Birungi dedicated years to supporting other women on campus, and created programming that fostered community.
“She has a very nuanced perspective, because she has a lot of identities that she uses to inform her research and inform her programming,” said Alejandra Rincon, the center’s assistant director. “Ananda has been extremely instrumental in [making people feel included].”
Birungi was also involved in the FYRE Pre-Orientation Program, which aims to help first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented first-year students navigate Harvard — first as a participant and then as a team leader and as part of the steering committee.
“It’s great for the world if people use their intelligence and their resources and privilege to make a difference for the common good,” Rincon said. “And I think she is definitely somebody that will be doing that.”
Another issue close to Birungi’s heart is food justice, sustainability, and security. She volunteered three nights a week for a Harvard University Dining Services program, packing leftover meals and distributing them to food-insecure communities in Boston.
“It’s such a jarring experience sometimes, because there’s so much wealth within this institution, then you walk not too far from your House, your classes, and people are struggling with homelessness and food insecurity,” she said. “[This is] a great way to be involved in food recovery, but also a great way to redistribute Harvard’s resources.”
“Ananda is a bright light, going out into a world that needs her excellent research, analytical and writing skills, and that also needs her compassion, her warmth, and her energy.”
Anya Bassett
Anya Bassett, Birungi’s social studies instructor and adviser who now teaches at Brown, met Birungi in the fall of 2022 in her junior seminar. She said she was struck not only by Birungi’s “sharp analytical insights,” but also by the warmth and care she brought to conversations with her classmates. She listened carefully to what they had to say, displayed empathy, and showed a “remarkable capacity to synthesize her classmates’ ideas with her own.”
“Ananda missed only one class last fall: to go back to Colorado to take her citizenship test and her oath as an American citizen,” Bassett said in an email. “We celebrated her in my tutorial, and in conversations with Ananda, I came to understand how her experience as a Ugandan immigrant woman has shaped her academic interests and her commitment to advocating for others.”
As for what’s next, Birungi hopes to contribute to work on issues pertaining to women’s health, education, and equity, both in Africa and the U.S. Harvard allowed her space to explore her various interests, and she’ll be taking those passions with her as she goes.
If she had to give one piece of advice to future students, it would be to “pay attention” to the people who come into your life. Whether it’s an adviser, a teaching fellow, or Housemate, they have the potential to profoundly change the course of your life.
“The things that you learn from others here have personally shaped me and helped me in ways that I feel like I’m only starting to understand,” she said.
Bassett said she’s just happy she had the opportunity to work with Birungi.
“Ananda is a bright light, going out into a world that needs her excellent research, analytical and writing skills, and that also needs her compassion, her warmth, and her energy, devoted to making things a little better for others,” Bassett said. “I am proud of Ananda, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.”
Joelle Abi-Rached and Allan Brandt discussed their contribution to the NEJM series on key historical injustices in medicine, including the rise of Nazi Germany.
How do you read organization’s silence over rise of Nazism?
Medical historians look to cultural context, work of peer publications in wrestling with case of New England Journal of Medicine
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
In December, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, began a process of self-examination, publishing articles about the Journal itself and its handling of a series of key historical injustices in medicine, including eugenics, slavery, oppression of Native Americans, and, in an issue published in April, the rise of Nazi Germany.
One major challenge, according to two medical historians, is how little the NEJM had to say about Nazism and its systematic and genocidal oppression of Europe’s Jews beginning in 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power.
That came as something of a surprise to Allan Brandt, the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine and professor of the history of science, and Joelle Abi-Rached, Ph.D. ’17, the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The pair contributed to the series, which was initiated by David Jones, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine. Brandt praised the publication for its willingness to face what may be an uncomfortable history.
With so little material available, the two researchers, in a conversation with the Gazette, discussed their dilemma: How do you parse a near silence? This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Knowing the prevailing attitudes toward race and ethnicity in the World War II era and the decade leading up to it, were you expecting to find a complicated situation?
Brandt: Yes. The New England Journal’s effort is very similar to what Harvard did in its exploration of slavery on campus — Harvard faculty and administrators held slaves and did not challenge slavery often. These are the kinds of institutional self-observations that I think are important. It’s often been perceived as a reputational risk in opening up the archives and facing these things. But I think the reputational risk is in not doing it and the Journal very appropriately recognized that.
“We expected that, given the dimensions and the horrors of the Holocaust, we would find that the Journal said a lot during that time. But our initial finding was that there was almost nothing.“
Allan Brandt
When we look at your specific findings, what do you think is most important?
Brandt: When our colleagues were working on other papers in this series and ran their digital investigations, they literally came up with hundreds of hits. For us, the experience was like putting a search term into Google and getting no response. We expected that, given the dimensions and the horrors of the Holocaust, we would find that the Journal said a lot during that time. But our initial finding was that there was almost nothing.
Abi-Rached: The omission, absence, and silence startled us, so we made an extra effort to find anything that was written on the rise of Hitler. We did come across a few items and these became the backbone of the paper. They were illuminating.
One piece published in 1933 is a very short piece that even people who have read our paper have trouble finding. It’s a short communique published at the end of a very long and tedious paper on surgery. The communique, “The Abuse of the Jewish Physicians,” is revealing because the concern was not discrimination or persecution but the fact that these Jewish physicians were dismissed and lost their livelihood. That was the only piece published in 1933.
Then there is a controversial, longer piece published in 1935 by Michael Davis, an eminent health reformer, with a German nurse who later research would reveal was a Nazi sympathizer. And then there was nothing until 1944.
In 1944, the Journal published its first editorial, an important piece in which the Journal takes a stance on the humanitarian disaster that the “Nazi tyranny” had caused in occupied Europe.
Then you have another key article published in 1949, long after the conclusion of the Second World War, by Leo Alexander, who was a Viennese-born neuropsychiatrist who gathered evidence for the trial of the doctors at Nuremberg. So, this absence of debate around the rise of Nazism and its persecutory, racist laws became our guiding thread.
How would you describe what must have been the Journal’s approach during those years?
Brandt: Joelle and I talked about how we could understand silence, or an omission. We speculated about structural or institutional racism and thought about whether, in a medical or scientific journal which is typically reporting clinical findings and new knowledge, it might have been possible for editors to say, “This isn’t really part of our remit. It’s terrible, but that’s not what we do.”
“An important conclusion is that silence is not neutral. It says as much as it hides. Reading the past also tells us something about our contemporary moment, our failings, including our moral failings.“
Joelle Abi-Rached
So we decided to go to other leading journals, Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association, to see if that held up — sometimes you have to go outside to look on the inside. We couldn’t get to it in an article of this length, but I think if we more closely examined Boston medicine at the time, between academics at Harvard Medical School and the Journal, we might have gotten additional insight. It was not a diverse group.
Abi-Rached: The point we make is that the silence, the omission, was not banal. It was not mere ignorance. The discriminatory nature of these policies that were implemented by the Nazi regime were reported in the U.S. press.
JAMA and Science did report on what was happening in Germany vis-à-vis the Jewish physicians, who were the victims of such policies. The Dachau concentration camp was established in 1933 and Davis and Krueger, for example, mentioned labor camps in their piece, but they omitted the term “forced” labor camps, rendering them somehow unproblematic.
These camps were mentioned in other journals, the persecution of Jewish physicians was mentioned in JAMA, decried in Science. They were more explicit. Science was more forthcoming and did not mince words at all. They mention repression, active antisemitism, and the weaponization of education. That was probably what alarmed Science most.
JAMA was more interested in the persecution of Jewish physicians, especially the restriction of their practice, of their education, and the consequences of laws that were persecutory in nature. And this was two years earlier than the publication of the Davis and Krueger paper.
Your critique of the Davis paper was that it focused on economic issues and read as if nothing outrageous was happening outside of the economic sphere?
Brandt: The Davis piece is remarkable for its opacity, its ability to focus on a reform and not have any context around it. Davis’ response to one critic of the article makes that clear. He said, “Of course I’m concerned about what’s going on with Jews in Germany. But we were writing about a social reform, a health reform.”
The kind of denial that it takes to dissociate the social and political context from what you’re centering your attention on is why we use the term “compartmentalization.” These are the psychological and institutional structures that permitted racism to persist.
Joelle and I explored the fact that Davis had done much for the poor. He was trying to expand insurance coverage in the U.S., so in this instance, this narrowness was really shocking, especially given the fact that his ancestors were Jewish.
Was there a change among the editors after the war when coverage changed?
Abi-Rached: The evidence was so obvious that the doctors were part and parcel of the genocidal nature of that regime that a journal like NEJM could not remain silent. It’s an important moment in the history of medical practice and medical research that had a profound effect on how experiments were conducted later on, in the second half of the 20th century.
A paradigm shift happened: You could not be silent and blind and not engage with what was happening especially because it concerned medical practitioners. It also laid bare how the Hippocratic Oath was insufficient to protect patients or anyone else. There was a clash between the very paternalistic nature of the Hippocratic Oath and how institutions, even regimes, can politicize that oath to their own advantage and how medical doctors are enmeshed in that institutional framework, whether they serve the state or an insurance scheme.
The Journal could not remain silent, and it is only in the 1960s onwards that you come across editorials, perspectives on the ethics of medical experimentation, and so on.
Are there lessons for today here?
Abi-Rached: An important conclusion is that silence is not neutral. It says as much as it hides. Reading the past also tells us something about our contemporary moment, our failings, including our moral failings.
Another point is that medicine cannot be dissociated from social and political issues. They are intertwined. Medicine is the product of societal beliefs, norms, and prejudices. The Journal is a reflection of wider social, political, and moral biases. It’s a reflection of a wider society.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Over the past 12 years, when trapeze artist and circus ringmaster Izzy Patrowicz wasn’t flying 40 feet in the air all over the world and performing in up to three shows a day, she was taking classes at Harvard Extension School to get her bachelor of liberal arts degree in the field of psychology.
The Salem, Massachusetts, native “was hooked” after taking her first class in “Creativity Research: Madmen, Geniuses, and Harvard Students” at the Extension School in fall 2012. “Then I decided to apply for the program and was accepted.”
“It’s been nice, honestly, to do it slowly,” Patrowicz said of her academic journey.
Patrowicz first began performing at age 10 with Circus Smirkus, an international youth troupe that hosts sleep-away camps and tours New England. While she mainly did a partner acrobatic hand balancing act, Patrowicz said her favorite stunt was the duo trapeze. Her love for the circus grew, which led to a difficult decision after high school: college or circus school?
Ultimately, Patrowicz left Salem for Whittier College in California, but only lasted a year and a half. The call of a lifetime came from a fellow artist leading Patrowicz to join the Big Apple Circus and learn the art of flying trapeze. While touring with Big Apple and other groups, Patrowicz briefly let her college career stall.
Fast-forward to 2012. Although she took a few Harvard classes in person, Patrowicz juggled most of her education online between circus stops. “All of the traveling has been amazing, but it’s been nice to take classes with people from all over the world,” she said. “It’s been really cool that everybody’s in different time zones, but they’ll come and meet at the same time for lecture.”
“The flying trapeze act is an incredible amount of work. It’s an hour to warm up and then the act is 10 to 15 minutes long.”
This spring, Patrowicz took “The Psychology of Competition and Peak Performance” with Emily Hangen, a visiting assistant professor from Fairfield University. The course explored why some competitors choke and others thrive under pressure.
“It is not often we have a professional circus performer in the class,” Hangen said. “During the first day of introductions, her fascinating background immediately stood out and caught my attention.” Patrowicz’s experience made her an engaged student who always had insightful comments to contribute, the instructor added.
Patrowicz’s art has taken her throughout Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. “The flying trapeze act is an incredible amount of work. It’s an hour to warm up and then the act is 10 to 15 minutes long,” she explained. Evenings are spent practicing for the next day’s performance.
Recently, Patrowicz became one of the few women who can do a triple somersault — an act first performed by the young Latvian aerialist Lena Jordan in 1897, according to Guinness World Records. The daring act has Patrowicz soar through the air, tuck into a somersault, and open out for the catch.
When she wasn’t under the big top or in class, Patrowicz made elaborate costumes for herself and her boyfriend, who also performs. But the 33-year-old knows she can’t perform forever. She hopes to use her entertainment expertise as well as her psychology degree to plan for her future.
“I am confident that Izzy will continue to impress with her educational and professional pursuits,” Hangen said. “She is clear-eyed, intelligent, and has shown a maturity in considering and exploring future aims in her life. Given her work ethic and intelligence, I’m excited to see how far she goes and the contributions she will make in her next endeavors.”
Physicists demo first metro-area quantum computer network in Boston
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
It’s one thing to dream up a next-generation quantum internet capable of sending highly complex, hacker-proof information around the world at ultra-fast speeds. It’s quite another to physically show it’s possible.
That’s exactly what Harvard physicists have done, using existing Boston-area telecommunication fiber, in a demonstration of the world’s longest fiber distance between two quantum memory nodes. Think of it as a simple, closed internet carrying a signal encoded not by classical bits like the existing internet, but by perfectly secure, individual particles of light.
The Harvard team established the practical makings of the first quantum internet by entangling two quantum memory nodes separated by optical fiber link deployed over a roughly 22-mile loop through Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, and Boston. The two nodes were located a floor apart in Harvard’s Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering.
Map showing path of two-node quantum network through Boston and Cambridge.
Credit: Can Knaut via OpenStreetMap
Quantum memory, analogous to classical computer memory, is an important component of a quantum computing future because it allows for complex network operations and information storage and retrieval. While other quantum networks have been created in the past, the Harvard team’s is the longest fiber network between devices that can store, process, and move information.
Each node is a very small quantum computer, made out of a sliver of diamond that has a defect in its atomic structure called a silicon-vacancy center. Inside the diamond, carved structures smaller than a hundredth the width of a human hair enhance the interaction between the silicon-vacancy center and light.
“Showing that quantum network nodes can be entangled in the real-world environment of a very busy urban area is an important step toward practical networking between quantum computers.”
Mikhail Lukin
The silicon-vacancy center contains two qubits, or bits of quantum information: one in the form of an electron spin used for communication, and the other in a longer-lived nuclear spin used as a memory qubit to store entanglement, the quantum-mechanical property that allows information to be perfectly correlated across any distance.
(In classical computing, information is stored and transmitted as a series of discrete binary signals, say on/off, that form a kind of decision tree. Quantum computing is more fluid, as information can exist in stages between on and off, and is stored and transferred as shifting patterns of particle movement across two entangled points.)
Using silicon-vacancy centers as quantum memory devices for single photons has been a multiyear research program at Harvard. The technology solves a major problem in the theorized quantum internet: signal loss that can’t be boosted in traditional ways.
A quantum network cannot use standard optical-fiber signal repeaters because simple copying of quantum information as discrete bits is impossible — making the information secure, but also very hard to transport over long distances.
Silicon-vacancy-center-based network nodes can catch, store, and entangle bits of quantum information while correcting for signal loss. After cooling the nodes to close to absolute zero, light is sent through the first node and, by nature of the silicon vacancy center’s atomic structure, becomes entangled with it, so able to carry the information.
A diamond chip containing silicon vacancy centers.
“Since the light is already entangled with the first node, it can transfer this entanglement to the second node,” explained first author Can Knaut, a Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in Lukin’s lab. “We call this photon-mediated entanglement.”
Over the last several years, the researchers have leased optical fiber from a company in Boston to run their experiments, fitting their demonstration network on top of the existing fiber to indicate that creating a quantum internet with similar network lines would be possible.
“Showing that quantum network nodes can be entangled in the real-world environment of a very busy urban area is an important step toward practical networking between quantum computers,” Lukin said.
A two-node quantum network is only the beginning. The researchers are working diligently to extend the performance of their network by adding nodes and experimenting with more networking protocols.
The paper is titled “Entanglement of Nanophotonic Quantum Memory Nodes in a Telecom Network.” The work was supported by the AWS Center for Quantum Networking’s research alliance with the Harvard Quantum Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms (an NSF Physics Frontiers Center), the Center for Quantum Networks (an NSF Engineering Research Center), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and other sources.
Science is making anti-aging progress. But do we want to live forever?
Nobel laureate details new book, which surveys research, touches on larger philosophical questions
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Mayflies live for only a day. Galapagos tortoises can reach up to age 170. The Greenland shark holds the world record at over 400 years of life.
Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel laureate and author of the newly released “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality,” opened his packed Harvard Science Book Talk last week by noting the vast variabilities of lifespans across the natural world. Death is certain, so far as we know. But there’s no physical or chemical law that says it must happen at a fixed time, which raises other, more philosophical issues.
The “why” behind these enormous swings, and the quest to harness longevity for humans, have driven fevered attempts (and billions of dollars in research spending) to slow or stop aging. Ramakrishnan’s book is a dispassionate journey through current scientific understanding of aging and death, which basically comes down to an accumulation of chemical damage to molecules and cells.
“The question is whether we can tackle aging processes, while still keeping us who we are as humans,” said Ramakrishnan during his conversation with Antonio Regalado, a writer for the MIT Technology Review. “And whether we can do that in a safe and effective way.”
Even if immortality — or just living for a very, very long time — were theoretically possible through science, should we pursue it? Ramakrishnan likened the question to other moral ponderings.
“There’s no physical or chemical law that says we can’t colonize other galaxies, or outer space, or even Mars,” he said. “I would put it in that same category. And it would require huge breakthroughs, which we haven’t made yet.”
In fact, we’re a lot closer to big breakthroughs when it comes to chasing immortality. Ramakrishnan noted the field is moving so fast that a book like his can capture but a snippet. He then took the audience on a brief tour of some of the major directions of aging research. And much of it, he said, started in unexpected places.
Take rapamycin, a drug first isolated in the 1960s from a bacterium on Easter Island found to have antifungal, immunosuppressant, and anticancer properties. Rapamycin targets the TOR pathway, a large molecular signaling cascade within cells that regulates many functions fundamental to life. Rapamycin has garnered renewed attention for its potential to reverse the aging process by targeting cellular signaling associated with physiological changes and diseases in older adults.
Other directions include mimicking the anti-aging effects of caloric restriction shown in mice, as well as one particularly exciting area called cellular reprogramming. That means taking fully developed cells and essentially turning back the clock on their development.
The most famous foundational experiment in this area was by Kyoto University scientist and Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka, who showed that just four transcription factors could revert an adult cell all the way back to a pluripotent stem cell, creating what are now known as induced pluripotent stem cells.
Ramakrishnan, a scientist at England’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He said he felt qualified to write the book because he has “no skin in the game” of aging research. As a molecular biologist who has studied fundamental processes of how cells make proteins, he had connections in the field but wasn’t too close to any of it.
While researching the book, he took pains to avoid interviewing scientists with commercial ventures tied to aging.
The potential for conflicts of interest abound.
The world has seen an explosion in aging research in recent decades, with billions of dollars spent by government agencies and private companies. And the consumer market for products is forecast to hit $93 billion by 2027.
As a result, false or exaggerated claims by companies promising longer life are currently on the rise, Ramakrishnan noted. He shared one example: Supplements designed to lengthen a person’s telomeres, or genetic segments that shrink with age, are available on Amazon.
“Of course, these are not FDA approved. There are no clinical trials, and it’s not clear what their basis is,” he said.
But still there appears to be some demand.
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Moderator David E. Sanger (from left) with Ivo Daalder, Karen Donfried, and Stephen Hadley.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
National security analysts outline stakes ahead of July summit
As Russia opens a new front in its war on Ukraine and the 75th NATO Summit approaches in early July, national security analysts debated whether the military alliance should widen its role in the conflict during a talk Friday at Harvard Kennedy School.
The war is at “a really critical moment,” said the event’s moderator, David E. Sanger ’82, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. Ukraine suffered damage over the last several months as it waited for Congress to approve a $60.8 billion aid package in late April. The Russians have regained territory in Eastern Ukraine, he continued, and while they’ve endured significant casualties, their fighting force remains large and strong and has gotten better at using drones and other forms of electronic warfare.
“This is not a war about territory, it’s a war about the future of Ukraine,” said Ivo Daalder, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The way to defeat Russia is for Russia to be denied the opportunity to determine Ukraine’s future.”
Even as the U.S. announces a $400 million military aid package to deliver weapons, artillery, and other munitions to Ukraine, Daalder said he is “deeply worried about where we are.” He fears the stalemate on the battlefield that began in November 2022 could give way to an advantage for Russia because U.S. weapons and aid are arriving “too late,” and Ukraine’s military mobilization has been “woefully inadequate.” The average age of Ukraine’s fighting force is 43 years old, a “stunning” figure, he said, and Ukraine is being outpaced by Russia in its efforts to conscript fresh, younger fighters to relieve troops that have been fighting for more than two years.
“This is not a war about territory, it’s a war about the future of Ukraine.”
Ivo Daalder
Many European Union countries continue to provide support to Ukraine, and some, like Lithuania, are considering sending their own troops to fight. Whether other NATO allies and the U.S. ought to do the same, given the stakes, will be a topic of serious debate at the upcoming summit in Washington, D.C. French President Emmanuel Macrón, the leadership of the Baltic states, and possibly Polish President Andrzej Duda are expected to address the wisdom of direct military support.
Still, the U.S. remains a “hugely important actor” in the direction this conflict will take in the coming months, according to Karen Donfried, former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Biden administration and a Belfer Center fellow. The EU can’t replace the role that the U.S. is playing in Ukraine, she said. “Were it not for the weapons we’re providing Ukraine, they would not still be in this fight.”
The question NATO allies need to be asking themselves right now, said Daalder, is how important is Ukraine “not failing” to future European security? “And so far, we have said, it’s not important enough” to do everything we possibly can, like committing troops and more air defense.
Though still supportive of the war, the Ukrainian people have been worn down by it.
Stephen Hadley
Stephen Hadley.
Ukraine needs to do several things to turn the tide, said Stephen Hadley, a former assistant to President George W. Bush on national security affairs and deputy national security adviser under Condoleezza Rice. First, Ukraine must increase its capacity to defend territory and “dig in” to defend areas it still controls; improve its air defense to better protect the country’s energy infrastructure and people; build up a defense industry so it’s not as reliant on the West; continue to go after Russian logistics; and challenge Russian control of Crimea, like Ukraine did with control of the Black Sea, in a bid to prompt Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to the negotiating table.
Though still supportive of the war, the Ukrainian people have been worn down by it, said Hadley. President Volodymyr Zelensky faces “some very difficult decisions” about if, or how, to wind down the war if there’s an opportunity to strike a deal while Russia still controls large areas of Ukraine. NATO allies can offer help with that quandary, Hadley said.
Meanwhile, a newly re-elected Putin feels very confident right now and Russia will do “everything in its power” to ensure that it has the upper hand by the time the NATO summit begins, said Donfried. “He thinks he’s winning.”
None of the panelists expect Ukraine and Russia to enter into a negotiated settlement in the next 12 to 18 months.
“Most wars don’t actually end in negotiation. Most wars end in victory, exhaustion, or stalemate,” said Daalder. “And so, we’re much better off not focusing on how do we get them to the table … and talk about, how do you stabilize the situation for long enough to alter what is, in fact, happening and needs to happen to alter the political situation between Russia and Ukraine?”
The talk was part of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ 50th anniversary celebration. Launched in 1973, the Belfer began as a research center on nuclear arms control and policy and grew to become a highly influential national security think tank.
‘More of a slide and a pivot’ than a rollback, Merhill says of rules set to take effect Aug. 1
Nicole Rura
Harvard Correspondent
6 min read
The core of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 consists of 37 words that prohibit sex discrimination in any educational program or activity that receives any federal funding.
Although Title IX itself has remained constant, in recent years its interpretation has been amended, altered, and redefined by the federal government and the Supreme Court. Initially, Title IX was known for expanding access to academic institutions and requiring that support for female-dedicated athletics programs equal that of male-dedicated programs, especially at the collegiate level. In 1992, Title IX’s protections were interpreted to encompass sexual harassment, including sexual assault. And since then, the Department of Education has defined — and redefined — sexual harassment and misconduct and described how academic institutions should respond, with two significant changes to guidance and regulation in 2011 and 2020, respectively. Last month, the Department of Education once again issued regulatory changes to Title IX.
To better understand the latest changes to the regulations, which will take effect Aug. 1, the Gazette sat down with University Title IX Coordinator Nicole Merhill, who is also director of the Office for Gender Equity (OGE). OGE is currently consulting with various stakeholders across the University to explore the necessary revision to University policies, procedures, and training for students, staff, and faculty to ensure Harvard remains in compliance with the latest changes to the Title IX regulations. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What is your overall impression of the new regulations?
There are many changes, from definitions to scope of conduct, to applicability of sex discrimination, to coverage. It’s not so much an expansion of what was covered, but really a clarification on the application of Title IX.
When I’ve heard people talk about the new regulations, they talk about a “rollback” to the pre-2020 regulations and prior. This is not a rollback or reverting to what the regulations used to be five years ago. It’s more of a slide and a pivot.
For example, prior to the 2020 regulation change, the definition of what constituted sexual harassment was, in part, unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that was severe, persistent, or pervasive, based on the totality of the circumstances.
In 2020, the definition for what constitutes sexual harassment shifted, in part, to unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that was severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.
The new definition for sex-based harassment includes a definition for hostile environment harassment, which is unwelcome sex-based conduct that, based on the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is severe or pervasive. We are not returning to the pre-2020 standard of severe, persistent, or pervasive.
It is essential that people understand that the requirements throughout these regulations are not simply rolling back to how things were done before 2020. They’re different.
How will protections for gay, transgender, and non-binary people be affected?
The new regulations expand the definition of what qualifies as discrimination on the basis of sex. We knew that was this coming due to the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., which ensures that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is included under Title IX on the basis of sex discrimination. So, this was already in effect, but now we have it actually written into the regulations. And that’s really important. The regulations now clarify that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Are there different protections for pregnant students?
Pregnancy or related conditions always have been part of the Title IX regulations, and discrimination based on pregnancy and related conditions has always been prohibited. This set of regulations, though, really strengthens the requirements and increases our obligations, such as providing students who are pregnant with information about the University’s obligations, reasonable accommodations, voluntary leaves of absence, and lactation spaces. So, it’s another really noteworthy shift.
How have the regulations changed when it comes to the grievance process for sexual harassment complaints?
There are some significant changes in the grievance process. Under the 2020 regulations, there must be a hearing, there must be cross-examination, and that cross-examination must take place through personal advisers during a live hearing.
Under the new regulations, there must be a process to assess the credibility of parties and witnesses, including follow-up questions that challenge credibility, but a live hearing is no longer required.
Another big change is the move away from mandatory dismissal. Under the 2020 regulations, if conduct didn’t meet the narrow definition of Title IX sexual harassment, complaints had to be dismissed. Most institutions, including Harvard, created additional policies to address these complaints. With mandatory dismissal now gone, that likely means that many institutions will likely go back to a single policy that encompasses all behaviors within the realm of sex-based harassment.
Are there changes in how complaints are filed?
The 2020 regulations required complaints to be formally made in writing and signed by the person, the complainant. The new regulations define a complaint differently, and they allow for oral complaints. Under these regulations, if a person goes to a faculty member and says, “I experienced sexual harassment by a classmate, and the University should investigate this,” that puts the University on notice and triggers our response obligation, including our obligation to conduct an investigation, as appropriate.
Given these changes, will there be training for faculty and staff navigate to learn how to handle a complaint?
Yes, we are required by the new regulations to annually train all our employees. The good news is we already have systems in place to roll out training for staff and faculty. Faculty and staff should see trainings in their email inbox on the new regulations as well as our policy changes in the coming months.
With all of these changes, is anything staying the same?
Yes. There will be no change in the structure of the Office for Gender Equity, including SHARE, Title IX, and Prevention. These new regulations have broad, sweeping implications, but we have a good team of people working on this.
Our SHARE team will continue to provide a range of support to all community members impacted by harm. These services include trauma-informed counseling, education and support groups, and a 24/7 confidential hotline. OGE’s Strategic Prevention Initiatives team will continue to engage with community stakeholders to expand prevention initiatives, including those focused on creating culture change. Our network of local Title IX Resource Coordinators will continue to serve as the primary point of contact for supportive measures. And the Title IX team within OGE will serve as an additional support service for community members, including via our anonymous disclosure tool, the Resource for Online Anonymous Disclosure.
In addition, the Office for Dispute Resolution will continue to offer impartial, professional investigative processes for students, staff, faculty, postdoctoral parties, and third parties.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Saif Kamal is the kind of person who pursues opportunities and helps others do the same. Kamal was in his late 20s and working as head of design and marketing at the Dhaka Tribune, a newspaper in Bangladesh, when he got the idea for a startup — a business incubator for local entrepreneurs.
“That’s where I found out a lot of Bangladeshi young people were winning all these competitions, but they couldn’t transform their star ideas into proper startups, enterprises, or other sales coming in,” he said. “And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew why I wanted to do. I knew that an idea that can change the lives of millions cannot die just because a person is born here and not in a privileged place.”
To pursue his idea, Kamal found a mentor in India, and moved there to start his multinational Toru Institute of Inclusive Innovation. After three years in operation, he was chosen to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland in 2017 as one of the “global shapers of the world.”
He didn’t know it then, but soon after he would be confronted with a series of life-threatening medical challenges that would change the trajectory of his life and eventually lead to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a fresh start.
Riding the high from Davos, Kamal ended the year with his annual trip to reunite with Jamal, a close friend from his youth. The two vacationed in Singapore where, over drinks, they got to talking about their health.
“One day he’s like, ‘You know what? We should get a full-body checkup.’ I’m like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because we’re getting older,’” Kamal recounted. “I said, ‘Speak for yourself.’”
The 35-year-old Kamal relented. The two made appointments before the vacation’s end. Expecting a clean bill of health, Kamal never would have predicted what happened next.
“The woman doing the echo[cardiogram] stopped and said, ‘You need to see a heart surgeon immediately.’”
One of Kamal’s heart valves had expanded to the point where if it increased just a fraction of an inch more, he would likely drop dead.
Kamal found a surgeon in Bangalore, India, and was in the hospital for nearly a month and a half while doctors tried to figure out what had caused the enlargement. They reached no conclusions but removed Kamal’s thymus and replaced his aortic valve. Finally, although he was without answers to what had caused the swelling, Kamal thought the nightmare was over.
A year later, he was back flying to Bangkok to meet Jamal and celebrate his near-miss with death. He arrived at his hotel, told his friend he wasn’t feeling well and that he would see him at lunch.
“I woke up in an ICU after 14 days. When I woke up, my left side was paralyzed. My vision was gone. I couldn’t move anything, and 60 percent of my brain was damaged.”
Saif Kamal
After not seeing him then, or for dinner, or for breakfast, Jamal had hotel staff break into Kamal’s room. They found Kamal passed out after having suffered a stroke.
“I woke up in an ICU after 14 days,” Kamal said. “When I woke up, my left side was paralyzed. My vision was gone. I couldn’t move anything, and 60 percent of my brain was damaged.”
The day was Oct. 2, 2018. Kamal says that is burned in his memory because the people in his hospital room were discussing the death of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, who had been assassinated by Saudi agents.
“I still remember the day because I couldn’t figure out anything, but I could hear that,” Kamal said.
A team of doctors was able to determine that what had been plaguing Kamal all along was Behcet’s disease, also called Behcet’s syndrome — a rare disorder, thought to be an autoimmune disease, which causes blood-vessel inflammation throughout the body.
Over the next three years, immunocompromised Kamal suffered lung failure, a COVID infection, and a tumor that needed removal. He continued to struggle with impaired cognition, and a slow muscular recovery. His emotional saving grace? Pandemic shutdowns.
“When the world is always moving and you’re not, you feel that you’re falling behind. When the rest of the world slowed down, I felt relieved,” Kamal said.
Saif lived with his brother Onik in Dhaka during his recovery, and the height of the pandemic.
“It was challenging emotionally, because the threat of losing Saif was higher for us. We were very helpless,” Onik said.
But every day in quarantine with his brother he was doing memory games, learning to walk again, talk again, and even learning to cook in their shared kitchen.
“I usually tell Saif that he is a very bad cook. But he was trying to learn new things and fed me a bunch of stuff,” Onik added. “Our dinners were special.”
Eventually, Saif even learned to swim and do some gymnastics moves.
Despite his successes, Saif Kamal had his bad days too, when he couldn’t find the words to express himself, or couldn’t get rid of the aches in his joints. Due to his illness and the global economy taking a hit from COVID, Kamal eventually lost his business.
“It’s about just getting to the edge of pushing yourself and then giving yourself the kindness to stop,” Kamal said. “You will move 10 steps ahead, and you will fall back eight … even though I would say that I’m still two steps ahead than where I was yesterday, I would not be satisfied. That is the challenge of perfectionism.”
Eventually, all his relearning made him realize he wanted to study how humans learn best.
“So I applied for Harvard,” he said.
Kamal spent the last year working on a master’s in learning design innovation technology, focusing on state-of-the-art tech and strategies, along with the fundamentals of the learning process.
One class in particular, an introductory course called “Becoming an Expert Learner” taught by Professor Tina Grotzer, stuck out to him.
“She said, ‘Imagine if we had to remember everything that we come across, how crazy the world would be, how crazy our brain would be. So it’s good to forget.’ And that gave me so much of power, so much of agency to be myself and to be OK with forgetting. And to be awkward about asking questions, to be kind to myself, and not to compare myself to my past but to stay present,” Kamal said.
The third week of Grotzer’s class is dedicated to looking at memory. The class explored the story of Clive Wearing, a British musician and conductor who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia, meaning he could neither remember his past nor easily form new memories.
“So that they can get a really deep appreciation for what it means to have a memory and how central that is to our sense of self and our being,” Grotzer said.
She said Kamal’s connection to the material and candidness was invaluable to fellow students.
“He just had these nuggets, these gold nuggets of insight and thoughtfulness and ability to reflect on challenges that I think brought everyone to a close, a deeper appreciation for their humanity and their ability to think and reason in the ways that they do,” Grotzer said.
Kamal, who continues to wrestle with vision impairment and immune issues, said his time at Harvard changed his outlook.
“I can physically, mentally, cognitively feel change in me,” he said. “They say that if you take the frog out of a pond, the frog will die. Sometimes you need to get a frog out of the pond so it will find new ways to survive and jump around and learn new things.”
Kamal said that his career goal now is to find ways to empower others to change the world through their entrepreneurial leadership.
“I think that no matter what he decides to do, but particularly if he decides to work in education, he is going to understand things about the mind, and how it works, but also have the humility about learning that he will be able to share with others and with learners,” Grotzer said. “That will be a gift to them.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Growing up in India, Priyanka Pillai witnessed the immense and varied struggles many impoverished people faced in their daily lives, such as getting prenatal care and protecting children from labor exploitation.
As an undergraduate in Bangalore studying industrial design, she wondered whether good design could help ease at least parts of these and other challenges. She came to Harvard Graduate School of Design two years ago and got her answer, discovering she could take on big problems “that you don’t even realize … could be tackled with design.”
Pillai wanted to do something to help address the refugee crisis in Uganda for her independent design engineering project. Those projects span two semesters and call for students seeking a master’s in design engineering (a joint GSD and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences program) to identify complex, real-world problems and develop solution prototypes.
“For the first time, I truly felt like I was doing work that was very in touch with what GSD wants people to do, which is working with communities.”
Conducting fieldwork in Uganda, Pillai saw the difficulties that South Sudanese refugees were having reuniting with their families. The plight of those fleeing the ongoing civil war in the northeast African nation has become one of the largest refugee crises in the world, with more than half a million living in Uganda alone, mostly in camps.
More than 60 percent are children separated from parents who are looking for them, Pillai said, and need multiple layers of support. While non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are providing some assistance, much more help is needed.
“One thing that really stood out was agency. There’s currently a lack of agency when it comes to finding their family members on their own,” said Pillai, who graduates later this month. Many refugees use informal, ad hoc methods such as phone calls, WhatsApp, and photo sharing to try to find relatives.
“The second part, which is extremely critical, is that we need to move from a Western-centric way of finding a family member,” such as cataloguing names, ages, and date of separation done by NGOs, because it doesn’t capture vernacularor local geography, vital details that may speed up reunification, she said, noting that learning more about how to design for “the Indian context” and the Global South more generally was a key reason she came to Harvard.
“A lot of cultural nuances were missing in connection to the data to find missing family members,” she said. “And that’s the kind of solution that we’re moving toward.”
Given the ubiquity of cellphones there, Pillai and classmate Julius Stein designed and built an online platform for refugees to enter information about themselves using text, photos, and audio. The platform generates a series of questions that can lead to possible matches while minimizing the risk of exploitation by malign actors.
“For the first time, I truly felt like I was doing work that was very in touch with what GSD wants people to do, which is working with communities,” she said. “It was just a life-changing experience.”
Earlier this month, one startup Pillai is involved in, Alba, won an Ingenuity Award as part of the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge. The team designed a special wipe so the visually impaired can better detect when their menstrual period has begun without relying on outside assistance.
In 2023, Pillai was part of a student project that won gold in the Spark International Design awards. The design team created Felt, a haptic armband that turns sound and visual clues into movement. The device assists people who are deaf blind to independently catch emotional nuances or subtexts in conversations, which often get lost in Braille or other translations.
During her time in the program, Pillai also jumped at the opportunity to take courses at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Graduate School of Education to learn more about things such as accessibility, ethical design, and negotiation.
“I knew that I was limiting myself because I didn’t know all these different things,” she said.
When not focused on her own studies, Pillai has been a teaching fellow for a design studio at GSD and at SEAS for a course led by her IDEP adviser, Krzysztof Gajos, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science.
“I love teaching,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite experiences.”
Reflecting on her time at GSD, Pillai has been deeply inspired by the faculty and her fellow students. This group from many different backgrounds with different interests and perspectives, working in many different disciplines, has been like a “dream” design studio where she’s been able to share and borrow ideas and practices from others and see how other fields look at things such as collaboration, sustainability and accessibility. It has been intellectually liberating to experience such fearlessness, she said, after years of feeling so “constrained” in her prior practice, which had been “rooted in ‘realistic goals.’”
“People tackling very huge issues that you don’t even realize 1) is a problem that could be tackled with design, and 2), they’re almost your age and they’re doing it somehow. That was very important to see,” she said.
“People really think that you can solve anything.”
More educated communities tend to be healthier. Why? Culture.
New study finds places with more college graduates tend to develop better lifestyle habits overall
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Having more education has long been linked tobetter individual health. But those benefits are also contagious, say the co-authors of a new working paper.
“It’s not just that the individuals who have more years of education are in better health,” said David M. Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics. “It’s that even people with fewer years of education — for example, people with just a high school degree — are in better health when they live around people who have more years of education.”
The paper examines why cities with more college graduates see lower mortality rates for residents overall. It’s not due to spatial sorting, or the practice of relocating to live amidst those with similar habits. Nor did the researchers find a particularly strong correlation with factors like clean air, low crime, and high-quality healthcare infrastructure. Instead, most of the explanation involves rates of smoking, physical activity, and obesity.
The pattern has everything to do with a community’s common culture, said co-author Edward L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and chair of the Department of Economics. “Smoking, for example, is a social activity,” he said. “Fundamentally, being around other smokers is fine if you’re smoking, but it’s usually pretty unpleasant if you’re not smoking.”
Every 10 percent increase in area’s college grads linked to …Source: Human Capital Spillovers and Health: Does Living Around College Graduates Lengthen Life?
7%
Decrease in all-cause mortality
13%
Decrease in the probability of smoking
7%
Decrease in the probability of having no physical activity
12%
Decrease in the probability of being very obese
35%
Decrease in number of COVID-related deaths
Glaeser, an urban economist and author of “Triumph of the City” (2011), has spent decades studying how varying education levels play out across U.S. society. One well-established finding concerns economic resilience. “If you ask yourself, which American cities managed to turn themselves around after the very difficult period of the 1970s and 1980s? Educated places like Seattle or Boston did. Less-educated places did not,” Glaeser said.
Also collaborating on the new paper were Jacob H. Bor, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, and Ljubica Ristovska, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Together, the researchers rejected the spatial sorting explanation with the help of data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study. Similar analysis was done using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of young women and men. Results showed that unhealthy people of all ages relocate more frequently than healthy ones. But both groups settle in areas with roughly equal levels of human capital (defined here as a population’s years of education).
The team analyzed a variety of information sources — from county-level homicide statistics to regional estimates of air quality and a federal measure of hospital quality — to see whether mortality differentials are due to area amenities. “We estimate that at most 17 percent of the human capital externality on health is due to these external factors, driven largely by greater use of preventative care,” the co-authors wrote.
Instead, the majority of the correlation between human capital and area health — at least 60 percent — is explained by differences in health-related behaviors, the researchers found. Combining data from both the U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that every 10 percent increase in an area’s share of college graduates was associated with an annual 7 percent decrease in all-cause mortality.
Study authors David M. Cutler (left) and Edward L. Glaeser.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
With additional data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS), the researchers were able to probe connections between human capital and various health-related behaviors. Every 10 percent increase in an area’s college graduates was associated with a 13 percent decrease in smoking, a 7 percent decrease in having no physical activity, and a 12 percent decrease in the probability of being very obese.
“It really opens up all these questions of how people form their beliefs,” Cutler said.
The paper went deepest on smoking, given the wealthof historical numbers on cigarette initiation, cessation, and beliefs. CPS data showed that in cities where people have more years of education — New York City, Boston, or Seattle, for example — people are more likely to think that smoking is bad for you. Residents of these cities are also likelier to support smoking regulations. For every 10 percent increase in bachelor’s degrees, the probability of working at a place with a complete smoking ban increases by 2 percentage points.
Cutler and Glaeser were especially fascinated to find a growing connection over time between human capital and area health, especially between the years 1990 and 2010. As the correlation between individual education and behavior increased, they explained, the relationship between a community’s education levels and its mortality rates slowly followed suit.
“Just look at people who were 70 in 2000,” said Glaeser, who has observed a similar dynamic over the same period between human capital and earnings. “These people were 30 in 1960. A lot of people were smoking in 1960, and there wasn’t nearly as strong of an education gradient as we saw 30 years later.”
“It was the first time I heard about there being a large Jewish community anywhere in Greece,” said the graduating senior, a joint history and classics concentrator. “I thought, why have I never heard about this before? If anyone should know about this history, it’s me.”
Tellides, who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, with a Greek father and Jewish mother, went on to devote her senior thesis to the city’s politically active Jewish residents during a period of upheaval in the early 20th century. Once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish population in Europe, Thessaloniki (traditionally known as Salonica or Salonika) proved a gold mine of Jewish culture and resistance, with Tellides surfacing new insights on the community’s struggle for survival.
“For an undergraduate to have gone into such depth, and with such originality, is remarkable,” said Tellides’ thesis adviser Derek Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Greece’s second-largest city, situated 300 miles north of Athens on the Aegean Sea, once served as an economic and cultural crossroads. “It was one of the most important ports in the Ottoman Empire,” Tellides explained. It was also a melting pot where Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in relative peace.
That changed when the Greek government took control in the early 20th century, with Thessaloniki changing from “a multicultural, multireligious empire to a Christian nation-state,” said Tellides, whose second thesis adviser was Paul J. Kosmin, the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History.
According to a 1913 census, the Jewish population in Thessaloniki numbered around 90,000. Tellides’ scholarship focused on the community’s activism in the years between World Wars I and II, with Jewish residents organizing in opposition to rising antisemitism and discriminatory public policy. One example is a 1924 mandate for all businesses to remain closed on Sundays.
“Other historians have acknowledged the significance of the Sunday closing law — if Jews observed the Sabbath they effectively lost a day of work, which made it very hard to make a living,” Penslar noted. “Julia’s original contribution was depicting how the Jewish community reacted to the crisis, how they interceded with the Greek government, and even more interestingly how they interceded with international organizations in the spirit of the Minority Rights Treaties created after World War I.”
Tellides, a history lover from childhood, also examined a moment in the 1930s when the Greek government sought to take over the city’s vast Jewish cemetery, with more than 350,000 graves dating as far back as the Roman era. “They wanted to build a university campus on top of it,” she said.
With support from Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Center for Jewish Studies, and Department of the Classics, the Leverett House resident traveled to Thessaloniki last summer to conduct archival research and explore the city. But Tellides, who bolstered her Greek skills with coursework at Harvard, quickly found herself unable to decipher materials written in Ladino, a Romance language developed by Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century.
“Many of these spaces commemorate the community’s death rather than its life.”
“What I read instead was their correspondence with international Jewish organizations,” shared Tellides, who plans to teach English to kindergarteners in Athens following graduation. “They were desperately trying to overturn these laws through diplomatic channels, political pressure — anything they could possibly do.”
As Tellides walked the streets of Thessaloniki, she found little that celebrated the city’s Jewish heritage. All that exists are a couple of Holocaust memorials, two surviving synagogues, and a small but impressive Jewish museum.
“Many of these spaces commemorate the community’s death rather than its life,” she writes in her thesis before calling for more memorials to the lasting influence of Jewish residents.
One thing the city has in abundance are vestiges of the ancient Jewish cemetery, which was in fact dismantled during the Holocaust. “They used the tombstones to rebuild after World War II,” Tellides said. “They’re built into landscaping walls and parks. One of the biggest churches has Hebrew inscriptions in its floor.”
That harrowing chapter wasn’t a focus for Tellides, but it was impossible to set aside entirely. Thousands of Jews had already left Thessaloniki by the 1940s. During Nazi occupation, about 96 percent of the remaining population was deported and killed in concentration camps.
“So much is gone. Not only in terms of the amount of people killed, but all their synagogues, communal centers, and neighborhoods — everything was confiscated or actively destroyed during World War II.”
“So much is gone,” Tellides said. “Not only in terms of the amount of people killed, but all their synagogues, communal centers, and neighborhoods — everything was confiscated or actively destroyed during World War II.”
For Tellides, the scale of loss made it all the more important to focus on the interwar period. “It’s really inspiring, but also difficult to understand how hard they were working to save their community,” she said.
“The thesis is a case study of the failure of the Minority Rights system of the interwar era,” Penslar observed. “Julia catalogs and analyzes Jewish activism and agency in Thessaloniki in ways that go well beyond existing scholarly literature on the subject.”
It is rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals and has served as an important food source since prehistoric times. For much of human history, milk has been consumed in various parts of the globe and has helped shape civilization, said Warriner, an anthropologist specializing in biomolecular archaeology.
But the genetic and nutritional story is complex for most of the world’s population and that has puzzled Warriner.
“We produce nearly 700 million tons of milk each year,” said Warinner, the Sally Starling Seaver Associate Professor at Radcliffe, during a Wednesday webinar, “The Milk Paradox.” “And yet we know that most of the world’s population has a lot of difficulty digesting fresh milk. So how do we get to the point where we have this food, which is spread globally and is consumed in so many different places and on every continent in various contexts, and yet it’s very difficult for us to digest?”
When humans are infants, they produce an enzyme called lactase that helps digest lactose, a sugar found in milk, but when they become adults, they stop producing it, which leads to lactose intolerance, a condition present in 65 percent of the adult human population around the world.
“When you’re an adult, you don’t produce lactase anymore, and the lactose will pass undigested into your large intestine, which is full of trillions of bacteria,” said Warinner. “They are more than happy to help you digest that lactose. The problem is in the process, because they will produce about eight liters of hydrogen gas for every quart or liter of milk that you consume.”
In her talk, Warinner, who is also the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, spoke about her interdisciplinary approach, which includes archeology, anthropology, and ethnography, to reconstruct the prehistory of milk, the origins of dairying, and its spread throughout the world.
The story of dairying took place over thousands of years from its origins in the region that encompasses West Asia, the Balkans, and North Africa to its migration to Europe and then around the world.
Scientists believed for decades that early Neolithic farmers developed a genetic mutation that allowed them to produce lactase during adulthood to properly digest milk. This change proved beneficial as they migrated to Europe, which helped them expand over the continent and replace most of the previous hunter gatherers, said Warinner.
Today lactase persistence is common in people of European ancestry as well as some African, Middle Eastern, and Southern Asian groups.
New scientific developments, including ancient DNA analysis and genome sequencing, found that there was no lactase persistence among early farmers during the Neolithic era, and raised questions about the moment when this genetic mutation took place, said Warinner.
“So this opens up a huge question, because medically we explain lactose tolerance on the basis of these mutations or adaptations,” said Warinner. “And yet for 4,000 years, people are dairying; they developed this whole food purposefully, and then they had no genetic basis to digest it. How does this work?”
It is a question that Warinner has tried to solve in her research. “I started to wonder if there might be alternative ways of adapting to a dairy-based diet that isn’t based on your own genome, but might be adapting through the use of microbes, whether that might be, for example, culinary microbes, and through fermentation, or by adapting your own gut microbiome to be able to facilitate and improve digestion.”
Warinner’s research took her to Mongolia, a country with a long history of dairying whose economy is still centered around it, and where local herders milk more species of livestock than anywhere else in the world.
Warinner’s five-year research effort included working with archeologists in Mongolia to reconstruct genomes of ancient Mongolians to see whether they showed signs of lactase persistence.
They found low lactase persistence, which is still the norm. They also studied local cattle and yak herders to analyze their gut microbiomes and compared them with those of residents in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city.
What they found was riveting, said Warinner. Their research was able to trace the history of dairying in Mongolia, which goes back 3,000 years. The analysis of hardened tooth plaque from human skeletons found in burial mounds revealed traces of milk proteins from cows, yaks, goats, and sheep.
When they analyzed lactose intolerance among herders and urban residents in Mongolia, they found that herders showed very few symptoms of lactose intolerance and low hydrogen presence. They also found that the herders’ gut microbiome showed a high volume of lactic acid bacteria, or probiotics, which may help digestion, as well as bifidobacteria, or healthy bacteria that are especially abundant in young infants and help metabolize lactose without producing any hydrogen, said Warinner.
During her talk, Warinner highlighted the way in which archaeology can help inform present-day issues or challenges, such as finding out the many ways in which humans developed dairy products and adapted to consuming milk and dairy products.
“There’s one trajectory, which is to alter the human genome, and we’ve seen this in a number of populations around the world, but an alternative pathway seems to alter the microbes that we interact with both through food and through our own gut microbiome,” said Warinner.
As for the questions guiding her next research, Warinner said, “What change caused the genetic adaptations that occurred in some populations? We don’t know what the trigger was for it, or why in Mongolia, even when it’s introduced, it was never selected for. Those are open questions that we hope to resolve.”
At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 7, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Roger Ware Brockett was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
With the passing of Roger Brockett, An Wang Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Emeritus, engineering lost one of its last great polymaths and the University lost a prime mover in revitalizing its engineering program.
Brockett studied systems — a whole made up of parts that work together, such as an airplane, a human body, an electric circuit with batteries and capacitors, or a flock of animals. He changed the way we think about controlling systems to do things — how to land an airplane, how to button a shirt, how to corral a hundred sheep. Early in his career he wrote an influential textbook on linear systems, in which the rule is, roughly speaking, that twice as much action causes twice as much reaction. He went on to create the far more widely applicable field of nonlinear control from mathematics not previously used in control theory, such as differential geometry and Lie algebras. His 62 Ph.D. students — and 629 academic descendants at last count — in turn have shaped a remarkable range of subfields and application domains. For his contributions, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was recognized with his field’s highest honors, among them the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Control Systems Award and the distinguished Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award given by the American Automatic Control Council.
Brockett was born Oct. 22, 1938, in rural Ohio. The youngest of seven children, he worked on his father’s turkey farm. Starting at age 12, he would rise early to drive his mother to her job as a schoolteacher before returning to help with chores, clean up, and head to school himself. “Don’t play with electricity while we’re out,” his mother plaintively cautioned; he did anyway and also shared in his brother’s farmyard chemical mischief, while keeping the tractor and other farm machinery working. He was a good football player and a mediocre math student before heading to Case Western Reserve University’s Institute of Technology, where his curiosity blossomed and where he stayed on to earn a Ph.D. After six years on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he moved to Harvard and, together with Yu-Chi Larry Ho, created the nation’s most influential tiny program in Harvard’s “Decision and Control” area of study.
Brockett loved mathematics for what it could do, and beautiful mathematics could do the most. He wrote “truth and beauty” on the blackboard underneath particularly elegant results. But mathematics was not his only tool. He drew inspiration from across his broad scientific knowledge — from biology, physics, chemistry, computation, and quantum mechanics. He was intellectually fearless and taught his students to be the same. A lined pad he used at home was covered with equations, with just two words repeated and scattered across the page, “try” and “hope” — try a different approach and hope it works and, if not, then try another. His results brought not merely satisfaction but surprise — using analog mathematics to solve combinatorial problems or connecting thermodynamics to stochastic control.
All the while, Brockett never lost his love of gadgetry or his drive to make things work. In the early 1980s, there were robots that could assemble a thousand-pound truck chassis, but none that could pick up a penny. So Brockett founded the Harvard Robotics Laboratory to build a soft-fingered robot, an initiative that spawned a major research subfield.
Brockett loved Harvard for the excellence of its community across disciplines, and he loved the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) — or the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, as it was previously known — because its small size made collisions between disciplines inevitable. But a couple of decades after moving upstream to Harvard from MIT, he wondered why more students weren’t inspired to study the marvels of engineering. Enrollments in other science fields were strong, but Harvard was graduating only handfuls of engineers. The problem, Brockett realized, was that Harvard engineering had become a place where machines were to be studied, not built. Students had to learn multivariable calculus before they were allowed to touch a screwdriver. There was no hands-on first year course where students could marry the tactile joy of making things that work with the intellectual rush of understanding why. So in the late 1980s he created Engineering Sciences 51, a “course in the design and construction of mechanical and electromechanical devices.” Now students could follow the full creative arc, from imagining a machine to seeing, feeling, and hearing it go clickety-clack. The result was a resurgence in engineering not seen at Harvard since Charles William Eliot declared that the practical should rarely even be mentioned at a proper college.
Brockett never lost his midwestern-ness — the characteristic vowels, kindness, and directness. He expected both hard work and integrity from his students and had limited patience for obfuscation. He would not hesitate to interrupt speakers during their second lecture slide or to challenge a student who seemed to be searching for the right memorized formula rather than thinking about the question itself.
Brockett had high standards for quality of mind, but he made his students colleagues rather than trainees. He was generous but not indulgent with them, and his mentoring continued throughout their careers. He counseled students always to love what they did — even if no one else did. One measure of his devotion to them is the number of calls he got while working with students at the office, having lost track of time — dinner was on the table at home, and his beloved family wanted to see him, too.
Brockett died March 19, 2023, and is survived by his widow, Carolann, who came from a neighboring town in Ohio and to whom he was married for 62 years; their sons, Douglas and Erik; and seven grandchildren, two named Roger in his honor.
Respectfully submitted, Yu-Chi Larry Ho Robert D. Howe Yue M. Lu Harry R. Lewis, Chair
At first, Heidi Schreck wasn’t sure the world needed another take on ‘Uncle Vanya’
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Heidi Schreck talks about her reimagined Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya.”
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Playwright Heidi Schreck achieved a rare level of success with “What the Constitution Means to Me.” Still, she was wracked with self-doubt when director Lila Neugebauer approached her about reviving Anton Chekhov’s enduring masterpiece “Uncle Vanya.”
“I honestly felt very intimidated, like, ‘Why on earth should there be another translation when there are so many great ones?’” Schreck told Professor of English Derek Miller before an audience recently at Farkas Hall.
First performed in Moscow in 1899, “Uncle Vanya” has been translated and staged countless times, with 11 productions on Broadway alone. Ultimately, the Visiting Lecturer of Englishdecided there was one way forward with her version.
“I decided … I’m going to try to be as true to the spirit of this play as I understand it,” Schreck said. “That is my only goal: to try to make what I feel and get from this play — based on my own understanding of it and my understanding of Russian — and put it into a language that feels true, that feels like it’s happening now.”
Schreck’s “Uncle Vanya” opened April 24 at Lincoln Center Theater, starring Steve Carell of television’s “The Office” in the title role. Instead of setting “Vanya” on a 19th-century Russian estate, Schreck places it in the near future on a family farm in the U.S. (“maybe Massachusetts,” she suggested).
Chekhov’s drama about dashed dreams and existential dread among a group of characters on a rural estate has seen a resurgence in recent years, from David Cromer’s staging last year in a Manhattan loft to Simon Stephens’ 2023 version in London starring Andrew Scott in every role. Schreck, who is teaching “Playwriting Workshop: Writing Plays in the 21st Century” this spring, can understand why. Russia in the 1890s, with its class divides, wealth inequality, and brewing political discontent, feels extremely relatable to audiences today.
“Coming out of a pandemic, the exhaustion of these last several years in this country feels very present in ‘Uncle Vanya,’” Schreck said. “We wanted to be like, ‘It could be happening right here, right now.’”
But Schreck, who began studying Russian at age 17 and lived in Siberia and St. Petersburg after college, would need to pare away any language that felt overtly Russian or too 19th century. Challenges included the word chudak, which has puzzled “Vanya” translators for decades. Meaning a strange, eccentric person or outsider, chudak appears several times in Chekhov’s original text.
Schreck decided “creep” was too negative, “misfit” too old-fashioned. “Weirdo” just didn’t sound right. She eventually went with “freak,” the same word used by the well-known Chekhov translator Paul Schmidt, M.A. ’59, Ph.D. ’74.
“I was like, ‘Well, it’s a great word,’” Schreck said. “The ‘k’ sound is wonderful at the end of it. Chudak. Freak.”
Schreck’s conversation with Miller also covered her career, which began with writing and staging experimental theater pieces with friends in Seattle and continued in New York, where she wrote for television shows including “I Love Dick,” “Billions,” “Nurse Jackie,” and “Dispatches from Elsewhere.”
But after five years in TV, Schreck missed theater and decided to return her attention to a play she had been writing about the U.S. Constitution.
“What the Constitution Means to Me” was inspired by Schreck’s high school years participating in constitutional debate competitions and famously features a live debate scene with a real high schooler. The Tony-nominated show ran on Broadway in 2019 and then in theaters around the country before landing on Amazon Prime in 2020.
The piece was motivated by Schreck’s desire to create something for the stage, something that would only work with live audiences.
“A lot of the decisions about that production — like the fact that it ends in a live debate or that it ends with questions from the audience, and that the show ends differently every night — came from a lens of, ‘What can I do on stage with people that I could never do on screen?’” Schreck said.
First-year student Jocelyn Shek, who performed the role of high school debater in the show from 2020 to 2022, attended Schreck’s talk.
When Shek auditioned for “Constitution,” she was a member of her school debate team with no acting experience. After landing the role, she ended up touring with the show to 12 U.S. cities, all while keeping up with high school courses online.
“The part that I was in does have room for improvisation, so we were changing the text of the show on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis based on real-world political events,” said Shek, who plans to concentrate in sociology and statistics.
While giving advice to young artists, Schreck was candid about the difficulties of pursuing a career as a playwright. Those who choose this path are almost certain to encounter professional and financial setbacks, she said.
“I just say, really do it only if it’s something that you love,” Shreck said. “Find a way to make it pleasurable for yourself if it’s something that you want to do.”
Harvard Allston Partnership Fund awards grants to 26 Allston-Brighton nonprofits
Amy Kamosa
Harvard Correspondent
3 min read
The 16th annual Harvard Allston Partnership Fund awarded grants totaling $200,000 to 26 Allston-Brighton nonprofits at a special gathering in April.
Held at the Harvard Ed Portal, the event brought together interim President Alan Garber, Boston’s Chief of Planning Arthur Jemison, City Councilor Liz Breadon, and State Rep. Kevin Honan among others.
Since its inception, the fund has provided $1.8 million in grants to the local community, aiding a variety of grassroots organizations.
“Allston-Brighton is home to an exceptional network of nonprofits, and I thank all grant recipients — past and present — for delivering meaningful initiatives and programs,” said Garber. “I also thank our advisory board members for evaluating grant applications each year and for helping to determine how best to serve the needs of our community.”
Among those in attendance were State Rep. Kevin Honan (from left), Harvard Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick, interim Harvard President Alan Garber, grant recipient Frank Hughes, City Councilor Liz Breadon, and Boston’s Chief of Planning Arthur Jemison.
HAPF was established by Harvard University and the Boston Planning & Development Agency, in collaboration with the Allston community, as part of a cooperation agreement related to development approval of Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex in 2008. Since then, thousands of residents in Allston-Brighton have benefited from programs funded by these grants in areas ranging from youth enrichment programs to public health initiatives.
“This fund is a great example of a community harnessing the power of development to positively impact its residents,” said Jemison.
One of the grant recipients was Road to the Right Track, which received $10,000 to fund educational scholarships for team members from Allston-Brighton. “The money we’re receiving tonight will be going directly to the kids,” said founder and head coach Frank Hughes. “Nobody receives a paycheck for this work, so we really appreciated these funds and they will make a huge impact.”
In addition to presenting the grant recipients with certificates, the evening celebrated four Harvard College students from Allston-Brighton — Richard D. Flores ’25, Jose Marco C. “Marcky” Antonio ’25, Khalid Abdulle ’26, and William A. Hu ’27 — who are recipients of the Joseph M. Smith Scholarship Program. Also honored were the five retiring members of the Harvard Allston Task Force, a city of Boston advisory body for Harvard’s institutional development. Breadon presented the retiring task force members with a resolution from the Boston City Council “in recognition of their years of service on the Harvard Allston Task Force.” Breadon noted that many of the retiring members of the task force had served for more than 20 years and thanked them for their “incredible service to the community.”
A volunteer board of community members evaluates the grant applications and makes annual funding decisions for the Partnership Fund. For more information.
Six layers of excitatory neurons color-coded by depth.
Credit: Google Research and Lichtman Lab
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Researchers publish largest-ever dataset of neural connections
A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something stupendous.
Led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and newly appointed dean of science, the Harvard team helped create the largest 3D brain reconstruction to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of connections in a piece of temporal cortex about half the size of a rice grain.
Published in Science, the study is the latest development in a nearly 10-year collaboration with scientists at Google Research, combining Lichtman’s electron microscopy imaging with AI algorithms to color-code and reconstruct the extremely complex wiring of mammal brains. The paper’s three first co-authors are former Harvard postdoc Alexander Shapson-Coe, Michał Januszewski of Google Research, and Harvard postdoc Daniel Berger.
The ultimate goal, supported by the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, is to create a comprehensive, high-resolution map of a mouse’s neural wiring, which would entail about 1,000 times the amount of data the group just produced from the 1-cubic-millimeter fragment of human cortex.
“The word ‘fragment’ is ironic,” Lichtman said. “A terabyte is, for most people, gigantic, yet a fragment of a human brain — just a minuscule, teeny-weeny little bit of human brain — is still thousands of terabytes.”
Jeff Lichtman.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The latest map contains never-before-seen details of brain structure, including a rare but powerful set of axons connected by up to 50 synapses. The team also noted oddities in the tissue, such as a small number of axons that formed extensive whorls. Because the sample was taken from a patient with epilepsy, the researchers don’t know whether such formations are pathological or simply rare.
Lichtman’s field is connectomics, which seeks to create comprehensive catalogs of brain structure, down to individual cells. Such completed maps would unlock insights into brain function and disease, about which scientists still know very little.
Google’s state-of-the-art AI algorithms allow for reconstruction and mapping of brain tissue in three dimensions. The team has also developed a suite of publicly available tools researchers can use to examine and annotate the connectome.
“Given the enormous investment put into this project, it was important to present the results in a way that anybody else can now go and benefit from them,” said Google collaborator Viren Jain.
Next the team will tackle the mouse hippocampal formation, which is important to neuroscience for its role in memory and neurological disease.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
When LyLena Estabine was applying to college as a high schooler in Olathe, Kansas, she wanted to become a civil engineer. Harvard didn’t offer that field of study, but her parents nudged her to apply anyway.
Estabine got accepted to many of the schools she’d applied to — including Harvard. She faced a dilemma: pursue her dream of becoming a civil engineer or pursue the unknown in Cambridge.
She went with Harvard and has no regrets. Not only did Estabine forge a new scholarly path there that combined her love of numbers and people, but she also discovered a knack for leadership and got involved in student government and public service. She also changed faiths, shifted political leanings, released two musical albums, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
“Looking back now, I can be sure that this is where God wanted me to be,” she said. “The people that I’ve met here and the experiences that I’ve had … I could have only had at a school like Harvard.”
Once Estabine committed to an uncertain path at Harvard, she first gave economics a try. She liked the quantitative aspects of the field but wanted to incorporate social issues. Eventually, she decided to concentrate in sociology with a track in data analytics.
“It is dedicated to asking these questions about how we can live and work together better,” she said. “I really felt like it was a discipline that sparked my curiosity and engaged me intellectually.”
Estabine said quantitative research can be helpful when evaluating whether systems are working, but it’s crucial to talk to the actual people behind the numbers.
She applied that lesson during her sophomore year while serving on the Undergraduate Council. When the student body decided to transition to a new form of government, Estabine was an integral part of the structure that took its place: The Harvard Undergraduate Association.
“LyLena takes the approach of servant leadership, this importance of giving back to something that is greater than one person.”
Jason Meier, the associate dean for student engagement
“We realized that the system in place was not properly structured to facilitate student engagement and student changemaking within the larger system of Harvard,” she said. Once the HUA was established, Estabine was elected co-president, alongside Travis Allen Johnson.
Jason Meier, the associate dean for student engagement in the Dean of Students Office, was very involved in the development of this new governing body. He had only just started in his position when he met Estabine, and said that his early days in the role were inseparable from her support.
“LyLena takes the approach of servant leadership, this importance of giving back to something that is greater than one person,” Meier said. “Not only did I have this incredibly kind, thoughtful person to work alongside, but I felt like the student body was in good hands with her leadership and her very gentle, reassuring nature.”
Estabine’s leadership style developed in part from her commitment to the Catholic faith. While she was raised in a Christian family, she underwent a spiritual awakening while at the College. She was looking for answers to some of life’s big questions and found guidance and comfort at St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square.
Patrick Fiorillo — who recently took a new assignment within the Archdiocese of Boston — met Estabine during her junior year while he served as the Undergraduate Catholic Chaplain at St. Paul’s. “I got to see firsthand her own kind of spiritual journey quest and see her wrestle with many deep questions.”
After Estabine converted to Catholicism, she served her faith community as a Harvard Catholic Forum Fellow. In this role, she encouraged other students to bring their whole selves to conversations. Fiorillo said that Estabine had a natural gift for helping students bring their “heart and mind and body and soul.”
“She clearly has an interest in applying her gifts and talents for the good of society at large and other people,” he said.
Estabine’s various leadership roles did not come without challenges. There were a few points when students questioned her ability to lead the student body. For one, she was open about her religious beliefs. She also became politically conservative during her time at Harvard.
“No one really understood that I could be those things and also serve them,” Estabine said.
Meier, who worked alongside Estabine during this time, said it was difficult to see her attacked, often anonymously. Even during this time, he was struck by her maturity and grace.
“She never let it deter her work,” he said. “She continued to trudge forward because she knew serving students would be more important and that’s where she needed to put her energy.”
During her co-presidency Estabine helped establish multiple resources for the Harvard community. One is the Crimson Career Closet, a collection of professional attire available for students to rent located in the Smith Campus Center.
As a singer and a songwriter, she received the First-Year Creativity Award and performed at multiple events, including at Claudine Gay’s presidential inauguration. And over the past few years, she released Vol. I and Vol. II of her music project, “Songs of Prophets.”
As for what’s next, Estabine, who was inducted into the Alpha Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, is entering another time of uncertainty. As she leaves campus, she will be pursuing work as an analyst in the D.C. area.
She offered this advice for students who come after her: “Be fully who you are and don’t struggle to fit yourself into one box fully. You can change always, and you should.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Ivan Specht started at Harvard on track to study pure mathematics. But when COVID-19 sent everyone home, he began wishing the math he was doing had more relevance to what was happening in the world.
Specht, a New York City native, expanded his coursework, arming himself with statistical modeling classes, and began to “fiddle around” with simulating ways diseases spread through populations. He got hooked. During the pandemic, he became one of only two undergraduates to serve on Harvard’s testing and tracing committee, eventually developing a prototype contact-tracing app called CrimsonShield.
Specht took his curiosity for understanding disease propagation to the lab of computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti, professor in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and member of the Broad Institute, known for her work sequencing the Ebola virus in 2014. Specht, now a senior, has since co-authored several studies around new statistical methods for analyzing the spread of infectious diseases, with plans to continue that work in graduate school.
“Ivan is absolutely brilliant and a joy to work with, and his research accomplishments already as an undergraduate are simply astounding,” Sabeti said. “He is operating at the level of a seasoned postdoc.”
His senior thesis, “Reconstructing Viral Epidemics: A Random Tree Approach,” described a statistical model aimed at tackling one of the most intractable problems that plague infectious disease researchers: determining who transmitted a given pathogen to whom during a viral outbreak. Specht was co-advised by computer science Professor Michael Mitzenmacher, who guided the statistical and computational sections of his thesis, particularly in deriving genomic frequencies within a host using probabilistic methods.
Specht said the pandemic made clear that testing technology could provide valuable information about who got sick, and even what genetic variant of a pathogen made them sick. But mapping paths of transmission was much more challenging because that process was completely invisible. Such information, however, could provide crucial new details into how and where transmission occurred and be used to test things such as vaccine efficacy or the effects of closing schools.
Specht’s work exploited the fact that viruses leave clues about their transmission path in their phylogenetic trees, or lines of evolutionary descent from a common ancestor. “It turns out that genome sequences of viruses provide key insight into that underlying network,” said the joint mathematics and statistics concentrator.
Uncovering this transmission network goes to the heart of how single-stranded RNA pathogens survive: Once they infect their host, they mutate, producing variants that are marked by slightly different genetic barcodes. Specht’s statistical model determines how the virus spreads by tracking the frequencies of different viral variants observed within a host.
As the centerpiece of his thesis, he reconstructed a dataset of about 45,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes across Massachusetts, providing insights into how outbreaks unfolded across the state.
Specht will take his passion for epidemiological modeling to graduate school at Stanford University, with an eye toward helping both researchers and communities understand and respond to public health crises.
A graphic designer with experience in scientific data visualization, Specht is focused not only on understanding outbreaks, but also creating clear illustrations of them. For example, his thesis contains a creative visual representation of those 45,000 Massachusetts genomes, with colored dots representing cases, positioned nearby other “dots” they are likely to have infected.
Specht’s interest in graphics began in middle school when, as an enthusiast of trains and mass transit, he started designing imagined subway maps for cities that lack actual subways, like Austin, Texas. At Harvard, he designed an interactive “subway map” depicting a viral outbreak.
As a member of the Sabeti lab, Specht taught an infectious disease modeling course to master’s and Ph.D. students at University of Sierra Leone last summer. His outbreak analysis tool is also now being used in an ongoing study of Lassa fever in that region. And he co-authored two chapters of a textbook on outbreak science in collaboration with the Moore Foundation.
Over the past three years, Specht has been lead author of a paper in Scientific Reports and another in Cell Patterns, and co-author on two others, including a cover story in Cell. His first lead-author paper, “The case for altruism in institutional diagnostic testing,” showed that organizations like Harvard should allocate COVID-19 testing capacity to their surrounding communities, rather than monopolize it for themselves. That work was featured in The New York Times.
During his time at Harvard, Specht lived in Quincy House and was design editor of the Harvard Advocate, the University’s undergraduate literary magazine. In his free time he also composes music, and he still considers himself a mass transit enthusiast.
In the acknowledgements section of his thesis, he credited Sabeti with opening his eyes to the “many fascinating problems at the intersection of math, statistics, and computational biology.”
“I could fill this entire thesis with reasons I am grateful for Professor Sabeti, but I think they can be summarized by the sense of wonder and inspiration I feel every time I set foot in her lab.”
Melissa Dell (from left), Alex Csiszar, and Latanya Sweeney.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Symposium considers how technology is changing academia
While moderating a talk on artificial intelligence last week, Latanya Sweeney posed a thought experiment. Picture three to five years from now. AI companies are continuing to scrape the internet for data to feed their large language models. But unlike today’s internet, which is largely human-generated content, most of that future internet’s content has been generated by … large language models.
The scenario is not farfetched considering the explosive growth of generative AI in the last two years, suggested the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Kennedy School professor.
Sweeney’s panel was part of a daylong symposium on AI hosted by the FAS last week that considered questions such as: How are generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT disrupting what it means to own one’s work? How can AI be leveraged thoughtfully while maintaining academic and research integrity? Just how good are these large language model-based programs going to get? (Very, very good.)
“Here at the FAS, we’re in a unique position to explore questions and challenges that come from this new technology,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, during her opening remarks. “Our community is full of brilliant thinkers, curious researchers, and knowledgeable scholars, all able to lend their variety of expertise to tackling the big questions in AI, from ethics to societal implications.”
In an all-student panel, philosophy and math concentrator Chinmay Deshpande ’24 compared the present moment to the advent of the internet, and how that revolutionary technology forced academic institutions to rethink how to test knowledge. “Regardless of what we think AI will look like down the line, I think it’s clear it’s starting to have an impact that’s qualitatively similar to the impact of the internet,” Deshpande said. “And thinking about pedagogy, we should think about AI along somewhat similar lines.”
Students Naomi Bashkansky (from left), Kevin Wei, and Chloe Loughridge discuss their experiences with AI.
Computer science concentrator and master’s degree student Naomi Bashkansky ’25, who is exploring AI safety issues with fellow students, urged Harvard to provide thought leadership on the implications of an AI-saturated world, in part by offering courses that integrate the basics of large language models into subjects like biology or writing.
Harvard Law School student Kevin Wei agreed.
“We’re not grappling sufficiently with the way the world will change, and especially the way the economy and labor market will change, with the rise of generative AI systems,” Wei said. “Anything Harvard can do to take a leading role in doing that … in discussions with government, academia, and civil society … I would like to see a much larger role for the University.”
The day opened with a panel on original scholarship, co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center and the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Panelists explored ethics of authorship in the age of instant access to information and blurred lines of citation and copyright, and how those considerations vary between disciplines.
David Joselit, the Arthur Kingsley Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, said challenges wrought by AI have precedent in the history of art; the idea of “authorship” has been undermined in the modern era because artists have often focused on the idea as what counts as the artwork, rather than its physical execution. “It seems to me that AI is a mechanization of that kind of distribution of authorship,” Joselit said. He posed the idea that AI should be understood “as its own genre, not exclusively as a tool.”
Another symposium topic included a review of Harvard Library’s law, information policy, and AI survey research revealing how students are using AI for academic work. Administrators from across the FAS also shared examples of how they are experimenting with AI tools to enhance their productivity. Panelists from the Bok Center shared how AI has been used in teaching this year, and Harvard University Information Technology gave insight into tools it is building to support instructors.
Throughout the ground floor of the Northwest Building, where the symposium took place, was a poster fair keying off final projects from Sweeney’s course “Tech Science to Save the World,” in which students explored how scientific experimentation and technology can be used to solve real-world problems. Among the posters: “Viral or Volatile? TikTok and Democracy,” and “Campaign Ads in the Age of AI: Can Voters Tell the Difference?”
Students from the inaugural General Education class “Rise of the Machines?” capped the day, sharing final projects illustrating current and future aspects of generative AI.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Every two weeks or so, somebody would stop Kazuma Mitchell ’24 and ask for a photo.
“They were mostly Chinese tourists visiting Harvard for the day,” he said.
While Mitchell appears to most on campus as an ordinary college student, these passersby recognized him from his life on another continent as a music star. A former member of the boy band Intersection, the soft-spoken solo artist built a successful career in Japan before his breakthrough in China on the “American Idol”-style reality TV show “Chuang 2021.”
“I want to keep building my brand in China, slowly expand across Asia, and find different companies to support me in different countries,” said Mitchell, who recently appeared in GQ China and modeled for a Valentino campaign in the country. “I want to work toward the U.S. market as well, but it’s a hard market to just barge into.”
Despite the early professional success, Mitchell, 23, said he was shocked to gain admittance to Harvard College. He set aside the bustling performance career and attended his first classes in fall 2019, making fast friends with other first-years in the Yard.
“He told me like a month in, ‘I’m really famous abroad,’” recalled friend and former housemate Chris Wang ’23. “I thought that was really funny.”
Concentrating in economics was an act of pure pragmatism, Mitchell said. But earning a music secondary left a little room for pursuing personal interests in theory and experimentation.
Concentrating in economics was an act of pure pragmatism, Mitchell said. But earning a music secondary left a little room for pursuing personal interests in theory and experimentation. The course “Storytelling With Sounds,” led by composer and Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music Hans Tutschku, was a highlight.
“It was basically a class where we recorded sounds from everyday life, and then used those sounds to create abstract music,” Mitchell said.
According to Tutschku, Mitchell’s strong musical foundation and cross-cultural background helped him succeed in a course designed to challenge convention. “What they learn is to listen differently,” Tutschku explained. “They learn to listen to the world differently, listen to sounds differently, and accept or use sounds in a different way.”
Mitchell was born in New York City and picked up his first musical instrument — the flute — after watching Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.”
“I really loved that movie, and I wanted to be the prince,” he recalled.
At age 8, Mitchell moved with his family to Tokyo, where he and a younger sister were enrolled in public schools. “Up until that point, I didn’t really know any Japanese,” said Mitchell, who often appears under the name Kaz. “After a year, though, I kind of picked it up and now Japanese is basically my native language as well as English.”
He was just 13 when he joined up with Intersection, a four-boy power pop ensemble featuring a blend of Japanese and Western elements.
“All of us were mixed — half Japanese and half something else — and all of us spoke English,” said Mitchell, who has a white American father and Japanese mother.
It took about four years of rehearsals until Intersection was ready. Mitchell had just graduated from high school, in 2019, when the group debuted with an album of English-language songs. Their first music video, “Starting Over,” played up their youth, with the bandmates rollicking about one of Japan’s many “cat islands,” where feline residents outnumber people.
Mitchell also appeared during a gap year on the popular Japanese reality series “Is She the Wolf?” The reality dating show, familiar to U.S. audiences from subsequent seasons that stream on Netflix, features five men and five women, with a single foil planted among the latter.
Spurred by the pandemic, Mitchell took a break during the 2020-21 academic year to appear on “Chiang 2021” and record a solo EP titled “Code Love.” The six-song collection is far more eclectic than anything Mitchell released with Intersection. He collaborated with Japanese actress and singer Hikari Mitsushima on “Drown,” a track featuring lush layers of acoustics, electronics, and bilingual vocals. Also noteworthy is “Summer Is Over,” an R&B-infused duet with 2023 Harvard grad Mai Anna that has serious lo-fi allure.
Resuming coursework in Cambridge left him feeling divided, Mitchell said. “I couldn’t really communicate with my company in Japan. I couldn’t really make the most of my connections.”
Last year he signed a three-year contract with Beijing-based Longtao Entertainment. To make the most of this opportunity, he opted to spend his final semester studying abroad in China, bolstering his Mandarin skills by day while spending nights performing, attending industry events, and working on new music, including a pop-driven single due out any day.
But he retains fond memories of Harvard, where everyday life was closer to normal. “He’s more introverted than people would expect,” Wang observed. “He deals with being a celebrity when he’s out and about in China, but I think in college he appreciated alone time.”
Until somebody would recognize the pop star on campus again. “There were a couple of times where my photo got taken in the Science Center,” Mitchell said. “I had to issue a statement on Weibo — the Chinese social media site — and be like, ‘Hey, if you want to take my photo, just talk to me. Don’t take it without me knowing.’”
Wang, who speaks Mandarin, eventually resolved to protect his reserved friend from the most aggressive intrusions. “I got really good at telling people to back off,” he said. “I’d always step in front of the camera and ruin their picture.”
OFA dance classes offer well-being through movement
On a Tuesday evening in March, a group of students lay on their backs or stomachs on mats in a Harvard Dance Center studio, as teaching artist Grisha Coleman guided them through simple poses in the Feldenkrais Method — turning the head and resting it on the hand or raising one knee slightly — with the goal of increasing body awareness and mindfulness during movement.
The students were learning the power of slowing down — literally.
“It’s gentle. The approach is the opposite of ‘no pain, no gain,’” said Coleman in an interview. “The goal is not a six-pack ab; the goal is opening lines of communication between your nervous system and your muscular skeletal system.”
Coleman’s class “Awareness Through Movement: The Feldenkrais Method,” was part of a new series of community classes put on by the Office for the Arts Dance Program this spring, focused on physical and emotional healing. “Embodiment Practices” also included “Healing Through Expressive Flamenco,” taught by instructor Laura Sánchez.
Elizabeth Epsen, lead administrator for the Dance Program, said 50 students signed up for flamenco and 56 for Feldenkrais — a sign that the subject matter has resonated with people.
“The goal is not a six-pack ab; the goal is opening lines of communication between your nervous system and your muscular skeletal system.”
Grisha Coleman
“We know there’s a national mental health crisis among college-age students,” said Epsen. She noted that the idea for the series came from the OFA’s recent strategic planning process, which revealed a need for more programming that supports student health and well-being. “Students are navigating tremendous pressures on their own — some very personal scenarios, loneliness, things happening at home — while also living in a time of multiple crises in the world. Dance and embodiment practices can provide tools for coping and more integrated ways to literally move through the world.”
Sánchez said Expressive Flamenco combines the emotional dance form with storytelling, improvisation, and free writing to help students get in touch with their bodies and create a healing space for connection, self-expression and self-care.
“Facilitating Expressive Flamenco was a fascinating experience,” Sánchez said. “Several students were interested in experiencing a new art form, others were more interested in the healing/embodiment practice, and others were also interested in finding a space to heal in community.”
Mia Lupica ’26, a student in the course, has been taking classes and workshops through the OFA Dance Program since she was introduced to it during first-year pre-orientation.
“Laura was an amazing instructor who taught us to connect to stories through dance, to connect to rhythms through our bodies, connect to the musicians through movements called a llamada, [or] call, and how to actively support and engage with one another as we danced together by shouting olé,” Lupica said. “The class was super inclusive and accessible to all levels or injuries, and it was a great experience to learn how to express through my body.”
Coleman’s Feldenkrais class uses slow movements — like Tai Chi or gentle yoga — to help with posture and balance, mindfulness, pain relief, and healthy aging. Movements may be as simple as extending or retracting an arm or a leg, or finding a twist in the spine. The method is intended to inform daily movement — walking, safely lifting objects — but it can also be helpful for dancers.
Coleman said she began practicing the technique after sustaining injuries as a professional dancer.
“Depending on what genre or style you’re in, you’re trained to do things that may or may not be super coherent with what your body actually does,” Coleman explained. “For dancers, I think the benefit is you can untrain some of that useless effort and you can learn to dance more freely.”
Epsen said she hopes the series is helpful for all attendees, regardless of their dance style and experience level.
As a high school student, Maya Counter ’24 led the effort to rename the residential Cambridge neighborhood where she grew up from Agassiz to Baldwin. She is pictured outside her elementary school, named after educator and civic leader Maria L. Baldwin, the first Black school principal in the Northeast.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
For Maya Counter ’24, honoring a notable Black educator, and setting right a historical wrong
Maya Counter ’24 was only an infant when her neighborhood school in Cambridge was renamed from the Agassiz School to the Baldwin School. This moment would later take on untold significance for her in high school and later at Harvard where she graduates this month.
In 2002, the Cambridge School Committee voted unanimously to shed Louis Agassiz’s name and legacy of racist ideology from the elementary school and replace it with that of Maria L. Baldwin, honoring the school’s first Black principal who led the school starting in 1889.
Growing up on Sacramento Street, the very street where the Baldwin School is located — “It is like a little heart of Cambridge”— Counter always felt connected to the school’s namesake, who was celebrated throughout the halls on posters and plaques.
“She was an incredible person, a civic leader, and awesome person within the community,” Counter said.
The Maria L. Baldwin School, which inspired Counter’s renaming project, lies in the heart of the Cambridge neighborhood.
Baldwin was born in Cambridge in 1856, attending public schools that were racially integrated (codified by Massachusetts law in 1855). She graduated from Cambridge High School in 1874, earned a teaching certificate in 1875, and in 1881, she secured a full-time position at the Agassiz School, then a predominantly white, middle-class school, becoming the only Black teacher in Cambridge. Within eight years, she was recommended to replace the retiring principal of the Agassiz, making her the first Black principal in Massachusetts and the Northeast.
“Baldwin was remembered by students and colleagues for her quiet authority, her love of literature and poetry, and her affection for and nurturing of her pupils,” Beth Folsom, program manager for History Cambridge (formerly the Cambridge Historical Society), wrote in 2021.
Among the children Baldwin educated was Edward Estlin Cummings, who famously grew up to become the notable American poet e.e. cummings. He reflected nearly 60 years later on his beloved principal “blessed with a delicious voice, charming manners, and a deep understanding of children.” “Never did any semidivine dictator more gracefully and easily rule a more unruly and less graceful populace,” and “from her I marvellingly learned that the truest power is gentleness,” he wrote.
Despite the school’s renaming, the Agassiz neighborhood name remained. Counter recalled her early unease, “When I was old enough to understand why my elementary school name changed, I started questioning why the Agassiz neighborhood was still named the Agassiz neighborhood. And then learning more about how he used science to classify Black people as inferior, I felt almost awkward being a Black person walking around the neighborhood I love. Thinking about that name representing me in the community, it just didn’t sit right with me.”
Counter holds her copy of “Maria Baldwin’s Worlds: A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice” by Kathleen Weiler.
By the time Counter was at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School and studying Agassiz’s writings for an AP U.S. History class, her frustration grew. She began a campaign for the Agassiz neighborhood to change its name. The new name would unquestionably be Baldwin. “There was no other person I wanted to advocate for.”
She began reaching out to Cambridge city councilors, talking to local activists, and attending community meetings. The initiative did not pass the first time, but she regrouped and spent the next three years working closely with the support of Cambridge City Councilors Sumbul Siddiqui and E. Denise Simmons and Agassiz Baldwin Community Center Co-Executive Director Phoebe Sinclair. The effort channeled through the sometimes obscure and tedious processes of local government.
Counter stands outside the Maria L. Baldwin School. “I think it’s important to recognize the people who have historically been pushed out of being honored, despite their incredible work, especially because of the color of their skin. If we can do that today, why not?”
“I just knew at the bottom of my heart that people didn’t like the name. It wasn’t just me. I trusted that,” she said.
In August 2021 the Cambridge City Council voted 9-0 to rename the neighborhood to Baldwin. Counter celebrated the change as an undergraduate on the cusp of her sophomore year at Harvard College. “I think it’s important to recognize the people who have historically been pushed out of being honored, despite their incredible work, especially because of the color of their skin. If we can do that today, why not?
“There’s a lot more work to do,” she said. “We live in this country, and it has a lot of scary legacies. I would encourage people to just question everything they see on the streets and be open to relearning and unlearning.”
Biologist separates reality of science from the claims of profiling firms
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Molly Przeworski launched into a lecture on genomic trait prediction with disappointing news: Using your genes to read the future is a murky practice.
The Columbia University systems biologist, who visited Harvard last week as featured speaker in the annual John M. Prather Lecture Series, explained how current approaches to genomic trait prediction in humans are imperfect. In a sample of 150,000 people, she said, more than 600 million positions in the genome differ among individuals. Over the past decade, it has become routine to survey such variation in large samples and try to associate variation in traits, such as height, to these genetic differences. Companies now aim to use DNA profiling to make personal predictions — height, cancer risk, educational attainment, which wine would best suit their palate, and even the right romantic partner.
“There are areas, notably for medical prognosis, where genomic trait prediction may turn out to be useful,” said Przeworski, whose lab studies how evolution, natural selection, recombination, and mutation operate in humans and animals. “But by and large, genomic trait prediction is much less informative than these ads and headlines would suggest.”
“But by and large, genomic trait prediction is much less informative than these ads and headlines would suggest.”
Molly Przeworski
At the moment, she said, the most useful application is not for humans, but rather for studying other species’ ecological responses to climate change. Her team has used genomic trait prediction among coral species in the Great Barrier Reef to shed light on which are most susceptible to coral bleaching.
In human genetics, the typical approach for associating some trait of interest (height, cancer risk) to specific genes is called a genome-wide association study. The test relates trait variations to genotypes (base pairs AA, AG, etc.) in certain positions on the genome, and fits them to a line.
However, many traits are associated with a large number of genetic variants. For example, one study Przeworski cited found 12,000 unique positions on a genome in which changing one base pair letter would have a small effect on one’s height. What’s more, environmental factors, such as nutrition, also affect height.
“I think a lot of us have this implicit model of what genomic trait prediction should mean — that we understand something about how that genetic variant affects the protein, affects the cellular phenotype, affects development, and therefore affects height,” she said. “In practice, for almost all complex traits, we are very, very far from that. All we really have is this massive correlational study.”
So if genomic prediction is murky, why bother? Przeworski admitted to asking herself the same question years ago, and investigating contexts in which confounding genetic clues wouldn’t matter as much as simply making a helpful, reliable prediction. “It occurred to me we could make predictions about ecologically important traits in the response to climate change,” she said.
She spent part of her talk describing how her lab followed up, partnering with Australian scientists who study how ocean warming affects coral reefs. Due to temperature-related disruptions in the symbiotic relationship between certain coral species and the algae they farm, some colonies lose their pigment and become “bleached,” which stunts growth and leads to colony death. Przeworski’s team has used their expertise in genomic trait prediction to build models that determine which corals are most vulnerable to bleaching.
“As it becomes more straightforward to collect genomic information, I think its greatest promise may be in applications outside humans,” she said.
The lecture was co-sponsored by the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.
‘Spermworld’ documentary examines motivations of prospective parents, volunteer donors who connect through private group page
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
A woman is relaxing before a fireplace when a male figure enters the frame.
“Here you go,” he says, handing her a vial. “That’s a good five milliliters.”
It’s but one quietly awkward scene from the documentary “Spermworld,” directed by Lance Oppenheim ’19. Everybody in the film is connected to a Facebook group called Sperm Donation USA, where prospective parents can connect with volunteer donors, without the anonymity and cost of traditional sperm banks.
The film, now streaming on Hulu, was produced by The New York Times and inspired by a 2021 story on the high demand for rogue donors.
Oppenheim’s topic is unusual and provocative, but he said what struck him were the motivations of his subjects. “It’s not just about the desire to have a child,” offered the bicoastal director, whose first full-length documentary was “Some Kind of Heaven” (2020). “It’s about not feeling alone in this world. It’s about something bigger than yourself.”
We caught up with the 2019Art, Film, and Visual Studies graduate to learn more about his new project. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
The film opens with an encounter between Anica and a donor named Kyle. How long ago did you capture this footage?
Steve Walker (left) with Rachel Stanley, who wants to get pregnant despite having cystic fibrosis.
Film stills courtesy of FX
Walker with Stanley.
Ari Nagel and his mother.
We started filming with Kyle in 2021, and that was our second day of shooting. For me, it’s an important scene for a few reasons. For one, it’s the only scene in the film that results in a successful pregnancy. I also wanted the film to have this uneasiness, this unpredictability. How do these two people know each other? What are they even doing? And because she successfully gets pregnant — leading to this beautiful, transcendent experience — it showcases the potential, the magic that “Spermworld” can yield.
When did you know this subject could sustain a feature-length documentary?
The process of looking at people’s Facebook posts … I was like, “There’s no way this can be a short film.” The fact that there were so many people attempting to find themselves through the process of creating life — that to me felt like a deeply existential thing you could watch forever.
Say more about the Facebook group and its role in the filmmaking process.
I kept going back to it, because I was really moved by the sense of community there. You see not just men advertising themselves, hoping someone will choose them. You see people talking about their desires. It’s almost like a support group for people trying to get pregnant.
Whenever I was confused about where the film was going, or why I was making it, I would go back to their posts. I knew I wanted the movie’s tone to mimic the experience of reading them.
What drives women to this group and similar online forums?
There are many reasons, but a major one is economics. Sperm banks are cost-prohibitive for so many. The idea that you can get free sperm from someone who’s willing to hand it over gives some people a real sense of agency and community.
I didn’t know sperm banks were so expensive.
It’s crazy. You have to pay like $1,000 per vial. Maybe it’s strange to see people in the movie going the unregulated route, but there’s nothing stranger to me than going to a place that’s so deeply monetized.
Let’s turn to some of the characters we meet in the film, starting with super-donor Ari Nagel, who has fathered well over 100 children and spends his time crisscrossing the globe to visit them.
He’s been in the media so many times; initially I was wary of engaging with him. But then I became interested in how he was stuck in this loop. Everyone around him was saying, “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself. You have a problem.” He sort of acknowledged that he wanted to stop and chart a new course. But also, he was aware that he could never stop because it gives his life so much purpose.
I was really drawn to donor Tyree and his fiancée, Atasha, a woman who dreams of becoming pregnant herself.
I found Tyree on Facebook and then an associate producer, David Malmborg, first talked to him over Zoom. David told me Tyree was engaged, and maybe his fiancée would want to participate in the film. So that was the first place I went — “I find you interesting, but I find your fiancée interesting as well.” These movies require so much vulnerability and trust. I have to be honest with everyone from the very beginning about what I’m trying to do.
Also fascinating is Steve, a 60-something divorcé and brand-new donor. He appears romantically inclined toward Rachel, a much younger woman who hopes to become pregnant despite living with cystic fibrosis.
Donating is something he’s doing to fill this void, to feel he can contribute meaningfully to society. His relationship with Rachel starts in this ambiguous place, where the two of them are spending more time together than you would expect with the traditional sperm donor/recipient dynamic. Ultimately, whether or not there’s a romance is irrelevant, because they’re both so aware of their own mortality.
It occurs to me that our culture fixates on certain women’s drive to become parents. Did you set out to capture that urge from the male side?
One thing I noticed early on is that women joined the Facebook group with the desire to get pregnant. And if they achieved that, they would quickly leave. The men stuck around. They fulfilled other people’s desires. But then they returned to their lives, where they are in most cases completely disconnected from their donor children.
I was really interested in that purgatorial space, where they’re doing this to help people, but they’re really doing it for themselves. They’re giving back to give their own lives purpose. And when they’re done, they basically return to a world that feels meaningless. This theme keeps coming up, and I knew it wasn’t necessarily gendered after finding Atasha and Rachel — whom I consider the heart of the movie. These are people solely defining themselves by their attempts to have children — and hoping it will change things for the better.
‘Harvard Thinking’: How far has COVID set back students?
In podcast, an economist, a policy expert, and a teacher explain why learning losses are worse than many parents realize
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
We’re now three academic years beyond the pandemic. A lot of families think things are back to normal. Thomas Kane disagrees.
“A lot of parents misperceive how much students have lost,” said the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research. “That has been one of the biggest things hampering the recovery, parents thinking things are fine now that kids are back in school.”
According to Kane’s research, on average students have lost about a half a grade level in math and a quarter of a grade level in reading. But that’s on average; individually, some schools are doing even better than before the pandemic, while others have lost as much as two grade levels in education.
Heather Hill, a co-director of the teacher education program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, said one thing she noticed was that students forgot how to “student.” Gone were skills in studying, sitting in classrooms, and taking notes.
“When teachers came back they said, ‘Wow, these kids have forgotten how to be students,’ and one of the things we saw pretty immediately was a rise in behavior issues,” Hill said. While a lot of those issues have been addressed, she said, others — like the rising absenteeism rates that are nearly double pre-pandemic levels — have not.
Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.’06, a New York State Master Teacher who teaches math at Colonie Central High School, said educators are facing higher expectations than ever.
“We’re asked to be counselors, social workers, teach math, teach writing, and teach students how to be students,” Conklin said, pointing to rising rates of turnover and burnout. Guests talked about the need to better support teachers and what that might look like beyond pay raises.
In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Kane, Hill, and Conklin about post-pandemic challenges in the classroom and how to fix them.
Transcript
Thomas Kane: A lot of parents misperceive how much students have lost. They see kids are back in school and they’re thinking everything’s back to normal. And honestly, that has been one of the biggest things hampering the recovery: parents thinking things are fine now that kids are back in school.
Samantha Laine Perfas: American schools took a big hit during the pandemic. On average, they lost half a grade level in math and a little less than that in reading. Some schools have come back, but many others have not, and some are in even worse shape. Other problems have also cropped up, like a surprising rise in absenteeism that spans geography and income. So what happens now?
Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life.
Today, I’m joined by:
Kane: Tom Kane. I’m a faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research here at Harvard.
Laine Perfas: He works with school districts and state agencies to help them evaluate programs and policies. Since the pandemic, a lot of his research has focused on gains and losses in education. Then:
Heather Hill: Heather Hill. I am at Harvard GSE. My research focuses on mathematics teaching. I spend a lot of time in classrooms, which is one of my favorite things to do.
Laine Perfas: She also co-directs the teacher education program at GSE, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and helps prepare teachers for the classroom. And finally:
Stephanie Conklin: Stephanie Conklin. I’m a math teacher at Colonie Central High School.
Laine Perfas: She’s also a New York State Master Teacher and a graduate of GSE. She serves on the faculty at the University of Albany.
And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. And in this episode, we’ll explore what’s happening in our schools as they try to regain pandemic learning losses.
It’s not a surprise that education took a big hit during the pandemic, but I think there’s been some surprise regarding its lingering effects. I’d love to start the conversation with where things stand now. Maybe, Tom, you can start by talking a little bit about your research in this area.
Kane: Sam, as you said, it was not surprising that students lost ground during the pandemic. But I think many were surprised by just the magnitudes of the losses, especially in many high-poverty school districts in the U.S. Remember March of 2021, when the American Rescue Plan passed, people were sort of hoping that online learning was, maybe, 80 percent as good as in-person learning. We learned subsequently that many districts lost much more than 20 percent of their typical learning during that school year. Now, as a country, we lost about half of a grade level in math and we made up about a third of that. We lost about a quarter of a grade level in reading and we made up about one quarter of that. So we still have a ways to go, and that is on average. There are many districts that are much farther behind than that, like more than a grade level behind.
Laine Perfas: Yeah. I actually wanted to ask you about how the average somewhat hides the greater gaps that are at play. Because when I was looking at some of your research, I was seeing that some school districts are pretty much back to where they were, if not doing even better than before the pandemic. But other areas are significantly worse than pre-pandemic. What’s happening there and what districts seem to be recovering in a way that we would hope, and which districts are being left behind?
Kane: There was a lot of variation in the magnitude of losses, but two factors did play a role. One was high-poverty schools in every state were more likely to stay closed for longer. For instance, in Florida the average school went back sooner than the average school in Massachusetts. But still, even in Florida, the higher-poverty districts stayed closed for longer. And that was true in most other states. The second reason is that when schools closed the losses were larger for higher-poverty schools. Interestingly, in the places where schools did not close for long — like practically every school was closed in the spring of 2020 — but among those places that came back quickly in the fall of 2020, there wasn’t as much increase in inequality. High-poverty and low-poverty schools lost about the same amount of ground. It was in the places where schools were closed for half of the 2021 year or more, that’s where we really saw big differences in the magnitude of the losses.
Unfortunately, an untold story is that the higher-poverty districts in Massachusetts did the opposite of catching up between ’22 and ’23. They lost more ground. So Lynn, Massachusetts, is now basically two grade levels behind where they themselves were in 2019. Those gaps that existed before the pandemic are bigger now and all of the recovery in Massachusetts has been limited to the higher-income districts like Newton, Wellesley, Lexington. The higher-poverty districts like Lynn, Fall River, fell further behind between ’22 and ’23.
Hill: I think one of the issues about being home for a full year, which is what a lot of kids were in some cases in some of these urban districts, is that they forgot how to “student,” if you think about student as a verb. “Studenting” means paying attention, being engaged with your peers, being engaged with your teacher. When teachers came back they said, “Wow, these kids have forgotten how to be students,” and one of the things we saw pretty immediately was a rise in behavior issues on the part of kids. I would say from what I can tell, and I’d be curious what Stephanie thinks about this, I think those are worked out. But what teachers are also saying at this point is that the student engagement is not back yet.
Conklin: As Heather mentioned, when students came back to the classroom, besides just learning how to student, we also noticed that a lot of students’ skills in learning had really suffered. So for example, just students’ ability to retain facts and retain information, that is a real skill that we teach in schools. And then the other piece, too, to learning how to be a student, is being organized. Keeping track of eight classes for many of our students is a real struggle at the middle- and high-school level. And then not having had to do that for a year really made it even harder for students to access the curriculum. So many of us in education had to take a step back, not only reteach academic skills, we also have to teach, OK, how do you take notes in a math classroom? How do you use a calculator if you haven’t used it for a year?
Laine Perfas: It sounds like a big challenge has just been transitioning kids back to school. But another challenge that we’re seeing is actually getting kids back in the classroom in the first place. Can you talk about that and how absenteeism rates are really high right now?
Kane: Basically, chronic absenteeism rates have almost doubled from before the pandemic. By the way, when you yourself miss class, you miss more than a day. Obviously you miss that day you were gone, but the first day you’re back you’re maybe picking up 75 percent of what the teacher is saying. The second day you’re back you’re maybe picking up 80 percent of what the teacher is saying. But when you’re a teacher where 5 percent of kids are missing one day, but it’s a different 5 percent the next day, it’s a different 5 percent the next day. And then you’re trying to juggle and keep everybody going. It really becomes disruptive.
Laine Perfas: Are people still getting sick or is it just not seeing the value of attending school? What exactly is causing that huge increase in absenteeism?
Kane: I don’t think anybody really knows yet. At least part of it is likely due to the fact that I think parents are more aware of communicable diseases, whereas we might have sent our kid to school when they were coughing, now we might hesitate. But I think that is a small share of it. It’s more likely to be things like families have gotten out of their routines, kids, they’re more accustomed to being at home during a weekday of school.
Hill: I think parents are home more often as well at work from home, which takes the burden off of sending your kids to school because you’re like, “It’s not a big deal for you to be home.”
Conklin: For my students I take a picture of all my notes. I post my assignments online. Many of us educators got into a routine of making everything accessible for students, whether they’re in or out of the classroom. Now the positives to that are tremendous. I have students who will follow my notes on their iPad while taking notes with me in class, I have students if they’re absent a day here or there, they can catch up. However, I think that what that’s done is, if we have students who maybe are like, “Well, I’m not feeling great, I’m going to just stay home because Dr. Conklin always puts her notes online and I can catch up tomorrow.” I think families also have the same issue, but I did want to take Tom’s comment like a little bit farther about when a kid misses one day. In the educator perspective, we are not only trying to catch kids up for that day, teach them the content, but also from past things. Three years ago, they missed that content. So what I’m finding is it’s almost like whack-a-mole teaching. “OK, these five kids were out on Thursday. I need to catch them up on today’s lesson, but they still don’t know how to do these four topics.” But then I also have kids who I want to extend the lesson because they already know it. So we’re finding that teachers are not only scaffolding, differentiating lessons, it’s almost like too much for one human being to do, to have two to three different classrooms running in one classroom setting.
Hill: One of the things I think about teaching, which was already pre-pandemic a really difficult job for a lot of reasons, it’s become 20 percent harder. And that may not sound like, “Oh, it’s insurmountable.” But 20 percent harder day in, day out becomes really unsustainable. And I think one of the things that we’ve been seeing is increased teacher absence rates as well, which, paired with teacher shortages and sub shortages, puts schools in this really difficult position. So many of the schools that I’m in, it just feels very tenuous to be there because it erodes the social contract a little bit between students and teachers when you get that level of everybody’s absent and relationships can suffer.
Kane: So for all these reasons, it’s remarkable that between 2022 and 2023 kids did make up some of the ground. Students gained about .17 grade level in math, so that means that students learned roughly about 117 percent of what they would typically learn in math, which is remarkable. But a lot of that was paid for with federal dollars. People had extra resources to hire teachers’ aides or to hire tutors or expand summer school, and that federal money is expiring at the end of September.
Laine Perfas: I wanted to ask a little bit more about the relief dollars, because it seems like they helped. One, did they help, and was that a consistent benefit across the country? And then also, why is it ending in September if there’s clearly still pretty huge gaps that need to be bridged?
Kane: Remember, the American Rescue Plan, which provided this pot of federal money to school districts around the country, was passed in March of 2021; many schools were still closed. So that was before anybody knew how big the losses were going to be. And 90 percent of the money was sent directly to school districts. So basically 13,000 different school districts around the country were making up their own recovery plan. Some came up with better plans than others.
Unfortunately, the federal guidance on this was downright misleading because the federal law only required them to spend 20 percent on academic recovery. But a lot of districts like Lynn or Fall River that lost more than a grade level, there was no way they were going to be able to recover spending 20 percent of those federal dollars on academic recovery. There was simply no way. Imagine if at the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government said, “We’re not even going to try to come up with a vaccine. We’re going to send all the money out to local public health authorities and say, ‘You come up with your own solution.’” And that’s exactly what we did in education, is we put out $190 billion, 90 percent of it, directly to school districts. And then had them all figure out their own plans and some have made progress and some haven’t.
Conklin: I know, on the ground in my district, we’re spending a lot of money focusing on more teachers in classrooms. I teach an at-risk population. I’m math certified, but also special-ed certified, and I have a co-teacher. So there are two adults in my classroom at all times to support our special-ed students, all of our learners who are struggling, and so, at least in my district, I think we’ve been able to spend the money wisely, and we’ve been able to justify keeping those positions by changing how we’re funding other things. Now, when we talk about Lynn and other school districts in Massachusetts, they were probably underfunded to begin with. And so now they’re having to go back and figure out where can we put this money if it’s toward staffing, it’s toward students’ needs, in our high-poverty schools. How are we then going to justify keeping extra staff, which we know works? I’m in New York and high schools that I’m in touch with, our special-ed students who are consistently attending school because they have supports, they’re being really successful and they are catching up.
Kane: This is one place where I feel like both the federal government and states really dropped the ball during the pandemic. We had an opportunity to learn more about the efficacy of different strategies. The problem was we blew the opportunity to learn which of those strategies were most effective. So like in Stephanie’s school district, choosing to have a couple of teachers in a given classroom, that’s one strategy. Other districts did things like, they said, “We’re going to hire math coaches,” and other places said, “Oh, we’re going to really try to expand summer learning,” or, “We’re going to hire tutors.” And even if each of those has some positive effect, I don’t think we have a good sense now, a better sense than we did before the pandemic, of what is the bang for the buck for these different strategies. School districts weren’t tracking which kids got what, so we didn’t learn nearly as much as we could have and should have learned over the last two or three years.
Laine Perfas: Stephanie, you mentioned that, at least in your school district, just staffing up was a really wise investment of resources. How do you do that when there’s so much teacher turnover and burnout right now? Heather, I think you actually mentioned that earlier in the conversation, that teachers are exhausted. It’s a really hard job. It was hard before, and now it’s even harder. I just want to create some space to talk about that a little bit because teachers are such a vital part of the solution and yet they’re struggling as well.
Conklin: It’s a great question. I have so many thoughts. I guess I would say I am on staff at University of Albany, teaching folks how to become teachers. I know in the past three years, pre-COVID, we had about 50 students in our teacher-ed program. And now I think I have 24 this semester. So we’re certainly seeing a huge hit.
I think what teachers are being asked to do is tremendously different than what I was asked to do during my teacher training 15 years ago. We’re asked to be counselors, social workers, teach math, teach writing, and teach students how to be students. I know that our program at University of Albany, we’re always seeking to change it, amend it, but a lot of the state requirements for teachers are not aligned. Two six-week student teaching opportunities I don’t feel is enough — that’s the state requirements right now — in order to really prepare someone for a lifelong career in education. We really should be looking at programs where student teachers are placed for an entire school year in a district and or in a placement and working with a mentor teacher on how to deal with this. OK, when you have a student in crisis, how do you deal with it? How do you deal with it the day after spring break when no student wants to do any work? Which can be very stressful when you have 30 kids in front of you and everyone still wants to be on spring break, yourself included. All these nuances of teaching really need to be taught and modeled for new teachers. I think the current system and the current programs that we’re offering may not necessarily yield themselves to creating teachers who have that resiliency, that ability to sort of push through this much more challenging time.
Hill: OK, so number one, just pay teachers more. If the job is 20 percent harder in any other profession, we’d be like, and you pay people more. Instead, what we see is many states saying, “Oh, we can’t find teachers at the wage that we’re willing to pay. Let’s let people into classrooms who have no training.” There is some weird way in which the public governance of teaching as a profession has stood in the way of actually paying teachers the money that is needed to do the job that they have.
The next thing would be to take a look at teachers’ overall working conditions. There is an enormous amount of stuff that we’re asking teachers to do on top of just teaching students. Looking at that level of workload and paring back what is not necessary would be step two for me, which is to say, how can we get teachers more time to prepare for and to teach students? End of story. Number three is schools need to be better places for teachers to work. Teachers leave schools that are not well-managed, and not all schools are well-managed right now for various reasons. Helping schools get over shortage of subs, helping principals establish common disciplinary policies across the school, establish common routines in classrooms, so as kids are moving around they’re very familiar with this is how we do things at the school; that can make a big difference to getting teachers to stay in the profession.
Laine Perfas: Why do we put all that pressure on teachers? There are so many needs that students have. I’m wondering if there’s space for other people who are not teachers to be part of this solution as well. And what that could look like, engaging an entire community on a broader level to help with some of these challenges.
Kane: We had an event here where the governor of Rhode Island was talking about what they’re doing; you know, very few mayors can teach Algebra I. But mayors can help with the attendance issue, with public information campaigns, with maybe lowering bus fares or handing out transportation cards to students or providing more transportation options. That is one area where public organizations outside of schools could really help.
But the other area is, so here in Boston, there’s an organization called Boston After School and Beyond that helps organize summer learning opportunities. Rather than having the school try to plan both the enrichment activities for summer learning and the academic content, what Boston is doing is saying, “OK, so we got a bunch of organizations here in the city that run enrichment opportunities during the summer: summer camps or museums or other organizations. And why don’t we have them organize the enrichment, but then have the Boston Public Schools provide teachers to teach on site?” So it’s splitting up that task and saying, “Hey, look, we don’t have to solve all of this. Why don’t we let the nonprofits who were already doing a great job recruiting kids and getting kids to show up for summer and just inserting some summer learning into that.”
Conklin: We are finding that summertime, where we have the 10 weeks of students not doing anything, does need to be filled. And the idea that someone else could take that on besides a school? Those opportunities really would benefit students. One of the things I wanted to agree with you wholeheartedly on is giving teachers more time. Tom mentioned algebra. I’ve been teaching algebra for 17 years. I have been rewriting everything the past three years. The time with my colleagues, the time to prepare for my students that are in front of me, is critical. And I know a lot of things we’re talking about relate to funding, but that is one very tangible thing: teachers having more time. And going along with that, I think one of my biggest stressors is dealing with families who have a really challenging time understanding why their students are behind, why their students aren’t being successful. And having support from administrators, which I do have at my school, who are willing to say, “Hey, we need to support your child. Here’s what we’re going to do.” And it’s not just on the teacher.
Hill: The solutions that you’re suggesting are the right set of solutions. I don’t know how to do a hard reset on teachers’ working conditions. The way that the bureaucracy has grown in American education is that teachers need this, and teachers need that. But that takes teachers’ time, and it takes time away from preparing to teach students, and from, in many cases, actually teaching students. One of the things that is the most robust in this literature on the production function for kids — meaning like what produces student achievement — is literally, like, time on task: Are kids in classrooms? This comes back to the absence issue. Are kids there? Are teachers there providing instruction?
Kane: One of the barriers is that a lot of parents misperceive how much students have lost. They see kids are back in school and they’re thinking, everything’s back to normal. If parents are misperceiving the amount of loss, it’s going to be hard for school districts to ask for the bigger things like major increases in funding for teachers or big increases in summer learning and honestly, that has been one of the biggest things, I think, hampering the recovery, is parents thinking things are fine now that kids are back in school.
Laine Perfas: How might parents get a better understanding of how bad things are in some of the school districts?
Kane: I wish more schools would just tell parents, before school’s out, when their child is below grade level in math or reading or any other subject so the parents actually have time to sign up for summer learning. Instead, there’s been a lack of honesty with parents on just where kids are. And part of that is on schools. I can understand, if you’re already overwhelmed, like, who wants to get parents riled up? But I do think that lack of parent awareness of the magnitude of the losses is meaning that parents are pushing back on things like extending the school year or signing their kid up for summer learning.
Conklin: I would agree with Tom. I think, too, in the past two to three years, many students have been given a literal pass in courses because of COVID. You know, during the 2020, 2021 years, many students were passed on, whether through social promotion or because of policies related to COVID. So I think families have become accustomed to, well, they’re struggling, but they’ll get through. But now that we’re three years post-pandemic, three academic years, many of those supports to pass students are going away so students are going to be expected to pass exams that do have graduation requirements.
Hill: Can I ask Stephanie, what you were saying about students feeling like they can get by past their classes without having to really put in full effort is really interesting because I feel like from what I have seen anecdotally it’s certainly the case. One of the things I like to recommend is homework, but I know that is a fraught issue, so I’m curious how you’re thinking about this and whether that is part of a solution.
Conklin: I think the issue is, is that if kids don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what they’re doing at home. So I know that, for many of the teachers, what we talk about is having an assignment that is reasonable to do at home and that is started in class. So I always, the last five minutes of class, “OK, let’s get a jump start. Let’s read the directions together. Let’s do a couple problems.” For my middle and high school kids, you know, we’re really suggesting no more than 10 to 15 minutes of homework. And that’s actually probably all the practice they need to get that specific skill down.
Laine Perfas: We’ve been talking a little bit about solutions that could happen at the local or community level, but what policies need to change to create a healthier education ecosystem long term?
Kane: Sam, that is a great question. I wish it was a much more lively debate right now going on in states, because as I said, the federal money is about to run out. For the last three years, we’ve just been watching districts spend down the federal money without thinking about, “OK, so what’s going to happen when the federal money runs out?” Here are a few just very concrete things that states could be doing. You know, number one, they could be providing extra resources for students who are behind, so targeted benefits either to kids or to districts. A second thing, and this is something that Texas has been doing, they said, “OK, we, the state, will pay half the cost for additional days of learning time that you provide.” A number of districts have extended the school year beyond 180 days in Texas, as a result of this. And a third area, states could set aside some money for funding pilot programs for lowering absenteeism rates and then evaluating those. So a state could say, here’s a pot of money if a district out there has an idea or a pilot program they would like to launch to try to help lower absenteeism rates. If the state were to fund those and then fund evaluations of them, we could be learning much faster than we are about how we’re going to lower the absenteeism problem.
Hill: One of the things that I was thinking, this was a few years ago, back at the beginning of the pandemic, is just to say, everything is on the table. There’s a lot that I think we can do to increase academic learning time without changing structures within the schools to that much of an extent. There’s actually already programs that address student absentee rates. What they look like is they look very relational. So it’s working with the parents, having somebody from the school, sometimes a guidance counselor, somebody whose job is it to go and try to coordinate and reduce chronic absenteeism on the part of students. They can be very successful when they are able to form relationships with parents and really engage parents in solving the problem.
Conklin: To recruit the best teachers we need to offer a higher pay, and I think that people would be willing to work more for a higher pay. I have a doctorate in education and I can’t tell you how many of my students say, “Why are you a teacher if you have a Ph.D.? You went to Harvard and you have a Ph.D. and you’re teaching here?” I think we need to change that perspective. We need to pay teachers well, we need to treat teachers well. So if we talk about policy, every school for every certain number of kids having a social worker, having a counselor so that those SEL (social emotional learning) needs, which we know have been huge concern for teachers, students, families, are met. I think those are some of the issues that really would attract more teachers.
Kane: We’ve been talking mostly about academic recovery and what it’s going to take. I think we need to take a step back and realize what drove this. The learning loss to some extent is a result of public health measures, that were taken on behalf of all of us. I know there are people who disagree with those public health decisions that were made, but they were on our behalf by duly elected or appointed officials. Basically, what we’re doing now is deciding who’s going to pay for that. Right now, in a lot of communities, we’ve said, OK, kids are going to pay for that. That we’re not going to do what’s necessary to help students catch up. Framed that way, I think most people would say, “Gosh, of course, we need to continue the recovery beyond September. We’ve got to figure out some way to make sure these losses are made up because these were losses that were caused by public health measures intended to benefit all of us. It’s on us to make sure kids are made whole.” That’s what this is all about.
Laine Perfas: Thank you for joining me and for talking about this really important issue.
Hill: Thanks, Sam, for having me.
Conklin: Thank you for having me.
Kane: Thanks, Sam.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to see all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, and Simona Covel. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University.
What do anti-Jewish hate, anti-Muslim hate have in common?
Researchers scrutinize various facets of these types of bias, and note sometimes they both reside within the same person.
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Anti-Jewish hate is often connected to anti-Muslim hate, said political scientist Nazita Lajevardi, and she has the data to prove it.
“Our research … finds that there is a group of people who not only agree that Muslims contribute to all problems in American society, but who also agree that Jews contribute to all problems in American society,” she said.
Lajevardi, an associate professor at Michigan State University and author of “Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia” (2020), drew from her 2023 paper concerning the shifting patterns of hate speech and hate crimes following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where antisemitic rhetoric was prominently featured.
She and her co-authors analyzed information on hate incidents reported by the FBI, Anti-Defamation League, and Council on American-Islamic Relations. They also drew data from the mainstream social media site Reddit as well as more fringe platforms 4Chan and Gab.
Slurs against Muslims and Arabs decreased both on- and offline starting about one month before the rally, Lajevardi said. “What becomes incredibly important to know is that slurs against Jews increased right after the Unite the Right rally. In fact, slurs against Jews increased to 225 percent of their prior levels on Gab.”
Perhaps most revelatory were the researchers’ one-by-one scrapes of user feeds on the same platform. “What we found here is that people stopped mentioning Muslims and replaced those slurs with mentions toward Jews,” Lajevardi said. “We found a target substitution effect at the individual level.”
Kassra A.R. Oskooii, an associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, spoke to the particularities of Islamophobia.
“Our research … finds that attitudes toward Muslims are distinct insofar as they’re closely associated with tropes of terrorism, violence, and existential threat on the one hand — and perceived cultural incompatibility with the American way of life on the other,” he said.
As a result, social scientists have failed to predict political outcomes that curb civil liberties and religious freedoms specifically for Muslim Americans, Oskooii argued.
“We have looked into measures such as passing laws that restrict the number of mosques and Islamic centers, which gained a lot of traction after mobilization against the construction of Park51 Islamic center in lower Manhattan,” Oskooii said. Also cited were restrictions on immigration from Muslim-majority countries under former President Donald Trump and increased surveillance following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Speaking directly about antisemitism was Jeffrey Kopstein, a political science professor and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. After a long academic career spent studying past discrimination, he was surprised by the reaction to his move from the University of Toronto to UCI in the mid 2010s.
“People said, ‘You’re crazy. Why are you going? It’s an antisemitic campus,’” he recalled.
That inspired research into contemporary attitudes toward Jews at the school, with Kopstein measuring the prevalence of various antisemitic stereotypes. At the behest of the Anti-Defamation League, the investigation later expanded to include three more UC campuses, with Kopstein collecting data both before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
The results have yet to be published, but Kopstein previewed key findings. For example, before Oct. 7 about 25 percent of respondents agreed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than the U.S. Thirty-five percent agreed after the attacks.
“The thing about these results is, they’re not out of line with the rest of society,” offered Kopstein, pointing to broader data from the ADL.
Also measured was whether seniors harbored stronger anti-Jewish sentiments than first-years, with Kopstein finding “no change” between the two groups, rebutting conservative claims that colleges and universities push radical ideas that result in discrimination.
“The U.S. doesn’t have a campus problem,” he concluded. “It has an antisemitism problem.”
Sabine von Mering, Brandeis University professor of German and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, used her time to call for greater scrutiny of social media sites. Her 2022 book “Antisemitism on Social Media,” co-edited with the University of Haifa’s Monika Hübscher, is filled with case studies of antisemitic incidents on Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, highlighting the role of algorithm-driven technology in propagating prejudice.
“One thing I always want to emphasize is that this is happening for profit. The platforms being used in all of these cases are profiting handsomely from the spread of hate,” said von Mering, who also directs Brandeis’ Center for German and European Studies.
A German translation of her book is currently being reworked to incorporate Hamas’ use of social media on Oct. 7, she shared. “These images and videos were seen by millions around the world in real time,” von Mering said. “And again, social media companies were profiting in real time as well as advertisements were being sold.”
Scholars recognized for sharing with students ‘particular joy of academic inquiry’
Five faculty members have been named Harvard College Professors for their commitment to undergraduate teaching. The scholars work in fields ranging from philosophy to regenerative biology. They are:
Matthew Liebmann, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology
Yue M. Lu, Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Applied Mathematics
Selim Berker, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity
Jie Li, professor of East Asian languages and civilizations
Ya-Chieh Hsu, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology
“I am delighted to recognize these five colleagues for their contributions to undergraduate teaching, their work in graduate education and research, and their mentorship and support of students,” said Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “With creativity, passion, and an engaging approach, they each invite our students to join a world of knowledge and to discover the particular joy of academic inquiry. I am enormously grateful to these colleagues for their extraordinary commitment to our students and our teaching mission.”
The Harvard College Professorship was launched in 1997 with a gift from John and Frances Loeb. Professors hold the title for five years and receive support for a research fund, summer salary, or semester of paid leave.
Matthew Liebmann
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students in Liebmann’s courses regularly engage in hands-on learning, including field trips to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut. “When we get into really deep discussions about happiness, love, warfare, and violence, and hear everybody’s different perspectives — those are just great conversations to be a part of,” he said of “Deep History,” the gen-ed class he teaches with Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History Daniel Smail. “That’s where I feel like I’m getting more out of it than the students.”
Liebmann, chair of the Anthropology Department, added: “Anthropology is the study of human diversity, and an appreciation for human diversity includes the variety of ways that people lived in the past as well as the variety of ways people are living today around the world. The appreciation of that diversity makes the world safe for difference and that’s something that anthropology can really offer.”
Liebmann’s current projects include a long-term research collaboration with the Pueblo of Jemez tribe in New Mexico. His work is “in service” to the needs of the tribe and attempts to fill in the gaps of the historical record using archaeology.
“We always strive for it to be as collaborative as possible and that means working with the tribe from the earliest stages to identify appropriate research questions, identify appropriate methodologies to answer those questions, and talk about what interpretations of the data we might have after they help me gather data in the field,” he said.
Yue M. Lu
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Lu favors a dynamic approach to teaching. “I constantly remind my students that mathematics is not a spectator sport,” he said. “True understanding requires active engagement, and tackling mathematical problems can also be incredibly enjoyable.”
Lu studies randomness and patterns in high-dimensional systems in fields such as signal processing, information theory, and machine learning. He uses mathematical tools to understand the collective behavior of large systems that involve many interactive and random components, he said.
“My favorite part of lecturing is encouraging students to ask questions and challenge my solutions,” the SEAS professor said. “By going through my students’ unique perspectives, I often discover innovative solutions that I hadn’t previously considered.”
Lu cherishes the connections he maintains with many students even after they leave his classroom.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of my career is encountering alumni who share memorable experiences from their time in my courses,” he said. “While it’s not essential for them to still remember every specific formula, I’m deeply gratified when they tell me that my introduction to probability course has deepened their appreciation and understanding of the nature of uncertainty.”
Selim Berker
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
During his 100-level lectures, Berker makes sure to leave time for dialogue with the class.
“I’m learning from my students while I’m teaching them material and getting feedback on the things that I myself am grappling with,” he said.
A philosopher who focuses on ethics and epistemology, Berker welcomes the chance to sharpen big questions to their most powerful forms in conversations with undergrads.
“We get into this back and forth about what’s happening, and that’s the part of teaching that I just love the most,” he said. “Part of it involves trying to work hard to hear what people are asking and figuring out the best versions of what they’re asking. Then other students can refer back to that student’s points and think about it themselves and work through that back and forth.”
Jie Li
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Li approaches her work in an interdisciplinary manner and finds herself “very at home” in East Asian Studies.
One of her most popular classes, “East Asian Cinema,” has grown significantly since she joined Harvard’s faculty in 2013. Topping out at around 170 students, the class gives students a survey of East Asian cinema while also teaching them filmmaking. Students use their phones to illustrate different cinematography techniques or the styles of East Asian directors.
At the end of the semester, Li and her team of teaching fellows present students with their own “Golden Monkey Awards,” modeled after the Oscars. She was quick to praise her teaching fellows for making the classes possible.
“It’s wonderful to see the amount of talent at this University,” Li said. “Because students are coming from all kinds of backgrounds and it’s a gen-ed program, a lot of them are musicians, actors, and script writers. They pull their talents in this class and admire each other’s talents. I really like combining both this analytical and creative dimension.”
A double Harvard alumna, Li earned her A.B. in East Asian Studies in 2001 and her Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature and film studies in 2010. Her most recent book is titled “Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China.”
Ya-Chieh Hsu
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Hsu’s lab investigates how tissue formation, regeneration, and repair are shaped by interactions among diverse cell types, physiological changes, and environmental changes.
Outside the lab, Hsu teaches undergraduates and graduate students. Her favorite course is “From Cells to Tissues.”
“This is a course I developed that teaches students key principles of how cells, tissues, organs, and organisms are built, as well as the diseases that occur when these principles go awry,” she said. “It is a highly interactive course that not only teaches students principles and knowledge, but also empowers them to think critically and to learn from one another through discussions.”
As part of the coursework, students come up with a pitch for a documentary about a scientist’s personal story and major discoveries. “My goal is for students to appreciate that behind every scientific discovery is the hard work, creativity, curiosity, and perseverance of real people. People are the real magic behind science,” she said.
Previously a recipient of the Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence and sensitivity in undergraduate teaching in the FAS, Hsu emphasized the importance of highlighting and celebrating different paths to success.
“When I first came to Harvard, I somehow felt a bit like a misfit,” she said. “There seemed to be an implicit notion of what success looked like around here. Over the years, however, I’ve come to realize that being different is a real asset. It’s important to cultivate an awareness that there are many versions of what success looks like in our classroom, on our campus, and in our scientific community, and all forms of success should be celebrated.”
Sener, who worked for Pfizer in Turkey, and Rheaume, a neurosurgery resident in Canada, enrolled in the same “hybrid” epidemiology program, mixing two intensive, three-week stays on campus with four semesters online, ideal for working professionals and foreign students. Each hoped the program would help them take the next steps in their careers.
Neither came to Boston expecting to find a life partner, however.
Heather Baer, faculty director of the MPH in Epidemiology program, said the program is designed to bond classmates rapidly during campus stays. Its intensive nature keeps the 50- to 60-person cohort together both inside and outside of class, allowing them to bond over academic material, program-sponsored social events, shared housing at nearby Massachusetts College of Art, and during down time, when they’re free to tour the city, walk on Boston Common, kayak on the Charles, and engage in other activities.
It might be an understatement to say that for Sener and Rheaume it worked better than it perhaps ever has.
“The three weeks they’re on campus are very intense. It’s typical for the students to become really good friends during that time,” said Baer, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School and of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “One of the main points of that three weeks is for students to bond so that when they go off for the next year — much of which is online — they’re interacting with people they already know really well. But I don’t think we’ve ever had any other couples get engaged.”
Sener and Rheaume say the first day of class included a touch of love at first sight despite their different backgrounds. She’s from Turkey, where he “melted” in the 104-degree heat during a recent visit, and he’s from Canada, where she was greeted with minus 4-degree Fahrenheit temperatures during a visit for Christmas and New Year’s 2022.
The frosty capper on that visit was an invite by his family to a celebratory polar plunge in Lake Ontario’s 39-degree water. The air temperature by then had warmed to a balmy 28.
“It’s difficult because you cannot breathe, you cannot control your body,” Sener said of the experience. “And I didn’t have health insurance in Canada.”
“We found we have this shared mission together, as well as a personal connection and similar values.”
Alan Rheaume
Seray Sener and Alan Rheaume in Kapadokya Turkey.
Sener said that the two getting engaged was a bit of a surprise, especially since her mother warned her that North American men might break her heart. Sener was initially looking for a native English speaker to pair up with for homework — English is her second language — and was determined whoever that was would remain forever “in the friend zone.”
Those homework sessions, however, turned into trips to the gym together, and then dates around Boston. Though the pair faced both geographic and cultural gulfs, they found that they nonetheless had a lot in common: ambition and a drive to succeed academically and professionally paired with a deep appreciation of social and family connections.
In fact, their decisions to earn advanced degrees have already reaped gains, even ahead of graduation this spring. Sener said the program has already fostered her promotion to a new position with the multinational company, where she is now global director of oncology.
Rheaume said his studies have given him the quantitative tools for what he anticipates will be a career combining roles as a neurosurgeon and an academic researcher. He’s been accepted into a cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery fellowship at Stony Brook University Hospital on New York’s Long Island.
“The work that we want to do is not just something to make money, but a vocation where you can contribute and give back to your community,” Rheaume said. “We found we have this shared mission together, as well as a personal connection and similar values.”
That isn’t to say that things have been entirely smooth over the last two years. Though they were on campus together for six weeks and managed weekslong visits to each others’ home cities, there were months of dealing with the complications of a long-distance relationship and the nine-hour time difference between Edmonton and Istanbul.
She once called from the beach, for example, while he was in emergency surgery. He called back when the surgery ended, but she was then in a meeting with Pfizer executives.
Still, both did what they had to in order for it to work. Rheaume said his medical training made him a champ at getting up at odd hours for a phone call, and he blithely handled oddities like red wine for a remote dinner date, despite it being breakfast time in Edmonton.
“There were times when, because of the time difference, I’d be downing red wine at 9 a.m. on a Saturday because that time worked for her on a Saturday night,” Rheaume said.
All this occurred against the backdrop of the pair’s busy professional lives and a significant course load. The remote portion of the program was designed to be mostly asynchronous, with students able to view course modules on their own time, but it also included weekly live classroom sessions, discussion groups, and homework, some of which had to be done in collaboration with classmates.
“They’re clearly both bright and there’s no question about them being smart, motivated, capable people,” Baer said. “On a personal level, they are both very charming as well.”
The pair put those capabilities to work, both in the classroom and out.
Outside of class, Rheaume managed to teach himself Turkish using a cellphone app. He and Sener eventually solved the logistical puzzle of their long-distance relationship when Sener moved to Edmonton, and they plan to move to New York together in the coming months.
Now, though, their looming graduation has brought both their Harvard and personal journeys full circle. Just weeks after they receive their hard-won degrees — Commencement will be the first time their families will meet — they’ll get married in Turkey and have invited their entire cohort and several program faculty and staff members to attend.
“We want them to be with us because they saw us from day one and supported us,” Sener said. “They’re really close friends.”
Excited about new diet drug? This procedure seems better choice.
Study finds minimally invasive treatment more cost-effective over time, brings greater weight loss
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Interest in the latest generation of weight-loss drugs shows no sign of flagging, but a new study shows that a minimally invasive endoscopic bariatric procedure is actually more cost-effective and helps shed more pounds.
Researchers say it has been overshadowed as a treatment option due to the popularity of the new medications and deserves more widespread consideration.
The work, published in April in the journal JAMA Network Open, compared the effectiveness and price of semaglutide, the effective compound in the popular weight-loss drug Wegovy and anti-diabetes medication Ozempic, versus endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty over five years.
“GLP-1s changed the landscape,” Muhammad Haseeb, the study’s lead author, said of the new anti-obesity medications. “It is effective, no question about it. But at more than quadruple the price of previous drugs, it comes at a very high cost.”
The study also found that the procedure resulted in greater weight loss, with those getting the endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty losing, on average, 18 percent of body weight and having a BMI after five years of 31.7, compared to a starting BMI of 37. Patients taking semaglutide lost an average of 15 percent to 16 percent of body weight and had an average ending BMI of 33.0.
The procedure, endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty (ESG), is considered nonsurgical — meaning physicians make no incisions. It’s an option that reduces the volume of the stomach by inserting a flexible tube called an endoscope down the throat, and then suturing the stomach from the inside.
The treatment, done on an outpatient basis, takes just about an hour. It mirrors the effect of more invasive bariatric surgeries to reduce stomach volume that have been employed over the past few decades, but presents far fewer of the risks common to more invasive procedures.
“I wouldn’t characterize [the new medications’] usage as overextended, as many payers have already implemented restrictions on access. Rather, their current pricing structure is disproportionate to their value,” said Jagpreet Chhatwal, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and an author of the study. “There are other, more effective weight-loss options like ESG, which are minimally invasive and should be considered along with medications. These have been overshadowed by the excitement about the recent GLP-1 weight-loss medications.”
In addition, researchers point out that gastroplasty is reversible but can be a permanent fix. That contrasts with medications that have to be taken even after initial weight loss has plateaued in order to maintain lower weight. Because of that, Haseeb said, the savings of gastroplasty over the anti-obesity medications continue to mount in the months and years afterward.
“If you think about it, this is actually astonishing,” said Haseeb, who began the work while studying for a master’s degree in clinical investigation at HMS in 2022 and is currently doing a fellowship at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “Just imagine if the model was running for the next five years and costs would continue to occur on the medication side of things. The purpose of the study is to give the whole picture, over the longer term.”
The research comes amid enormous public enthusiasm for the new generation of weight-reduction medications, which recently expanded with the FDA’s November approval of tirzepitide, a drug that works in a similar fashion to semaglutide. The landscape for anti-obesity medications is expected to continue to shift as pharmaceutical companies race to develop new and more effective formulations.
Among experts, however, enthusiasm for the new medications is tempered by concerns about their cost, about $13,618 per year. A 2020 national study estimated that about 42 percent of American adults could be classified as obese, resulting $173 billion per year in medical costs.
Public health experts are concerned that, should most — or even many — turn to those weight-loss medications, the nation’s healthcare bill would skyrocket, increasing insurance and out-of-pocket costs and potentially leaving funding scarce for other medical and public health priorities.
Haseeb cited a 2023 study that estimated if only about 10 percent of Medicare patients with obesity who are eligible for medication treatment get semaglutide, the total spending could be $26.8 billion. But if every Medicare patient struggling with obesity received the drug, the cost would be greater than the current Medicare budget.
To conduct the study, Haseeb created a computer model that brought the results of separate clinical trials of semaglutide injection and endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty together in a single model.
The study showed that after the first year, semaglutide was the most cost-effective treatment, but each year after that, gastroplasty made gains as drug costs continued. An analysis showed semaglutide prices would have to drop from $13,618 to $3,591 per year to be as cost-effective after five years.
“There’s a pressing need for a substantial reduction in the cost of semaglutide, ideally by threefold, bringing it below $3,590 after factoring in rebates and discounts,” Chhatwal said.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health. Several of the researchers reported professional affiliations with companies engaged in endoscopic product development, but outside the submitted work.
How friends helped fuel the rise of a relentless enemy
The Faces of Fentanyl Memorial at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Arlington, Virginia, displays thousands of photos of people who died from the drug.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
8 min read
Economists imagine an alternate universe where the opioid crisis peaked in ’06, and then explain why it didn’t
The U.S. opioid epidemic is a story of failed policy initiatives, missed opportunities, and more than 600,000 deaths. It’s also a story with no end in sight, and for that, two economists say, we can blame relationships.
The central problem owes to the nature of the market, according to David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, and former Harvard doctoral student J. Travis Donahoe, co-authors of new research focused on the persistence of the crisis. In a situation with ample buyers and sellers — what economists call a “thick market” — spillovers in demand for opioids stem from the social nature of drug use, in which users encourage friends, acquaintances, and others to join them.
Information on opioids spreads easily via social networks
Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff
Ample supply means acquiring opioids, sometimes from family, friends, is easy compared with other illicit drugs
Users encourage others to use
Epidemic expands, with more opioid users and rising deaths
These demand-boosting spillover effects are common when the pleasure derived from a good is enhanced by shared moments, such as drinks at the bar or a group outing to a sporting event, said Cutler. The effects are particularly strong when the good is also highly addictive, he added.
Like many others, Cutler has been horrified by the explosion of opioid abuse in the U.S., which in the 30 years covered by the study, 1990 to 2020, claimed more than a half million lives. At the same time, he’s been puzzled by the epidemic’s decades-long staying power, which far exceeds that of similar crises in U.S. history, including the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
Trends in drug and opioid overdose deaths per 100,000, 1990 to 2020
Cutler and Donahoe, now an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, note in the study that communication via social networks becomes especially important in an illegal market, where advertising is unavailable and open sale is prohibited. In addition, they say, the presence of a robust market with many users can lower the nonmonetary costs of obtaining drugs, like risks from law enforcement or of violence from drug dealers, because the likelihood of doing business with friends, family members, and acquaintances rises.
According to the analysts’ economic models, “spillovers” were responsible for between 84 percent and 92 percent of opioid fatalities from 1990 to 2020, and were the chief reason for the steady climb in deaths. Without that spillover effect, they wrote, the opioid epidemic would have peaked in 2006. In contrast, rising demand due to spillovers can be high enough in some scenarios that, absent effective intervention, deaths rise indefinitely.
Before zeroing in on spillover effects, Cutler and Donahoe examined other potential explanations for the persistence of opioid demand in the U.S., including “deaths of despair” factors such as physical and/or mental distress in the population. They found a modest impact at most. From 1999 to 2018, the prevalence of physical pain in the population increased 20 percent, while opioid deaths increased 400 percent.
A hypothetical opioid epidemic with and without spillovers
Similarly, the authors examined whether changes in supply might be sustaining the epidemic, which has been fueled at different moments by prescription opioids, illegal heroin, and, most recently, the synthetic opioid fentanyl. While supply has shifted significantly, Cutler and Donahoe point out that neither heroin nor fentanyl are new. Heroin has been around for more than a century and fentanyl for decades. It is the widespread use of these substances, not their availability, that has changed.
In addition, when the pair examined prices for illegal drugs, they found no evidence of a game-changer. Heroin prices remained relatively static even after the crackdown on prescription drugs, when more people sought out heroin. Similarly, fentanyl’s displacement of heroin represented a major change to the opioid supply. But, while fentanyl is much cheaper to produce, the price on the street isn’t that different from the price of heroin. This means that fentanyl makers are pocketing the difference rather than passing along savings to customers in a way that might boost demand, Cutler said.
The spillover effects at the heart of the epidemic are outgrowths of what economists call a “thick market”— in this case, one that developed early. Opioids have long been recognized as powerful painkillers but through most of the 20th century they were largely reserved for people with significant, acute pain, such as cancer patients. In the 1990s, prescribing practices shifted, so that the pain threshold dropped while the duration of use rose, creating a massive new market. One key driver was the time-release opioid OxyContin, which was promoted as safer and less addictive than other opioids. The rapid expansion of opioid prescribing created a veneer of safety and legality that increased societal acceptance of opioid use. Addiction was fed by “pill mills,” where prescriptions were written in volume.
Map of average annual opioid deaths per 100,000, 1990 to 2018
“When the product is more readily available, other people use it more,” Cutler said. “The way people would get their start is they’d have some pain — back pain, knee pain — and they’d be talking to friends and family and someone would say, ‘Oh, when I had pain the doctor gave me opioids and I still have some in my medicine cabinet.’ So, here’s this prescription medication, and it’s got to be safe and effective or the FDA wouldn’t have let it out. The market is already there. I don’t have to do anything illegal. I don’t have to search very hard or go into the illegal market. The specific thing here is the availability. I can get it from friends, from family, from doctors who are prescribing it. That’s the sense in which the thick market makes it really easy to start off.”
The extraordinary potency of the drugs, he added, makes it extremely difficult to pull back.
“These are very, very addicting substances,” Cutler said. “They’re hugely addicting. That really matters because the withdrawal gets to be extremely severe and the consequence of that is that there’s a big issue in terms of people’s absolute desire to go back and use again.”
Cutler and Donahoe examined two pill-mill counties, one in Kentucky, the other in Ohio, where physicians prescribed opioids after cursory examinations, making them attractive for buyers interested in recreational use. The authors found that both physical proximity to the pill mill counties and social connectedness to people living in them raised the likelihood of opioid-related deaths. They found that every death in a pill mill county led to additional deaths in geographically close counties and in those with strong social connections to the pill mill counties,as measured by friend connections on Facebook.
Distribution of social connectedness to Greenup County, Kentucky, and Scioto County, Ohio
In this kind of “thick market” situation, the authors concluded, even temporary misconduct or mistakes by regulators and suppliers can create harms that far outlast the mistake or misconduct. And in this case, Cutler said, the fault lies with just about everyone.
“Companies got away with literally killing people,” he said. “The DEA screwed up, the FDA screwed up, medical societies screwed up, rating agencies screwed up. There’s enough blame to go around.
“If somebody had done their job really well — the FDA, the DEA, pharma companies, distributors, pharmacies — if someone had stepped in and said, ‘No, this is not right,’ the epidemic would have been less bad.”
To emphasize the point, he highlighted a missed opportunity amid the shift from prescription opioids to heroin. As authorities reacted to the damage of the growing crisis by tightening prescribing practices, they paid too little attention to demand. That failure to help, including a woefully inadequate commitment to treatment programs, led many people who were hooked on pills to turn to heroin.
“A big policy failure is that we thought too muchabout the supply side and not enough about the demand side,” Cutler said. “By coupling the supply side with the demand side, you would not push people into the illegal market, even as you make it harder for new people to get opioids when they don’t need them. Then, if you find a way for those who are addicted to get over the addiction, you’ve reduced demand. You’ve got a great glide path: fewer opioids out there, fewer new users, and help for those who are addicted.”
It’s a lesson that could still make a difference, he added — but only if we act on it.
“For the good of society, we’re treating opioids as more of a public health issue than a criminal issue. We got part of it right. There’s no sense putting people who are addicted to heroin or fentanyl in jail. That’s just dumb. But on the other hand, we can’t not help them out. The sad part is that we haven’t provided enough help.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
Nicholas Gonzalez found his vocation for the law through his love for acting.
A child actor who booked his first professional job at age 12, he was instantly smitten when he took part in mock trial and moot court competitions in high school. The performative part of arguing a case felt not just familiar, but alluring.
“On the set, you must be able to take direction to deliver a line in a certain way, and you must do it on the spot,” he said. “Similarly, when you are in a mock court, you have to think on your feet and perform before an audience … When we started winning our moot court competitions, that is when I started thinking, ‘Am I going to do law or am I going to do acting?’”
Encouraged by mentors and teachers who urged him to apply to law school, Gonzalez decided to go for it. Now he will be graduating from Harvard Law School this month.
Growing up as the middle child of five siblings in Brooklyn, Gonzalez was a true theater kid. Acting, singing, and dancing were his favorite pastimes in school, and when a casting director for “Billy Elliot: The Musical” asked him to audition, his passion became a family endeavor.
As an eighth-grader, he had to be accompanied to auditions by his parents, who supported him even though they knew nothing about show business. When he was hired to take part in a national tour of “A Christmas Story: The Musical,” his older siblings traveled with him as guardians as his parents couldn’t get off work.
In high school, Gonzalez became a series regular on the hit show “Orange Is the New Black,” where he played the role of the son of inmate Aleida Diaz, played by Elizabeth Rodriguez, who like Gonzalez is of Puerto Rican heritage. He won a 2015 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. Despite his success as a young actor, Gonzalez worried about making a living as an adult in the business. Even though he had his parents’ blessing, he decided he didn’t want to deal with the uncertainty.
“When you’re a child actor and you’re booking jobs, that’s really exciting,” he said. “But in my teenage years, I’d see audition rooms with guys who look exactly the same, and I was, ‘Do I want that to be my life?’ It’s such a cutthroat industry. For me, not knowing that it would work out for me is something that I struggled with. And then I also just really liked law.”
Gonzalez attended the University at Albany, State University of New York, and graduated with a degree in political science in 2019. He then worked as a corporate paralegal at Cooley LLP, a firm in New York, and was a Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) Law Fellow at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, also in New York.
During his stint at Cooley, he worked supporting attorneys dealing with emerging companies and venture capital groups, and felt lured by corporate law, especially mergers and acquisitions.
“During my time at Cooley, I didn’t get to experience much of the litigation side,” said Gonzalez. “But I really liked corporate work. I saw the attorneys who were corporate partners and senior corporate associates, and I thought I could be like them. I liked the fast-paced nature of the work and serving multiple clients. From a personality perspective and workstyle, I like corporate practice better than litigation.”
Molly Brady, the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, had Gonzalez as a student in her property law class. Gonzalez was also one of 80 students Brady, as a faculty leader, guided and supported through their first year at the Law School.
“Nick is the epitome of a community-builder,” said Brady. “I met him at orientation, and he was incredibly friendly, chatting up a table of fellow students. I’ve seen him flourish. He’s so interested in business law. It’s been fun to see that develop over the past three years. I just think he’s a natural because he builds connections among people. He’s a negotiator. He’s a problem-solver. He’s the sort of person who any client will be lucky to hire.”
After graduation, Gonzalez will work at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York as a corporate associate.
Gonzalez hopes eventually to work in entertainment law and realize his dream of becoming a Broadway producer. But if he gets a call from a casting director to play a lawyer, he will consider it, he said. It would be a way to combine his two passions.
One of his favorite television shows is “Suits,” a legal drama featuring actor Gabriel Macht in the role of Harvey Specter, who is one of television’s most popular lawyers.
“I would love to play Harvey Specter or one of his associates,” said Gonzalez with a chuckle. “If they call me tomorrow and say, ‘Nick, can you play an associate at our firm?’ I might have to defer the degree and go check out that opportunity [laughs].”
Matt Segneri, the Bruce and Bridgitt Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs, stands in front of a screen filled with members of the i-lab community.
Photos by Eve Photography LLC
Alex Parks
Harvard Correspondent
5 min read
Startup founders inspire global audience at 2024 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge Awards ceremony
Helping trauma surgeons control abdominal bleeding, using AI to maximize farmers’ crop yields, and enabling more African small businesses to participate in global trade. These were three of the winning startup initiatives recognized during the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony.
“Looking at the applications for the President’s Innovation Challenge, I was blown away at the quality,” said Harvard University interim President Alan Garber. “I know it reflects tremendous work by the teams, and tremendous work by all the people supporting them.”
The President’s Innovation Challenge is an annual competition for students and select alumni pursuing ventures that push boundaries in their fields. Thousands of people watched the President’s Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony on May 1, which drew attendees at Klarman Hall and a virtual audience from around the globe.
During the ceremony, audience members heard from several former President’s Innovation Challenge winners who have achieved significant impact in their fields. SurgiBox, a 2016 challenge winner, shared that its portable operating rooms were used on the battlefield in Ukraine. Chaku Foods, a 2021 winner, has helped farmers across Africa increase their incomes while promoting climate-resilient practices.
Additionally, attendees watched the 2024 finalists showcase a broad range of projects, from using solar power for farm irrigation systems in India to improving early diagnosis of gum disease. Winners received $517,000 in non-dilutive funding, made possible by a gift from the Bertarelli Foundation, co-founded by Ernesto Bertarelli, M.B.A. ’93.
The $75,000 award recipients
Beaver Health (Harvard College): Engaging older loved ones in stimulating, culturally responsive activities to boost cognition and quality of life.
EndoShunt Medical Inc. (Harvard Business School, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Controlling abdominal bleeding in trauma surgery with an innovative medical device.
MesaQuantum (Harvard Business School, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Developing chip-scale quantum sensors for next-generation GPS capabilities in position, navigation, and timing.
Solara (Harvard Business School): Providing on-demand solar irrigation to Indian farmers, increasing their access to affordable, reliable, and clean irrigation.
Stratagen Bio (Harvard Business School): Transforming MRI scans into a tool for objective clinical decision-making and quantitative biomarker assessment.
“This money is going to fund our initial pilots for the irrigation we’re doing in eastern India,” said Rea Savla, founder of Solara. “More importantly, the exposure that we’ve already gotten through this process … is going to be transformative in bringing Solara to market and impacting as many farmers as we can. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
The $25,000 award recipients
Bullseye Biosciences (Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences): Transforming therapeutics discovery and expediting the development of life-saving medicines.
Crop Diagnostix (Harvard Business School): Building the future of predictive agriculture with patented, AI-powered gene expression technology.
MabLab (Harvard College): Designing five-in-one test strips to detect the five deadliest lacing agents in recreational drugs.
Saturday Art Class (Harvard Graduate School of Education): Unleashing the creative potential of marginalized children in India with visual arts education that promotes the development of social-emotional skills.
TecHustle (Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School): Creating Africa’s largest small business network for global trade, providing financial services and market access.
Additionally, the President’s Innovation Challenge awards $17,000 in Ingenuity Award prizes to teams advancing ideas with the potential to be world-changing, even if they are not yet fully formed ventures.
Interim President Alan Garber (from left) with the Ingenuity Award winners Phyllis Mugadza, founder of Sprxng; Yihan (Connie) Hui, reer; Cami Tussie, PerioSense; Ben Schafer, MicroAvionics; Deepika Gopalakrishnan, Alba, and i-lab Director Matt Segneri.
Ingenuity Award winners
Alba (Harvard Graduate School of Design): Empowering visually-impaired individuals to detect the onset of their period with a tactile menstrual wipe.
MicroAvionics (Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Developing a propulsion mechanism that can fly in near-space, a region that is inaccessible to aircraft and satellites.
PerioSense (Harvard School of Dental Medicine): Making early diagnosis of gum disease more accessible and efficient while saving time and money for patients and providers.
reer (Harvard Graduate School of Design): Creating 3D-printed designer furniture that can be tailored to personalized needs and traded-in for renewal.
Sprxng (Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences): Developing holistic period care solutions through data-driven menstrual research and innovation.
“This is the best day of the year for us, because we get to spotlight our amazing community and show how they turn ideas into impact,” said Matt Segneri, the Bruce and Bridgitt Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs. “Since the Harvard Innovation Labs opened in 2011, we’ve worked with 5,000 plus ventures that span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors… This year, more than 2,700 students from across the University joined the i-lab… It’s tremendous growth from where we started in 2011.”
“I was pleased to meet many of this year’s finalists; they proved that once again the i-lab is preparing Harvard students — from all its Schools — to be successful entrepreneurs when they graduate,” said Ernesto Bertarelli, M.B.A. ’93. “But what I saw and heard wasn’t just a drive to make a profit, they were all also keenly focused on making a positive impact in society.”
To learn more about the President’s Innovation Challenge finalists and winners, and watch a recording of the May 1 awards ceremony, visit the Harvard Innovation Labs website.
Did student or ChatGPT write that paper? Does it matter?
Sam Altman, CEO of firm that developed app, says ethics do matter, but they need to be rethought (and AI isn’t going away)
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Colleges and universities have been wrestling with concerns over plagiarism and other ethical questions surrounding the use of AI since the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022.
But Sam Altman, whose company, OpenAI, launched the chatbot app, said during a campus visit Wednesday that AI is such a powerful tool that higher education would be doing its students a disservice by turning its back on it — if that were even possible now. And some of the old rules of ethics will need to be rethought.
“Cheating on homework is obviously bad,” said Altman. “But what we mean by cheating and what the expected rules are does change over time.”
Altman discussed AI in the academy, along with the subtleties of using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, while at the University to receive the Experiment Cup from Xfund, an early stage venture capital firm. That event was sponsored by the John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard Business School, and the Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS). It featured a conversation between Altman and Xfund co-founder Patrick Chung ’96.
Speaking to the Gazette before the Cup presentation, Altman likened the initial uproar at schools over ChatGPT to the ones that arose after the arrival of calculators and, later, search engines like Google. “People said, ‘We’ve got to ban these because people will just cheat on their homework,’” he said.
Altman, who left Stanford at 19 to start Loopt, a location-sharing social media app, said the reaction to calculators, for instance, was overblown. “If people don’t need to calculate a sine function by hand again … then mathematical education is over,” he said, with a gentle half-smile on his face.
Altman helped launch OpenAI in 2015 and its wildly influential ChatGPT — which can write papers and generate computer programs, among other things — before being removed in 2023 and then reinstated four days later as the company’s CEO.
ChatGPT, he said, has the potential to exponentially increase productivity in the same way calculators freed users from performing calculations by hand, calling the app “a calculator for words.”
He warned, “Telling people not to use ChatGPT is not preparing people for the world of the future.”
Following a bit of back-and-forth about how the ethics of using ChatGPT and other generative AI may differ in various disciplines, Altman came down hard in favor of utility, praising AI’s massive potential in every field.
“Standards are just going to have to evolve,” he said. He dismissed the notion that ChatGPT could be used for writing in the sciences, where the emphasis is on the findings, but not in the humanities, where the expression of ideas is central.
“Writing a paper the old-fashioned way is not going to be the thing,” he said. “Using the tool to best discover and express, to communicate ideas, I think that’s where things are going to go in the future.”
“There will be a conversation about what are the absolute limits of the tool, how do we as a society … negotiate ‘Here is what AI systems can never do.’ Where do we set the defaults? How much does an individual user get to move things around within those boundaries? How do we think about different countries’ laws?”
However, that discussion should not slow the development of AI. Instead, Altman described parallel tracks.
“Generally speaking, I do think these are tools that should do what their users want,” he said, before adding an important, if less than specific, caveat: “But there are going to have to be real limits.”
Researchers hope identifying blood proteins may lead to earlier prediction of risk, increase treatment options
Rachel Troy
Mass General Brigham Communications
5 min read
A new study suggests that proteins detectable in the blood could improve predictions about risk of liver cancer, which is typically diagnosed at later stages when survival rates are lower.
Led by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Mass General Brigham, the team’s results are published in JNCI.
Liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), ranks as the third leading cause of cancer worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally, with its incidence rate steadily increasing. Detection of liver cancers often occurs at advanced stages, when life expectancy typically spans less than 12 months. Currently, there is a notable deficiency in accurate, sensitive, and specific tools for the early detection of liver cancer. Many existing methods are relatively expensive, invasive, or limited in accessibility, primarily confined to major hospitals.
“Liver cancer rates are rapidly increasing, and liver cancer has a high mortality rate, but if we can diagnose it early, therapeutic interventions can be potentially curative.”
Xinyuan Zhang, BWH
The team used proteomics, the study and profiling of proteins, to develop a minimally invasive model for diagnosing or screening for liver cancer at an earlier, more treatable stage. Using the SomaScan Assay Kit — a high-throughput proteomics platform that measures protein levels in biological samples, available through BIDMC’s Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Center — the investigators detected 1,305 biologically relevant proteins that may be present in the blood at early stage of disease.
“Liver cancer rates are rapidly increasing, and liver cancer has a high mortality rate, but if we can diagnose it early, therapeutic interventions can be potentially curative,” said lead author Xinyuan (Cindy) Zhang of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “We need to have a way to detect this form of cancer early enough to intervene with surgery or liver transplantation to treat the disease before it becomes metastatic.”
The study team used SomaScan to analyze plasma samples from participants in both the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professional Follow-Up Study, two longitudinal, ongoing, prospective cohorts in the U.S. Notably, they examined blood samples obtained from patients an average of 12 years before their liver cancer diagnosis to pinpoint protein biomarker signals. After examination, the researchers cross-referenced medical records to confirm whether these patients ultimately developed liver cancer.
From the blood samples, the researchers identified 56 plasma proteins that showed significantly elevated levels in patients with liver cancer compared to matched control samples without HCC. The team selected four of these proteins to create a predictive model, which they tested on the U.K. Biobank Pharma Proteomics dataset, comprised of 50,000 individuals, 45 of whom were diagnosed with liver cancer. Their model had greater accuracy in predicting liver cancer compared to traditional risk factors.
The authors caution that their study included a limited number of liver cancer cases and further validation in larger, more diverse patient populations and in high-risk populations is needed.
“It’s always been challenging to identify highly specific disease biomarkers in the blood using traditional tools, but new technology allows us to detect a broad and dynamic range of both high and low abundant proteins,” said co-senior author Towia A. Libermann of the division of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Biotechnology at BIDMC. “New insights into the biological mechanisms underlying liver cancer development emerge from our data that may lead to identification of novel therapeutic targets. Most importantly, we were able to validate these early detection biomarkers using alternative protein analysis techniques and in an independent population cohort from the U.K.”
The study team aims to extend their methodology to uncover additional plasma protein biomarkers, explore biomarkers linked with different cancer types, and gain deeper insights into the role of HCC risk factors across specific patient populations. With further progress, the protein biomarkers investigated in the study could potentially hold clinical significance as a non-invasive test for assessing liver cancer risk.
“Even though further investigation in additional populations is needed, our results reveal a robust circulating protein profile associated with liver cancer years before diagnosis, which is truly remarkable,” said co-senior author Xuehong Zhang, who conducted work on this study while at the Channing Division of Network Medicine at the Brigham. Zhang is now at Yale
Additional authors include Long H. Ngo, Simon T. Dillon, Xuesong Gu and Michelle Lai, of BIDMC; Longgang Zhao of BWH; Tracey G. Simon and Andrew T. Chan of MGH; and Edward L. Giovannucci of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Cancer Institute (NCI) through grants R21 CA238651. Andrew T. Chan served as a consultant for Bayer Pharma AG, Pfizer Inc., and Boehringer Ingelheim for work unrelated to this topic. He has also received grant support from Pfizer Inc., Zoe Ltd, and Freenome for work unrelated to this topic.
Cease-fire will fail as long as Hamas exists, journalist says
Times opinion writer Bret Stephens also weighs in on campus unrest in final Middle East Dialogues event
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
An immediate cease-fire in Gaza sounds like a principled idea to those recoiling at the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have died since fighting began in earnest seven months ago, but it would be foolhardy to strike any deal unless it includes the complete dismantling of Hamas, according to journalist Bret Stephens.
The New York Times opinion columnist said he supports a halt in hostilities only if the agreement produces “a good outcome that permanently changes the status quo in Gaza” during a spirited conversation Monday evening at Harvard Kennedy School, the sixth and final installment in the Middle East Dialogues series.
Stephens, who also voiced his concerns about campus protests over the conflict, argued that anything that does not deal with Hamas will inevitably lead to future confrontations, noting the long history of cease-fire agreements that proved only temporary, including the one in place that Hamas violated on Oct. 7.
“Leaving Hamas in power with a cease-fire now or tomorrow is, in my view, a likely recipe for this tragedy to be repeated again and again,” he told Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, and organizer of the series.
Tarek Masoud, organizer of Middle East Dialogues, wanted to show that Harvard could confront the tensions around Israel-Gaza without vitriol or shouting. So far, it’s worked.
Einat Wilf, who is also former Knesset member, says shift needed in Palestinian ideology on legitimacy of Israel
“Both of us, and I hope everyone in this room, wants an outcome for the Palestinians that in three or five or 10 years looks a hell of a lot better than it did three or five or however many years ago,” said Stephens. “That outcome is not possible without the elimination of Hamas as a military and political entity” that could reconstitute itself down the road.
Taking out most, but not all, of Hamas is not enough, especially if the Palestinian Authority hopes to reassert power, he said. It cannot do so with a viable Hamas as its rival.
Before joining The Times in 2017, Stephens was a foreign affairs columnist and deputy editorial page editor for The Wall Street Journal and editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post from 2002-2004. He is currently editor of Sapir, a quarterly journal about Jewish cultural and political issues.
“I consider myself a Zionist, and I believe intrinsic to my Zionism is the belief that Zionism is a call for Jewish self-determination, which means that we are not ruled by others and that we do not rule others. Israel should not be in the business of ruling others,” said Stephens, who is Jewish. “If Hamas did not exist tomorrow, then any sensible Israeli government should be working all the time to find a way to separate from the Palestinians with the goal of creating a Palestinian state that is independent, viable, prosperous, progressive.”
Masoud said many believe Hamas is not entirely at fault for this conflict but was provoked into Oct. 7 by Israel’s occupation and ongoing settlement building in the West Bank, its indiscriminate bombing campaign, and other efforts by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to thwart Palestinians’ goal of national self-determination.
Tarek Masoud, organizer of the Middle East Dialogues series.
Harvard University
Stephens rejected the notion that actions like blockades of goods and people in and out of Gaza by Israel, Egypt, and others are to blame for Hamas becoming a violent terrorist organization and for the difficult conditions of life for many in Gaza even before the war, saying it’s “wishful thinking” that things might be better if only Hamas had been treated better. We “insult” Hamas when we downplay the motivational importance of its deeply held belief, embedded in the Hamas charter, calling for the elimination of Israel.
“That is their true belief, and they’ve said so a thousand times,” he said.
While not in favor of settlements “for all sorts of reasons,” Stephens does not believe they are the root cause of this conflict. If they were, when Israel withdrew all its settlements in 2005, life for the Palestinians should have gotten better. In fact, it got worse.
And though Israel’s funding of Hamas under Netanyahu was “wrongheaded” and deserves condemnation, it was not done in isolation, but as part of a broader “policy of appeasement” of Hamas endorsed by the West, including by current and prior U.S. presidential administrations.
The New York Times, The Times of Israel, and other news organizations have reported that Netanyahu’s government aided the funding of Hamas so the group would remain a powerful rival to the Palestinian Authority, which oversaw the West Bank, and reduce odds of a push for a consolidated Palestinian state.
In his Times column and in interviews, Stephens has denounced some pro-Palestinian protests taking place across the country, including on many college campuses like Harvard.
Mere criticisms of the Israeli government’s tactics or of a specific policy is not itself antisemitic, said Stephens, who has written critically of Netanyahu. But “when you say the one Jewish state in the world is the one state you are laser-focused on wanting to see disappear, then I am going to really question where that sentiment is coming from. And if the nature of your critique of Israel mirrors in almost uncannily precise ways older, antisemitic tropes, then I’m also going to raise some questions and quarrels with what you’re saying.”
In response to accusations that some protesters are antisemitic, Masoud said perhaps students ought to confront and engage viewpoints they don’t like or agree with rather than getting upset.
While thicker skin is probably good for everyone to have, universities have established a culture of “safetyism” and set standards around the acceptability of certain types of hurtful speech, Stephens said, but seem to have a different standard when it comes to speech concerning Jews.
His greatest objection to some of the protests is not even the specter of antisemitism.
“It’s the complete lack of nuance. It’s a complete lack of appreciation that maybe there’s more than one side to this, that there’s a history that you might not understand the totality of,” he said.
“And furthermore, if your Jewish friends are telling you again and again [that] what you’re saying is very troubling” and you “make no effort to listen to them” or to reconsider “whether the views I’m expressing, some of the slogans I might be repeating, like ‘from the river to the sea,’ aren’t simply unproblematic calls for freedom, but are, in fact, calls for the elimination of an entire city,” he said. “If you’re not doing this, I would say you shouldn’t be at an institution like Harvard.”
The Middle East Dialogues series hosted Israeli, Palestinian, and American scholars, activists, and political figures sharing different viewpoints on the conflict in Gaza. Prior speakers included Jared Kushner, former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump; Matt Duss, executive director of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Dalal Saeb Iriqat, professor of diplomacy and conflict resolution at Arab American University Palestine and columnist for Al-Quds newspaper; Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; and Einat Wilf, a political scientist and former member of the Knesset.
Colleagues, students remember Helen Vendler, a ‘titan’ of poetry criticism
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Beyond her passion for her work, they say, she was creative and engaged teacher, thoughtful adviser and mentor, trusted friend
When Helen Vendler taught William Blake’s “The Lamb,” she often ended class discussions by reading the poem aloud. Arms extended as if cradling a lamb, gaze directed upward, Vendler would embody the character of the worshipful child speaker.
One time, graduate students recall, Vendler also offered the lamb’s response — an unexpected “baa,” to the uproarious delight of her students. A celebrated literary scholar with a sometimes-unexpected sense of humor, Vendler took every opportunity to bring poetry to life, making her courses unforgettable experiences, according to students and colleagues.
Vendler, one of the world’s foremost critics of English and American poetry, died April 23 in Laguna Niguel, California. She was 90.
The Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita, Vendler taught in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for more than 30 years and published more than 30 books on poetry criticism. Last year she was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Vendler wrote on many of poetry’s giants, including Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Seamus Heaney. Her textbook “Poems, Poets, Poetry,” which was derived from her renowned undergraduate course of the same name, introduced countless non-humanities students to English and American poetry.
Vendler’s colleagues and former Harvard students remembered her not only as a discerning poetry critic, but also as a kind and attentive teacher, thoughtful adviser, and trusted friend.
“Helen was a titan in our department and in the world of letters.”
Glenda Carpio
“Helen was a titan in our department and in the world of letters,” said Glenda Carpio, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and chair of the Department of English. “As we, faculty, staff, and students, grieve her loss, we are sharing our stories about her. All of them point to the rigor and joy with which she taught and wrote about poetry, to Helen’s singular gift for candor and courage of thought … Poetry scholarship changed because of her and will never be the same with her passing.”
The daughter of two public-school teachers, Vendler was born in Boston in 1933, and often visited Widener Library and attended poetry readings at Harvard as a teenager. She graduated from Emmanuel College with a degree in chemistry in 1954 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in mathematics — which she changed to literature — at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She earned her Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard in 1960.
One of few women working in her field at the time, Vendler taught at Cornell, Swarthmore, Haverford, Smith, and Boston University before joining Harvard’s faculty in 1985. Five years later, she became the first woman to be named a University Professor.
“I have never wanted to write on anything but poetry and I have never wanted to teach anything but poetry.”
Helen Vendler
“I have never wanted to write on anything but poetry and I have never wanted to teach anything but poetry,” Vendler said last May upon receiving the Belles Lettres medal. “I do understand, I think, what it feels like to be a poet, even though I’m not one. I was born with a mind that likes condensed and unusual language, which is what you get from poems.”
“A work of art can change people,” Burt said. “What so much of Helen’s work is about is explaining how works of art do that. ‘How does this work?’ and ‘Why is this a poem?’ ‘Where is the feeling inside this work?’ ‘Who’s in there?’ She was able to show not just how all the many parts fit together, but how it feels to live inside these poems which she lived inside so attentively.”
” She was able to show not just how all the many parts fit together, but how it feels to live inside these poems which she lived inside so attentively.”
Stephanie Burt
Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, said it was amazing to witness the amount of time his friend and colleague dedicated to her students, which he saw from his office beside Vendler’s in the Barker Center.
“Helen believed passionately in the ideal of Harvard — veritas — and stood up for it uncompromisingly and on all occasions, as she did for gender equality,” Teskey said. “With equal passion she believed in the centrality of poetry to education, which she demonstrated with unparalleled, luminous insight.”
“Helen believed passionately in the ideal of Harvard — veritas — and stood up for it uncompromisingly and on all occasions, as she did for gender equality.”
Gordon Teskey
Christopher Spaide, Ph.D. ’19, who was Vendler’s student and teaching assistant from 2013 to 2019, remembered Vendler as a creative and engaged teacher who edited every student’s work attentively by hand, and encouraged everyone to take unusual courses to expand their horizons.
Spaide, who is now a postdoctoral fellow in poetics at Emory University, remembers watching Vendler deliver an undergraduate lecture on Keats’ “To Autumn” — a poem on which she had written a 50-page book chapter — with entirely new and fresh ideas not included in the book.
“She was so inventive,” Spaide said. “She found something new and refreshing in every class.”
Burt, who studied with Vendler as a Harvard undergraduate before later becoming her colleague, remembers her as a dedicated mentor as willing to give advice on parenting as on poems.
“She wasn’t there for herself; she was there for the work,” Burt said. “She was there to get you inside ‘The End of March’ or ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ or ‘To Autumn.’ She was there to show how works of art work, and why they work, and how the parts fit together.”
In the classroom, Vendler would employ creative ways of bringing a poem to life for her students, such as drawing pictures on the board to illustrate each line of “To Autumn.”
“She was so happy and delighted when she learned something,” Spaide said “It was not a class where she had the right answer and then we all attempted to replicate it. Sometimes someone would point out something she had never thought of, and she would say ‘Thank you.’ She was really grateful for that.”
Vendler is survived by her son, David, and his wife, Xianchun, and by her grandchildren, Killian and Céline.
A Human-AI Affair in the atrium of Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex. Models Chris Gumb and Peggy Yin pose in outfits designed by Helen Haitong Huang and Xiaowu Zheng during the fashion show, which aims to showcase the potential within human-AI collaboration. Designers were encouraged to use materials that reflect global sustainability.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Eileen O'Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
There’s never a shortage of creativity on campus. But during Arts First, it all comes out to play.
The 2024 Arts First Festival brought campus concert halls, galleries, and common areas to life for an exuberant five-day celebration of student, faculty, and staff creativity. The annual festival, produced by the Office for the Arts, showcases art in all its mediums and genres, with an array of music and theater performances, public exhibits, and hands-on activities.
In Paine Hall on Saturday, seniors Lucas Gazianis and Joshua Fang faced off in a “piano duel,” exchanging jazz licks from side-by-side pianos.
Gazianis, who had played with the Harvard Jazz Orchestra the night before, said he likes to keep one foot in the music world even while being a social studies concentrator. He likes the feeling the festival brings each year.
“I’m just walking around the Yard and the Science Center Plaza enjoying lots of different great music,” Gazianis said. “I feel great; it’s beautiful outside. There are so many talented students doing such different things.”
Students from Matt Aucoin’s class Music 187: Opera Workshop perform their creations in Holden Chapel. Olympia Hatzilambrou ’24 is pictured during the performance.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Andrew Lu ’24 (left) and Caitlin Paul ’24 sing their opera roles.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Danilo “Dacha” Thurber ’25 (left) is shown with Aucoin.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
The event, which ended April 28, also featured a four-show run of “Little Shop of Horrors,” performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, a human-AI collaborative fashion show, and an ensemble of four cellists performing a Disney song medley.
At Thursday night’s drag show, nationally acclaimed performer Pattie Gonia led a high-energy evening of performances by students, and on Wednesday night, Kevin Young ’92 was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal
Taylor Fang ’25, Arts First’s student producer and student poet, participated in the Arts Medal ceremony, asking Young about the role of memory in his work during the Q&A session.
Fang, an English concentrator with a secondary in computer science, said she likes the sense of community the festival creates on campus.
“The fact that there’s so many different mediums means that there’s all these different ways of engaging,” Fang said. “I don’t think there’s only a unifying aspect to art, I also think it allows us to have different perspectives and opinions. Through art we can have a more open-minded and understanding dialogue since it’s not coming at issues head-on, but through other ways of expression.”
Malgorzata (Gosia) Sklodowska (pictured) poses in their outfit at Fashion Flare.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
A close up shows the details of a jacket from the fashion show.
Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
A public art installation called “In Bloom” by Abby Weber ’26 was this pedestrian’s backdrop. It was displayed along the gates of Harvard Yard.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A detail of the public art installation “Oyster Floats, Camera Obscuras for a Floating City” by Graduate School of Design students Randy Crandon and Dylan Herrmann-Holt is shown alongside Memorial Hall.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Members of the Black Arts Collective create a mural highlighting the essence of jazz and celebrating underrepresented voices in the genre. Alyssa Gaines ’26 paints the mural on the Science Center Plaza.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
An art installation called “Home on the Yard” by GSD students Christian Behling, Ihwa Choi, Monica Mendoza, and Gabriel Schmid is exhibited in Harvard Yard.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Members of the cast from “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” perform.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Graduate School of Education student Amy Dang works on a drawing of a specimen at the “Sketch Up Close” tent on Science Center Plaza.
Photo by Scott Eisen
James Glaser ’25 helps run the pottery wheel on Science Center Plaza.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Dancers from the Harvard Ballet Company perform.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Members of Te Tango Bailando dance.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Anugraha Raman ’12 performs.
Photo by Scott Eisen
The Crimson Cellos play a Disney medley in the Harvard Art Museums’ Calderwood Courtyard.
Photo by Scott Eisen
Looking down on the Crimson Cellos as they play a Disney medley.
Researcher explains the human toll of language that makes addiction feel worse
When Mass General transplant hepatologist Wei Zhang says he wants his colleagues to think before they speak, he has the tragedy of a recent patient in mind.
Admitted to intensive care for advanced alcohol-associated liver disease, the 36-year-old woman hid the truth when asked about her drinking. “She was like, ‘No, I quit over a year ago, I didn’t drink at all,’” said Zhang, also director of the hospital’s Alcohol-Associated Liver Disease Clinic. “But we have tools that can detect the use of alcohol in the past three, four weeks.”
The patient, who had been traumatized by years of physical abuse, was denied a liver transplant, in part because she withheld information about her alcohol use. Her death days later was “a consequence of stigma,” Zhang said. Patients too often “feel they’re being judged and may fear that their condition is seen as a result of personal failing rather than a medical issue that needs treatment.”
For decades, medical terminology has labeled liver disease and other alcohol-related conditions as “alcoholic”: alcoholic liver disease, alcoholic hepatitis, alcoholic cirrhosis, alcoholic pancreatitis. Meanwhile, clinicians and administrators have described patients as addicts and alcoholics.
More recently, specialists and advocates have sought with some success to revise how we talk about substance use and those struggling to overcome it, not just to reduce stigma but also to combat bias among medical professionals. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the term “alcohol use disorder” is now preferable to “alcohol abuse,” “alcohol dependence,” and “alcoholism.”
“Emphasizing non-stigmatizing language is crucial not only for fostering honesty but also for supporting the overall treatment process and patient outcomes,” Zhang said.
Wei Zhang.
The new study is a step toward that goal. Inspired by his patients, Zhang set out to observe whether the terminology used by institutions that treat alcohol-associated liver disease reflects or rejects stigma. He and his team reviewed messages on more than 100 accredited liver transplant center websites, along with language used by addiction psychiatry sites. They found that almost nine of 10 transplant center websites use stigmatizing language such as “alcoholic.” Less than half of addiction psychiatry websites do the same.
“The gap between professional society recommendations and actual practice is concerning, since patients frequently use these online resources for information which can significantly influence their behavior and perceptions about alcohol-associated liver disease,” Zhang said.
“Emphasizing non-stigmatizing language is crucial not only for fostering honesty but also for supporting the overall treatment process and patient outcomes.”
“Drug use disorder and alcohol use disorder are among the most stigmatized conditions universally across different societies because people feel that it’s self-induced — that people are to blame because they put it in their body,” said Kelly, also the founder of Mass General’s Recovery Research Institute. “Just because they made that decision initially, doesn’t mean they plan on becoming addicted.”
In the 2009 study, Kelly and his colleagues described patients to more than 600 clinicians, alternating between “substance abuser” and “having a substance use disorder.” Those in the latter category were viewed more sympathetically and as more worthy of treatment.
“I was quite surprised just how susceptible they were,” Kelly said. “These were passionate, dedicated clinicians. They were still susceptible to the negative punitive bias.”
They still are today, Zhang’s findings suggest.
“We are very good at seeing patients with liver disease but if we add this behavioral mental disorder, it is somewhat out of our scope,” he said. “I think education could at least have them be more familiar with this topic and be willing to at least listen to the adoption and use of non-stigmatizing language.”
“I think education could at least have them be more familiar with this topic and be willing to at least listen to the adoption and use of non-stigmatizing language.”
Building on the new study, Zhang has recommended to healthcare institutions and professional societies that they implement website feedback mechanisms and carry out regular content audits to guard against potentially harmful language.
“The steps we are recommending should not only help to align clinical practice with sound language guidelines, but also foster a more empathetic and supportive healthcare environment for patients,” he said.
Zhang also said healthcare institutions should look to leverage technology to support adoption of appropriate standards.
His team is collaborating with Mass General’s Research Patient Data Registry to obtain de-identified patient records, which they plan to review for instances of stigmatizing language. He hopes the process will help researchers quantify the prevalence of such language in clinical notes and identify patterns that can inform interventions. The team will also analyze the association of stigmatizing language with patient outcomes.
Neuroscientist inspired by ‘great challenge’ of leading life, physical sciences division in era of rapidly growing knowledge
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman has been appointed dean of science, effective July 1, by Hopi Hoekstra, the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is a pioneering experimental neuroscientist who uses electron microscopy and computational reconstruction to study neural connections in the mammalian brain. One of his major research goals is to generate a complete map of the brain’s complex connective pathways.
“I am thrilled to welcome Jeff into this new role and to have him advancing the extraordinary possibilities of our academic community,” Hoekstra said in a message to the FAS community.
A member of the faculty since 2004, Lichtman said his strong desire for a prosperous and growth-oriented science enterprise at Harvard, as well as his personal and professional commitment to the institution, drove his decision to take the leadership role.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity,” he said. “Obviously it is a great challenge, but I like hard work.”
Lichtman was a founding affiliate of the Center for Brain Science, a University-wide coalition of researchers seeking new insights into neural circuits and how they translate to thought and behavior. Among Lichtman’s research interests is studying how mammalian brains are rewired during postnatal learning — the phenomenon that explains why the young often can learn complex tasks more quickly than adults.
Answering such questions led Lichtman and colleagues to develop visualization technologies for neural connections and for monitoring how they are altered over time. One of their inventions, the “Brainbow” method, uses fluorescent proteins in transgenic mouse brains to distinguish individual neurons from each other.
Recently, Lichtman partnered with computational neuroscience colleagues at Google, MIT, Princeton, and elsewhere to focus on the watershed challenge of creating a synapse-level wiring diagram of an entire mammalian brain. In this and other work, he brings together researchers from the life and physical sciences as well as computer science and engineering.
Lichtman came to Harvard after working for 30 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also did his M.D. and Ph.D. work (1980). He received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College.
He succeeds experimental physicist Christopher Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, who assumed the role as dean in 2018 after an interim term. Stubbs will continue to have a leadership role in the FAS as special adviser on artificial intelligence to Hoekstra.
“Chris Stubbs has been an outspoken advocate for the division, a highly effective leader of FAS initiatives from pandemic scenario planning to pedagogical responses to AI, and a generous and collaborative partner to me in my time as dean,” Hoekstra said.
Lichtman also reflected on the changing landscape of scientific research and education in the age of instant, AI-generated answers. “Thinking about our educational mission, as dean, I’d like to explore not just how we can more effectively convey to our students the explosive growth in scientific knowledge, but also how can we better instill in them the essential importance of learning how to ask questions that don’t yet have satisfactory answers,” he said.
John Sullivan (pictured) speaking during the event. Photos of a seminar titled, Russia’s War Against the West: A Conversation with Ambassador John Sullivan. The event is moderated the the Intelligence Project and takes place in the Wexner Building of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. John Joseph Sullivan is an American attorney and government official who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2020 to 2022, and who previously served as the 19th United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2017 to 2019.
Former ambassador sees two tragedies: Ukraine war and the damage Putin has inflicted on his own country
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
The same week President Biden signed legislation to provide $61 billion to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia discussed the run-up to the war during a visit to the Kennedy School.
John J. Sullivan, a Boston native, was appointed by former President Donald Trump in late 2019 to serve as the nation’s top diplomat in Moscow. Though he strongly opposed Vladimir Putin and his regime, he wasn’t “looking for a fight.”
“I was looking for the few areas that we could cooperate,” Sullivan said on Wednesday — like space, cyber, strategic stability, and arms control. He also hoped to discuss the return of wrongfully detained Americans. “I’m sorry to say we made progress on none of that,” he said.
There was little indication that Russia was planning to attack Ukraine during the final year of the Trump presidency or in the first six months of the Biden administration, Sullivan said. Ukraine had not been a major diplomatic concern and rarely came up in talks between the two countries.
But by October 2021, as Russian military infrastructure and troops were amassing on the Ukraine border, U.S. officials realized that Russia was indeed planning to invade its neighbor. Sullivan recalled joining CIA Director Bill Burns to confront Kremlin officials the following month, as Russian officials continued to deny attack plans while boasting about the country’s military capabilities.
In hindsight, Sullivan said, Putin was always going to invade Ukraine regardless of any outside circumstances, including a Trump victory in 2020.
“It’s a catastrophe what’s happened to Ukraine. I feel passionately about it, but it’s equally tragic what’s happened to Russia.”
The Russian leader hasn’t been and won’t be dissuaded even by the great damage the conflict has inflicted on the Russian economy, the military, and its population, according to Sullivan: “Putin does not have an off-ramp; he does not want an off-ramp in Ukraine.” He continued: “It’s a catastrophe what’s happened to Ukraine. I feel passionately about it, but it’s equally tragic what’s happened to Russia” under Putin and as a result of the war. “This is a great country and a great people who could make contributions to humanity.”
A key U.S. priority during Sullivan’s tenure was to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was set to expire less than a month after Biden took office. Sullivan described a frustrating series of talks with Russian officials en route to a deal. “Nothing is ever easy, even if we both wanted the same thing,” he said. (The Russians have since suspended their participation in the treaty.)
Sullivan was the deputy secretary of state from 2017 to 2019, and served briefly as acting secretary after Rex Tillerson was fired from the post in 2018. He succeeded Jon Huntsman as ambassador to Russia after Huntsman stepped down to run for governor of Utah. In fall 2022, the Russian government froze him out and ordered him to leave Moscow, which he did. He’s now banned from traveling to Russia.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Sullivan said, the Russians didn’t feel the Trump administration went easy on them. He saw no evidence that Putin had compromising information on Trump that would explain the U.S. president’s stated admiration for the Russian leader. Sullivan also pushed back on the perception that Putin and Trump had some “corrupt, special relationship.”
Trump had the same kind of relationship with other world leaders, he said, including Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India, and Recep Erdoğan of Turkey. “It’s all about what benefits him, Trump, personally, without a vision of what’s in the interests of the United States more broadly,” he said.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
In 2019, when David Velasquez heard that Massachusetts General Hospital was convening a working group on homelessness among its patient population, he wanted to help.
Alister Martin, an MGH Emergency Department resident, welcomed Velasquez, telling him there was plenty of work to go around and any willing hands were welcome. But as he listened to Velasquez’s story, Martin realized his new colleague not only brought passion to a tangled, societal-scale problem, but also valuable perspective: No one had to explain the challenges of poverty and homelessness to him.
“He told me his story, how he had struggled with homelessness. It was clear this was not just an academic issue to him,” said Martin, today an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It was clear. This is a guy coming in for the right reasons.”
Velasquez grew up in Southern California, the son of asylum seekers from war-torn Central America. He is graduating from the Medical School this spring after seven years on Harvard’s campuses. The first of his family to go to college, Velasquez was not satisfied with a single Harvard degree, or even two — he took a break between his third and fourth years at HMS to earn a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and one in business administration from Harvard Business School. The dual degrees, he said, are tools to extend his medical career beyond the clinic into policy and business with the aim of reforming a healthcare system too often inaccessible to those on society’s fringes.
When asked about his childhood, Velasquez describes a setting quite distant from the white marble and granite of the HMS quadrangle in Boston.
When his family arrived in the U.S. in 1993, they lived for a year in an East Los Angeles church that welcomed undocumented immigrants. Velasquez was born after that time, but his parents still struggled financially, limited by elementary school educations to low-paying jobs.
Velasquez remembers the family losing their home in 2009 and the six of them — his parents, three brothers, and himself — living in a motel. He also remembers his father standing outside a Southern California Home Depot in hopes a contractor would give him a day’s work and his mother, whom he counts as one of his heroes, working constantly cleaning people’s homes.
Despite his parents’ commitment to hard work, money was always short and healthcare a luxury. He recalls his father once making the difficult decision not to take Velasquez’s sick mother to the doctor because he needed the gas to get to work the next day.
Having a son at Harvard hasn’t proven a shield from life’s financial pressures.
In 2019, money ran out and his mother and father had to give up their home and move into a motel for several weeks. Later that same year, his father had a heart attack, which he survived but which generated a $120,000 medical bill.
Velasquez helped the family navigate that difficulty, consulting lawyers in Boston who counseled that they insist the hospital abide by California requirements that its hospitals provide free care to those who can’t afford it. Velasquez flew home after his OB/GYN rotation that year to talk to hospital administrators and handle the paperwork.
“There were many times when my parents got sick, and they never went to the doctor because my dad needed the gas the next day to go to work,” said Velasquez, who in June starts his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “There were neighbors having legs amputated because of uncontrolled diabetes and so forth. That ultimately taught me that there’s a bigger problem here that I need to understand and think about.”
Velasquez’s parents’ journey to the U.S. started in Nicaragua in the late 1970s when his father, at age 19, began fighting against the dictatorial regime of the Somoza family, which had ruled Nicaragua for decades. In 1983, he picked up arms again, joining the Contras in opposition to the Sandinista government, which had taken over.
After the war ended with the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro, his father left the country out of concerns for his own safety, eventually traveling to Mexico where he met Velasquez’s mother. In 1993, wanting a better future, they came to the U.S. seeking asylum because they were not able to return to Nicaragua. It took eight years, but the request was eventually granted.
Velasquez began college at the University of Southern California, planning to become an engineer. The transition to college was nearly overwhelming, and he wrestled with doubts, considering dropping out during his first year.
“I almost dropped out of my first semester, not because of academic reasons, but because I didn’t believe in myself,” Velasquez said, adding that he uses that experience today when he talks to students from similar backgrounds. “Kids that come from nontraditional backgrounds don’t necessarily believe in themselves and have confidence in themselves. I often tell students two things: ‘You can do it,’ and ‘but not alone.’”
Velasquez credits his success so far to the support of many around him. In addition to his family, friends, and classmates at Harvard, several mentors — including Martin — have provided valuable examples, opportunities, and advice.
Velasquez reconnected with Martin during the pandemic in GOTVax, an effort to bring COVID-19 vaccines to communities where the need was greatest. Martin was an organizer of the effort, and Velasquez ran its East Boston branch, helping deliver 1,000 vaccines to people in the community.
Later, in 2021-22, when Martin was a White House Fellow, he organized a round table on healthcare access and tapped Velasquez to be the panel’s only student participant.
“He’s incredibly driven and passionate, but underneath he is really warm and funny,” Martin said of Velasquez. “The thing that really surprised me was just how effective he was right off the bat, how people really loved working with him and how well he fit in.”
Velasquez’s mentors haven’t been limited to faculty members. When he was 19 and an intern at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, a nurse named Matt helped him through a key experience: his first time performing CPR on a patient whose heart had stopped and whom they eventually revived.
At just 19, the idea that he could impact someone else’s life in such a profound way nudged Velasquez further from his engineering path and fed a budding interest in medicine.
“The patient comes in — no pulse — and we started CPR. I go second, and we keep going back and forth. He regained a pulse five, seven times and ultimately was resuscitated,” Velasquez said. “I remember coming home and talking with my roommate about how, if I, as a 19-year-old without many skills, could contribute in some way to helping that patient come back to life, how much one could do with the field of medicine?”
Pulitzer Prize winner delivers keynote at Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s 2024 Symposium
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Nikole Hannah-Jones was 11 the first time she wrote a letter to the editor.
She regularly read the paper in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, with her father and was struck by how Black people only appeared there in stories about crime. So when Jesse Jackson ran for president and did poorly in her state, she decided to write about how it made her feel.
When her letter was published, she said, it was one of the first times she experienced the power of the written word and how journalism could be used as a tool for “telling our own stories.”
“I could see something that I thought was unjust in the world, and I could write something about it,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in her keynote address at “Reckoning with History, Shaping Our Future,” the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative’s 2024 Symposium. “I couldn’t change it, but I could at least force people to think about it, to grapple with it.”
As an investigative journalist, Hannah-Jones has devoted her career to highlighting racial injustice around her, a notable example being her award-winning “The 1619 Project,” which reframes American history, placing slavery at the center of the nation’s development and examining how its legacy continues to shape lives today.
“That’s when I started to understand that what they’re calling history is not actually what happened.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The year 1619 had been on Hannah-Jones’ radar since she was 15. She said that as a young person, she noticed how few Black figures emerged in her history class and assumed there must be a good reason for that. But when she took a semester-long class on African American history, she learned “more about Black people’s contributions, not just to the United States but globally, than I learned my entire life.” It was transformative.
“That’s when I started to understand that what they’re calling history is not actually what happened,” she said. Her teacher introduced her to the book “Before the Mayflower,” in which she was introduced to The White Lion, an English ship that brought the first enslaved Africans to the U.S. in 1619, well before the Mayflower arrived. “As a journalist, I [always felt] like I was working my way slowly back to 1619,” she told the audience. “[Slavery] would corrupt and corrode and shape everything about the United States.”
Hannah-Jones, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, spoke on the first day of the two-day event at the African Meeting House in Boston, the oldest existing Black church building in the country and part of the Museum of African American History. She was joined in conversation by Kiersten Hash, a junior at the College.
Hannah-Jones pitched her project to The Times when she realized the 400-year anniversary of slavery was approaching. One reason was that she wanted to help people understand the country we live in today and why inequity is so pervasive. But her other reason was that she wanted to answer the question that “every Black person” gets at least once in their life: Slavery was a long time ago, sowhy can’t you just get over it?
“I was like, ‘I’m going to provide the answer to that, which is we can’t get over it because y’all haven’t gotten over it,’” she said. “We have refused to be truthful about slavery and how it has shaped our society.”
Moderator Kiersten Hash (left) in conversation with Hannah-Jones at the African Meeting House in Boston.
But, she noted, that is only the beginning — a necessary step but not a whole resolution.
“We have to start with the truth-telling, but the truth-telling is just the beginning. No reckoning has occurred. We’re not even close,” Hannah-Jones said. An incredible amount of work still needs to be done, including financial compensation to descendants, investment in communities affected, and further efforts to repair the harm “that cannot be fixed.”
She asked the event organizers to share information about what Harvard has committed to doing, including through a $100 million fund to advance the recommendations from the Presidential Committee; the recommendations serve as a reckoning of Harvard’s own legacy of slavery. Examples of Harvard’s investments in repair work with descendant communities include the Du Bois Scholars Program, an intensive, nine-week summer research internship at Harvard College for students from historically Black colleges and universities, and the Reparative Partnership Grant Program, which is meant for community organizations to advance “innovative and impactful projects that address systemic inequities affecting people who have been harmed by slavery.”
A major reason Hannah-Jones focuses so adamantly on financial compensation is because it seems like “we want to do everything but that.” She reminded the audience that slavery was an economic decision; racism was simply a tool used to justify the act of buying and enslaving people. And as slavery was an economic decision, it requires economic repair.
“We understand in every other aspect of life, if you do something to me, then you have to pay me for that harm,” she said, advocating that even more resources should be going toward descendant communities. “[If you’re] not talking about cash payment, you’re not actually talking about repair.”
Toward the end of the event, Hannah-Jones shared a bit about what motivated her to do this work.
“Rage,” she said, which elicited laughs from the audience.
She went on to say there is much that makes her feel hopeless, but she feels her work pays back a debt to her family and her collective ancestors, and paves the way for generations to come. And change is possible.
“If you know that we chose it, you know we can build something else,” she said.
Jeremy M. Weinstein named dean of Harvard Kennedy School
Political scientist, who also served as academic leader and in various roles in Obama administration, to assume post July 1
6 min read
Jeremy M. Weinstein, an accomplished scholar of political science, experienced academic leader, and dedicated public servant, will become dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government on July 1, interim President Alan M. Garber announced Monday.
Weinstein, M.A. ’01, Ph.D. ’03, is currently the Kleinheinz Professor of International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. A Stanford faculty member since 2004, he has served that institution by developing and establishing cross-university initiatives and leading efforts to advance the social sciences, global and area studies, and issues of ethics, technology, and public policy.
“Widely respected for his energetic and empowering leadership style, [Weinstein] is responsible for the conception, establishment, and development of major initiatives,” wrote Garber in his message to the HKS community. “Jeremy is an exceptional scholar and leader with significant high-level policy experience who will bring to the deanship a rare combination of talents at a pivotal moment for HKS.”
“Jeremy is an exceptional scholar and leader with significant high-level policy experience who will bring to the deanship a rare combination of talents at a pivotal moment for HKS.”
Alan M. Garber, interim Harvard President
A tenured professor at Stanford since 2009, Weinstein has worked broadly on issues of comparative politics and public policy, with expertise on civil wars and political violence, ethnic politics, the political economy of development, democracy and governance, policing, and migration.
His scholarship has been published widely in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, and more. His first book, “Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence” won the William H. Riker Book Award from the American Political Science Association for best book on political economy. He is also co-author of “Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action,” which received the Gregory Luebbert Book Award for best book in comparative politics.
Weinstein is co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab, a research team that aims to improve the lives of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants through partnerships with governments, nonprofits, and others to design and evaluate innovative policies and programs.
More recently, Weinstein has been teaching and writing on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy. His recent, co-authored book, “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot,” was excerpted in The Atlantic, Time, and Fast Company, and reviewed widely.
“The Harvard Kennedy School is a singular institution in the landscape of American higher education known for its unique combination of cutting-edge social science, breadth in public policy, and abiding commitment to public engagement. I am thrilled to return to Harvard to become dean and simply can’t imagine a better platform for working with extraordinary scholars, students, and practitioners to understand and address the most important policy challenges of the next decade.”
In addition to his wide-ranging scholarship, Weinstein is an innovative and experienced academic leader. Working with a team of faculty, he designed and launched Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), a university-wide initiative that trains and invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions to address persistent social problems. As faculty director of SIL, Weinstein is responsible for the leadership, management, and fundraising for Stanford’s key initiative to accelerate the public impact of the social sciences.
Weinstein has also played a critical role in curricular innovations at the intersection of ethics, policy, and technology. He co-teaches a popular undergraduate course in computer science — “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change.”
He also launched and directs a new undergraduate major in data science and social systems, which enables undergraduates to develop expertise in computer science, statistics, and the social sciences, and to apply these skills to address important social problems.
Weinstein’s previous institutional leadership roles include serving as the Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, a role in which he managed 15 centers and programs with a network of more than 400 affiliated faculty members. Earlier in his career, he served twice as the Ford-Dorsey Director for the Center for African Studies from 2007 to 2008 and again from 2011 to 2013.
“We are delighted to welcome Jeremy back to Harvard,” interim Provost John Manning said. “He is a proven institution-builder who has helped bring about innovation across disciplines and impactfully connected his teaching and research to real-world questions that shape the global landscape. He will be a superb and collegial leader for the HKS community in the years ahead.”
A dedicated public servant, Weinstein has also worked at the highest level of government on major foreign policy and national security challenges. Between 2013 and 2015, Weinstein served as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and before that as chief of staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In these roles, he was Ambassador Samantha Power’s principal policy adviser and chief strategist, and led a team of professional diplomats, political appointees, and civil servants.
He also served as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies Committee, which advises the cabinet and the president on foreign policy issues. Before joining the State Department, Weinstein served at the White House as the director for development and democracy in the National Security Council from 2009–2011. He played a critical role in the design and launch of President Barack Obama’s Open Government Partnership, a global coalition of more than 75 governments working to transform how government serves its citizens.
Weinstein earned his B.A. in political science, economics, and public policy with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1997 and received his graduate degrees in political economy and government from Harvard.
Among his many awards, Weinstein received the Karl Deutsch Award for his significant contributions to the study of international relations, the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford, and the Joseph Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, given to the outstanding teaching fellow at Harvard when he was a Ph.D. student.
At Harvard, Weinstein will be joined by his wife, Rachel Gibson, a 2000 M.P.P. graduate of HKS, and two children.
Weinstein will succeed Douglas W. Elmendorf, A.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’89, who has served as dean since January 2016.
Kevin Young with Brenda Tindal at the Lowell Lecture Hall.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
7 min read
Kevin Young ’92 reflects on what took root at Harvard and how it’s grown
When Kevin Young ’92 came to Harvard as an undergraduate, he dreamed of becoming a poet. He wanted to write about Louisiana and his family, something he had yet to see in poetry collections.
Young studied under celebrated poets Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido, joined the Dark Room Collective, a Boston-based community of African American writers, and threw himself into poetry.
“I’ve never wanted to do anything else,” said Young as he reminisced about his time at Harvard Wednesday to an audience gathered at Lowell Lecture Hall to celebrate him as he was awarded the 2024 Harvard Arts Medal.
The Harvard Arts Medal recognizes a Harvard or Radcliffe alum or faculty member who has demonstrated excellence and achievement in the arts.
For Young, all his intellectual endeavors are closely tied, and they all took root during his time at Harvard, where he took classes in poetry, learned letterpress printing, handled archival material, and took inspiration from his professors and peers.
“All these roles are expressions of me, but also part of the work I do,” said Young during a conversation with Brenda Tindal, chief campus curator for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“Once I started to think about the people I tried to write about in my poems, people I hadn’t seen in poetry, my family and Louisiana, for one, were also people who weren’t always in the archives. And the two things seemed similar. Writing poetry can be an act of recovery. It is certainly an act of remembrance. And for me, that’s what archives were …”
Writing poems and curating archives are also connected to directing a museum, said Young. “We definitely show things at the museum that we want you to understand better and help contextualize, but we don’t put our finger too hard on that. We have objects like Harriet Tubman’s shawl and Emmet Till’s casket. How can you not have all the feelings in seeing these objects and encountering them? The important thing is that encounter, and for me that’s in poetry, that’s in archives, that’s in museums.”
Presented by the Office for the Arts at Harvard in partnership with the Department of English, the ceremony kicked off Arts First (April 24-28), the University’s annual festival showcasing the creativity of students, faculty, staff and University affiliates in the arts.
Harvard University interim President Alan Garber awarded the medal to Young by welcoming him to join the list of previous honorees, who include Yo-Yo Ma ’76, Frank Gehry, G.S.D. ’57, Ar.D. ’00, Ruben Blades, LL.M. ’85, and Colson Whitehead ’91, among many others. The first Harvard Arts Medal was awarded in 1995.
“From the crowded field came individuals of outstanding achievement in the arts; they created worlds of possibility and potential with art, in architecture, and with music, poetry, and writing,” said Garber. “Today his singular talent joins their revered number. If we all share what Kevin Young has called, and I quote him, ‘an American desire for more,’ then our medalist more than delivers. He is an acclaimed poet and essayist. He is an editor. He is a museum director. He is thrillingly prolific to all of our benefit.”
Young has published 15 books of poetry and prose, most recently “Stones,” shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and “Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015,” longlisted for the National Book Award. His poetry collection “Jelly Roll: A Blues” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2003. The poetry editor at The New Yorker since 2017, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, Young is the editor of nine poetry volumes, including the highly praised anthology “African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song.”
Describing herself as a friend and fan of Young, Tracy K. Smith ’94, professor of English and of African and African American studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, offered remarks during the ceremony. She spoke of her long friendship with Young — they met as undergrads at Harvard — and her admiration for his masterful craft as a poet of the African American experience in the U.S.
Smith spoke about “Saying Grace,” a poem included in Young’s first poetry book, “Most Way Home,” published in 1995. Young’s senior thesis was the basis for this book, which covered oral histories of the South.
Tracy K. Smith.
“The miracle here is that a grounded, gritty, even a grisly memory with the proper attention floods the reader with a sense of longing, reunion, and astonishment,” said Smith. “Young has published 10 books of poems and several works of highly researched nonfiction since the release of ‘Most Way Home,’ but I begin at that beginning because early poems like this one is where I met Kevin Young as a poet and where, here at Harvard, I first began to learn from the example of his dedication.”
Smith recalled the time when Young printed a letterpress broadside of his poem “Reward,” which was part of his then-thesis in progress and eventually made it into “Most Way Home.” “Even then he took himself seriously as an artist,” said Smith. “I remember the reading Kevin gave in Adams House in the spring of 1992 and feeling my heart catch in my throat when his voice rose steady, already in his now-familiar cadence, and with an authority I thought was the domain of only older folk or professors and famous poets.”
As part of the ceremony, undergraduate poets Taylor Fang ’25, Mia Word ’24, and Isabella Cho ’24 asked Young questions about his writing process, finding his voice, and the role of poetry in understanding and talking about history.
“I’m really interested in how history shapes us and how history is encountered by ordinary folks,” said Young. “To me, one of the great things about poetry is that it makes the ordinary extraordinary, and it makes the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence … I think a good museum does something of that, too. You see yourself in it and you see each other.”
Of his writing process, Young said it’s important to try to capture feelings and sensations, leaving the understanding for later. He advised young poets to wrestle with language and form and make them their own, and be open to revise drafts because it is part of the practice.
“It’s not always fun revising, but it also is part of getting it right,” said Young. “It’s not always going to feel 100 percent, and in a way, that’s part of the yearning and searching. … That’s maybe why you write 25 books because you’re trying to get it right.”
Young ended the ceremony with a reading of the poem “Hereafter,” and he called on the audience to open their hearts and minds to the arts.
“Art welcomes you, and moreover awaits you,” said Young. “Start something. Make something. Dream alone or with others. Sing. Come on in.”
A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.
Adam Tenforde, a sports medicine physician at Mass General Brigham and director of running medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, has logged plenty of miles himself: He was an All-American long-distance runner at Stanford University and a competitor in the 2002-2004 Olympic trials. We asked him how long the aging body can withstand a regular running regimen.
I certainly have a bias as someone who has competed and who continues to enjoy running as my primary form of exercise, but, in general, running can be done safely over the course of a lifetime. Which doesn’t mean it won’t sometimes hurt.
When you break down pain, there are a few different patterns. One question to ask: Does this pain improve or get worse with activity? Pain that improves with activity — we refer to that as a warm-up phenomenon, and it’s usually a sign that this is a less significant injury. On the other hand, pain that builds during movement can be a sign that the runner is experiencing cumulative stress and damage to tissue that could lead to a more significant problem.
Another key issue: Is the pain causing biomechanical changes? Is someone moving in a way that leads to compensatory movement that stresses other joints or tissues in an abnormal way? Pain that starts with one region of the body and moves to a second part is a sign that the runner has to modify their activity and figure out the source of the pain.
“There’s a common myth that running is bad for joints, but that idea has not played out in the research.”
There’s a common myth that running is bad for joints, but that idea has not played out in the research. Running and loading lead to adaptations to muscle, tendons, bones, and joints. Cartilage actually needs load to maintain its normal architecture and strength. Meanwhile, a lack of physical activity is associated with people being overweight or obese, which can contribute to conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. However, if a joint has pain that builds with activity, associated swelling, or other mechanical symptoms, this might be a sign of abnormal stress that could cause worse joint injury and should be evaluated by a medical provider.
What level of running will cause an injury? We don’t have a precise answer. From the literature on bone stress injury, it’s been proposed that more than 20 miles a week might put you at an elevated risk for injury. But a lot of people enjoy running more than 20 miles a week, and if you’re training for a race you need to exceed that number.
If someone loves to run, you really have to give me a good reason why that would be a bad thing for them to continue. It comes down to risk-benefit ratio. Some people will choose to run despite having knee or hip arthritis. In those cases, the goals would be to identify ways to optimize the mechanics of those joints to move in a way that ideally does not create pain or creates minimal pain that contributes to minimal inflammation. It’s a much more complex story than just “run until you can’t.” In each stage of life, there is an opportunity to maintain physical activity. You just want to have physicians and other medical providers who can support you.
In its 11th year, the Star-Friedman Challenge provides seed funding for novel research in the physical or social sciences, with an emphasis on new directions that might not otherwise be supported through traditional funding channels.
The program was first established in 2013 by a gift from James A. Star ’83 and expanded five years later by support from Josh Friedman ’76, M.B.A. ’80, J.D. ’82, and Beth Friedman. This year’s awardees were celebrated April 18.
Neuromodulatory effects of stabilized endogenous peptides
Fei Chen, Assistant Professor, Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology; Core Faculty Member, Broad Institute
Small strings of amino acids called peptides, including insulin, oxytocin, and leptin, serve important functions in the body and hold promise as biologic drugs. The use of peptides for therapeutic purposes has been hampered by their quick degradation, and many nervous-system-soluble peptides have not been well characterized due to their instability. Chen and colleagues will develop libraries of stabilized peptides to characterize their cell-type activity in the nervous system. Their aim is to identify stabilization strategies for more than 100 bioactive peptides.
Why do we have fat-handling organelles in neurons?
Jeeyun Chung, Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Lipid droplets are organelles inside cells that store fatty acids and regulate many cellular functions, but their roles in brain cells, such as neurons, remain unclear. Chung will elucidate the molecular characteristics, regulation, and functions of neuronal lipid droplets to understand how their metabolism contributes to nervous system health and function. The research should provide new insights into the role of lipid droplets in neurological disorders.
Advancing health equity by increasing take-up of U.S. poverty alleviation programs
Rita Hamad, Associate Professor, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
The Earned Income Tax Credit is the largest U.S. poverty alleviation policy for families with children. It provides up to $7,400 annually for working families as a tax refund, and it has well-established health benefits. Yet one in four eligible families do not claim the benefit, in part because of the complexity of tax filing. Hamad will lead a study to identify actionable and scalable approaches for increasing take-up of the tax credit to advance health equity.
Unlocking the treasure trove: Analog data for studying climate change and beyond
Miaki Ishii, Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Increasing temperatures are bringing severe weather phenomena, from floods to fires, which cause billions of dollars in damages each year. Ishii and colleagues will use more than 150 years of historical weather observations to document how such extreme weather events have been worsening since the pre-industrial era. She will lead the creation of software to efficiently convert analog meteorological data to digital, and to demonstrate the significant value of historical data for climate research and more. The team will work with Seikei University in Tokyo to salvage massive amounts of historical weather data that exists only in paper or analog form.
Transforming organ storage with porous water
Jarad Mason, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Korkut Uygun, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, Harvard Medical School; Director of Cell, Tissue, and Organ Resource Core at Massachusetts General Hospital; Deputy Director of Research, Shriners Hospital for Children
Organ transplantation is a life-saving treatment for patients with end-stage organ failure. Every year, thousands of potentially transplantable organs are lost or rejected because they incur damage due to lack of oxygen while they’re stored and transported to the patient. The researchers will explore innovations from Mason’s lab in microporous water, loaded with nanoparticles that carry high densities of oxygen, that could enable longer preservation times for organs and save more lives.
Biodiversity collapse and recovery at the end of the world: Using East Gondwana’s fossil record to understand Earth’s greatest mass extinction
Stephanie Pierce, Professor, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Museum of Comparative Zoology
Studying mass extinction events in the deep past can provide a unique perspective for understanding current and future impacts of climate change. Pierce proposes to focus on the largest biodiversity crisis in the history of life, the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction, which occurred 252 million years ago and ended in 90 percent of all species vanishing. Her team will conduct paleontological excavations along the Bowen Basin in Australia, which is part of the eastern Gondwanan supercontinent, now modern Australia and New Zealand. Her aim is to chronicle biodiversity collapse and recovery in this relatively poorly studied but historically significant region, and the extent to which geography may influence survival outcomes.
Bridging quantum chemistry and physics by chirality
Suyang Xu, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Joonho Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
In chemistry, a molecule is said to be chiral if it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image — much like the left hand placed on top of the right. Chirality determines many molecules’ chemical, pharmaceutical, and biochemical properties, but there is currently no general strategy for driving chemical reactions that control for chirality. The researchers are proposing a new way to synthesize chiral molecules based on electronic selectivity, rather than structural selectivity, as is typically used in chemical engineering. They will leverage breakthroughs in quantum materials to define a precise, efficient process for developing molecules with specific chiral properties.
DuVernay on exploring racism, antisemitism, caste in ‘Origin’
Despite horrors, film ‘a collection of love stories’
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
In a talk at the Kennedy School Wednesday, award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Ava DuVernay said the impetus for her latest film, “Origin” — an adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” — wasn’t racism, antisemitism, or caste.
“I have to be motivated by human emotions,” said the “Selma” and “13th” director, explaining her decision to make the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilkerson the protagonist of the film.
“I went in thinking, ‘I’m going to write a story about a woman writing a book,’” DuVernay said. Centering Wilkerson allowed her to explore “the interiority of the character. To write a movie about a woman on a journey.”
In “Caste,” Wilkerson explores underlying systems of social hierarchy, exploring connections between American racism, the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, and the subjugation of Dalits in India.
DuVernay said that after a second reading, she realized that Wilkerson was an obvious protagonist. This was partly because the author had shared on social media about the recent deaths of her parents and her husband.
“I don’t see my work as being about trauma. I see all my work as being about triumph, and you cannot triumph if you do not know what you are overcoming.”
Ava DuVernay
“I realized those losses happened when she was writing ‘Caste,’” DuVernay recalled. “She’s traveling the world. Her losses — and what she’s finding and gaining — all of those collide and all of those make their way into the book somehow.”
In some ways, DuVernay said, Wilkerson’s journey paralleled her own. In 2020, when “Caste” came out, DuVernay had recently lost a close family member. In addition, due to the pandemic, she recalled “everyone [feeling] afraid.” Soon after, the murder of George Floyd added to the “heightened emotions” of the day.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad with DuVernay at the John F. Kennedy Forum.
Wilkerson’s personal story “ignited” the historical information for DuVernay. “Origin” juxtaposes the contemporary story of Wilkerson and her book’s historical material, which “spans 400 years and seven different time periods.”
DuVernay said depicting the experience of the Dalits, the caste in India relegated to the lowest and most degrading work, was uncomfortable. She felt that as a non-Dalit, “I shouldn’t be doing it.” While she felt obligated to include such a major part of the book in her film, the experiences didn’t feel like hers to tell. In fact, for the filmmaker, it harkened back to another era — and another kind of injustice. “I likened it to well-meaning white people depicting African American life when Black people were not allowed to make films or given access to filmmaking,” she said. Without representation in the process, she concluded, “there’s usually a little something missing.”
DuVernay was joined on stage for the talk by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School.
“You’ve been making films about systemic racism for a long time, so what convinced you in the story of ‘Caste’ that Isabel Wilkerson had gotten it right?” asked Muhammad. “That somehow our language wasn’t quite right to capture … And I have a line here from the film, ‘Racism as the primary language to describe everything is insufficient.’ So talk us through your adaptation of this thesis.”
“I don’t say that she got it right,” DuVernay responded. “I think that her pursuit of her idea is fascinating.”
Describing the two years she spent interviewing Wilkerson, DuVernay explained her nuanced take.
“There are commonalities and there is an entry point that is shared across oppressions,” she said. “We don’t have to compete in the ‘oppression Olympics’ to see who is suffering more. This very simple idea of hierarchy of human beings based on a random set of traits is at the core of all of the -isms,” she concluded, naming racism and antisemitism along with Islamophobia and homophobia.
Despite the horrors in “Origin,” DuVernay said she sees her film as “a collection of love stories.”
“I don’t see my work as being about trauma. I see all my work as being about triumph, and you cannot triumph if you do not know what you are overcoming.”
“In our family we have a motto,” Justin said. “‘One plus one equals three.’ When you put two of us in a boat together, we feel unstoppable.”
Only two other American teams have won the five-day Snipe competition, which is based in the Callahans’ hometown of Miami and this year drew an extra-competitive field: 46 teams representing 19 countries. Cheering the Harvard Sailing twins through gusty conditions was their father, Paul Callahan ’80, M.B.A. ’92, a Paralympian whose example has been a lifelong inspiration for his boys.
Callahan twins sailing in the 2024 Snipe Junior World Championship in Miami.
Credit: Lexi Pline Photographer
“From when we were 2 years old, he taught us that there is no such word as can’t,” Justin said. “He showed us that the mind is the strongest thing that we have.”
Paul has been a quadriplegic for more than 40 years, after slipping on a wet floor and breaking his neck during his junior year of College. The injury didn’t prevent him from soon taking a second, more serious shot at sailing.
“I sailed a bit as a child,” Paul recalled. “But I was really introduced to sailing by a chance meeting with an ex-Marine who was a sailing instructor in Newport. I enjoyed it so much that I started competing shortly after. It is the ultimate challenge because there are so many variables that you have to account for.”
As Paul’s dedication to the sport grew, so did his skill level. He qualified for the 2000 Sydney Summer Paralympics and the 2012 London Summer Paralympics. When not training or competing, he worked full-time in the nonprofit sector, including as the founder of Newport, R.I.-based Sail to Prevail, and helped raise his family. Today, he never misses an opportunity to see the twins compete.
“It’s a parent’s dream to see your children get along so well together, set a goal together, and accomplish a goal together,” said Paul, who will visit Cambridge this week and in May to watch Justin and Mitchell sail in the ICSA National Championships.
The situation is a poignant reversal from just a few years ago, when the boys were the spectators and their father’s love of the sport instilled the same in them.
“It was amazing watching him get out of his wheelchair onto the boat,” Mitchell said. “From when we were born, Justin and I saw that no obstacle can get in the way of your passion.”
His brother feels the same gratitude.
“I can’t be more thankful for the childhood we were given,” Justin said. “When you have a quadriplegic father, that already teaches you so much about kindness, compassion, caring for others, not thinking of yourself first.”
America’s graying. We need to change the way we think about age.
Experts say instead of disability, focus needs to shift to ability, health, with greater participation, economically and socially
Alvin Powell
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
People in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s run marathons, write books, and go to work daily. But the predominant national conversation on aging focuses on disability rather than ability, something experts say is a problem as participation of America’s older adults grows more important, economically and socially, as the nation ages.
And it’s not just the young with the attitude problem. Caitlin Coyle, director of UMass Boston’s Center for Social & Demographic Research on Aging, said some of the biggest perpetuators of negative stereotypes are those growing older themselves.
“How we talk about it is powerful,” Coyle said Wednesday, as part of a discussion of the topic at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We do a lot of internalized ageism with self-talk like ‘Oh, I feel so old today,’ or ‘I can’t do that,’ ‘I’m too old for that,’ or ‘I can’t stay up late.’ I think if we start to engage people in thinking about how they talk about aging outwardly — and also how they think about aging internally — we can really start to shift the societal narrative.”
The panelists at the event “A reexamination of aging: Living longer, happier, and healthier” agreed attitudes about aging set expectations for ourselves and others, but what’s also important are programs and policies crafted to encourage healthy aging — via prevention and risk-factor reduction, along with involvement in society, through work, volunteerism, family relationships, religious organizations, or other ways of engaging that can bring meaning to life.
“I think if we start to engage people in thinking about how they talk about aging outwardly — and also how they think about aging internally — we can really start to shift the societal narrative.”
Caitlin Coyle
“We are expecting to live much longer than our parents and grandparents. And the structures we put in place to support healthy aging are really crucial,” said New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, a Chan School graduate and member of the panel. “At every turn, we are not just looking at the averted negative consequences of unhealthy aging, but looking at the aspirational, forward-looking indicators of healthy aging.”
The discussion hosted by The Studio at the Chan School was moderated by Kay Lazar, a reporter at The Boston Globe, and also featured Marisol Amaya, executive director of La Alianza Hispana, and Andrew Scott, professor of economics at London Business School and author of the book “The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives.”
Panelists acknowledged that declining health and rising disability are part of the landscape as one grows old, but Scott said it seems that when people think about aging they “go straight to the end” where those factors take on greater importance.
He attributed part of that to the “medicalization” of aging, which focuses on health problems and death. But what’s lost in between are, for many, years of increased life satisfaction, greater acceptance of oneself and others, decreased pressure to live up to ideals of how to look and behave, greater emotional stability during crises, and new opportunities to learn and develop new skills.
“The trouble with aging is we tend to go straight to the end of life. And that’s one of the reasons why we don’t like to think about a longer life being about having more future,” Scott said. “How do you think about that? How do you prepare for it? We see aging as an event — you’re 65 years old — but it’s a process that is relevant to all ages. What can you do to manage that process and how do you make sure you make the most of it?”
The tendency to view aging through a medical lens is not the only issue, however. Family structure in the nation has changed as people have fewer children and multigenerational living arrangements grow less common. This has led to an increasing tendency to segregate society by age and worsened the problem of isolation among the elderly.
At La Alianza Hispana, a social service agency focused on the Latinx community of Greater Boston, the elderly are provided programming based on individual preferences — bingo, for instance, isn’t for everyone and should be reserved for those who love it, Amaya said. Others want to play instruments, others to learn something new, and still others to teach.
Accordingly, the nonprofit’s elder-services program emphasizes flexibility, even hiring people still willing to work and able to draw on a lifetime of experience. Some are lacking in computer and other tech skills, but those can be taught, which the organization does, she said.
“We are flexible. We always encourage them to do more, empower them, because they see barriers and say, ‘I cannot do it,’” Amaya said.
As we create a society that is more elderly-friendly, Scott said thinking about the economics of living longer is important, since many fear outliving their resources.
But it’s also important to think about how to allow people to stay productive longer, which has to begin earlier in life by guarding one’s health through better habits, thinking about how to make jobs more age-friendly, and perhaps shifting roles from those that require strength to those that emphasize skill and experience.
A significant amount of attention must also be paid, panelists agreed, to reducing inequality in healthful aging. The trend toward healthier aging is not universal, with Black and brown communities making up a disproportionate number of those who die before 65, Vasan said. That highlights the importance of addressing preventative health in those communities in the decades before 65.
“I think inequity is a real missing piece in the dialogue, the public narrative, around longevity and aging,” Vasan said. “How do we create a civic expectation that healthier, longer lives are more equitably experienced? These are not mutually exclusive agendas. The equity agenda is central to the life expectancy agenda. There is no path that doesn’t go through equity. Addressing the causes of premature death gets us to healthier, longer lives for everybody.”
Conversation makes a big difference in study of isolated older people
Tracy Hampton
MGH Communications
4 min read
Just talking to other people can stimulate different brain functions among socially isolated older adults, even when the interactions are internet-based, according to a new clinical trial out of Massachusetts General Hospital.
The results are published in The Gerontologist, a flagship journal of the Gerontological Society of America.
“We initiated the first proof of concept behavioral intervention study in 2010, nearly a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic drawing attention to the detrimental effects of social isolation on our overall health,” explained lead author Hiroko H. Dodge, the principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health–funded trials.
The 186-participant phase 2 randomized trial, called I-CONECT, used the internet and webcams to allow for conversational interactions between trained interviewers and socially isolated individuals aged 75 years and older who had normal cognition or mild cognitive impairment.
Investigators rotated conversation partners assigned to each participant to enhance the novelty of the experience, provided user-friendly devices allowing participants without any internet/webcam experience to easily engage in video-based conversations, and encouraged conversations with standardized daily themes and picture prompts.
Thirty-minute conversations were conducted four times per week for six months and then twice per week for an additional six months. A control group of similar individuals did not participate in such conversations, but both the intervention and control groups received weekly 10-minute telephone check-ins.
After the initial six-month period, the intervention group had a higher global cognitive test score compared with the control group with a large effect size among those with mild cognitive impairment. Also, intervention group participants with normal cognition had scores indicating higher language-based executive function.
At the end of final six-month period, intervention group participants with mild cognitive impairment had test scores indicating better memory-related brain function than those in the control group. Measures of emotional well-being improved in both control and intervention groups, suggesting that emotion can be boosted by brief weekly telephone calls while improving cognitive function requires frequent conversational engagement.
Also, brain imaging tests showed that the intervention group had increased connectivity within the dorsal attention network—a region important for the maintenance of visuospatial attention—relative to the control group, although this finding must be interpreted carefully because of the limited number of participants assessed due to COVID-19–related research restrictions.
Upon requests from former trial participants asking to continuously have conversations, Dodge and her colleagues have established a nonprofit organization, the I-CONNECT Foundation. The foundation has been providing social interactions to isolated older individuals in the community free of charge, using the same materials used in the trial.
“Our next goal is to extend these activities to reach more isolated individuals in need, as well as to delve into the biological mechanisms underlying the impact of social interactions on our brain functions,” said Dodge. “Providing frequent stimulating conversational interactions via the internet could be an effective home-based dementia risk-reduction strategy against social isolation and cognitive decline. We plan to extend this therapy to geriatric outpatient populations, for which we are currently fundraising, and also examine its effectiveness for mild to moderate depressive symptoms.”
The team is also exploring the possibility of providing conversational interactions via chatbot — an artificial intelligence – trained robot that provides stimulating conversations as a cost-effective intervention. “We are aware that human contacts are critically important for our emotional well-being, but for cognitive stimulations, chatbots might work as effectively as humans, which we are currently investigating,” said Dodge, who serves as the director of Research Analytics at the recently inaugurated Interdisciplinary Brain Center at MGH and is a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School.
Funding was provided by the National Institute on Aging.
Planktonic foraminifera fossils offer clues into future changes in global biodiversity.
Credit: Tracy Aze/University of Leeds
Fossil record stretching millions of years shows tiny ocean creatures on the move before Earth heats up
For hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have teemed with single-celled organisms called foraminifera, hard-shelled, microscopic creatures at the bottom of the food chain. The fossil record of these primordial specks offers clues into future changes in global biodiversity, related to our warming climate.
Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that’s among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that environmental events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as an early warning signal.
The results are in Nature, in a study co-led by Anshuman Swain, a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and affiliate of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. A physicist by training who applies networks to biological and paleontological data, Swain teamed with co-first author Adam Woodhouse at the University of Bristol to probe the global community structure of ancient marine plankton that could serve as an early warning system for future extinction of ocean life.
“Can we leverage the past to understand what might happen in the future, in the context of global change?” said Swain, who previously co-authored a study about the formation of polar ice caps driving changes in marine plankton communities over the last 15 million years. “Our work offers new insight into how biodiversity responds spatially to global changes in climate, especially during intervals of global warmth, which are relevant to future warming projections.”
Anshuman Swain with fossil specimens.
File photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
The researchers used the Triton database, developed by Woodhouse, to ascertain how the composition of foraminifera communities changed over millions of years — orders of magnitude longer time spans than are typically studied at this scale. They focused on the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, the last major period of sustained high global temperatures since the dinosaurs, analogous to worst-case global warming scenarios.
They found that before an extinction pulse 34 million years ago, marine communities became highly specialized everywhere but in the southern high latitudes, implying that these micro-plankton migrated en masse to higher latitudes and away from the tropics. This finding indicates that community-scale changes like the ones seen in these migration patterns are evident in fossil records long before actual extinctions and losses in biodiversity occur.
The researchers thus think it’s important to place emphasis on monitoring the structure of biological communities to predict future extinctions.
According to Swain, the results from the foraminifera studies open avenues of inquiry into other organismal groups, including other marine life, sharks, and insects. Such studies may spark a revolution in an emerging field called paleoinformatics, or using large spatiotemporally resolved databases of fossil records to glean new insights into the future Earth.
The researchers’ study was made possible by a longstanding National Science Foundation field study aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel, which over the last 55 years has conducted ocean drilling around the world. The project is set to expire this year.
Gwen Carr (right) tells Sandra Susan Smith that people must be committed to having difficult conversations about race and inequality regularly.
Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Mother, uncle of two whose deaths at hands of police officers ignited movement talk about turning pain into activism, keeping hope alive
It has been nearly 10 years since Eric Garner died after a New York police officer locked him in a prohibited chokehold, and his last words — “I can’t breathe” — became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. And it has been almost four years since George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt into his neck during an arrest, sparking a wave of protest against police brutality across the nation.
But for Gwen Carr, Garner’s mother, and Selwyn Jones, Floyd’s uncle, the grief over the deaths of their loved ones remains fresh. The two sat down on April 18 with Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice, to talk about how they have channeled their pain into activism — and to explain why they still have great optimism even though some of the energy that powered the movement has waned.
“That fateful day put me in a dark place, and I just wanted to go to sleep and don’t wake up until this terrible nightmare was over,” said Carr, recalling July 17, 2014, the day her son was killed. “But it was never over … I had to talk to myself … I asked myself, ‘What are you going to do?’ What I decided to do was to turn my mourning into a movement and turn my sorrow into a strategy. I was going to go out, and I was going to try to change laws and talk to people to try not to let this tragedy happen to another person.”
Carr, a longtime train operator with the New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, has done that. She started an organization to help families that have been victims of police brutality, and thanks to her advocacy, in June 2020, the New York State Assembly passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which makes it a crime for a police officer to use a chokehold.
Jones also recalled the day, May 25, 2020, when his life changed. “That day … everybody’s eyes were open to police brutality, to systemic racism, to hatred,” said Jones, who co-founded a nonprofit in honor of his nephew two years ago. “The only thing we can do to make this thing better is to sit and have these conversations so we can prevent those things from happening …”
Killings of Black people in fatal encounters with the police have continued. Smith, who is also director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, cited numbers from a Washington Post article that found that since Garner’s murder, police have shot and killed nearly 10,000 people, 27 percent of whom are Black.
“I just want to keep his name alive. I want the world to know who my son was and that he wasn’t just a news story.”
Gwen Carr
Carr and Jones acknowledge the outcry that followed Garner and Floyd’s killings has dwindled over time, but they insist the struggle must go on.
Jones urged people to remember his nephew’s brutal death to keep the outrage alive to work for social change. “If you can remember that moment when all of you saw my nephew lying on the ground, crying, screaming, and begging,” said Jones. “Can you remember how that felt and how wrong it was?”
Carr said the only way to keep the social movement alive is to be committed to having difficult conversations about race and inequality regularly.
“It seems that they were in a moment, not a movement,” Carr said of those who either lost heart or simply dropped out. “When you are in a movement, you keep moving toward the goal that you’re trying to accomplish. You can’t let it die down … What it’s all about is continuation … We go from demonstration to legislation. This is how we make a change.”
It is an uphill battle, said Carr, but one that is necessary. When people tell her the conversations about race she holds across the nation make some people uncomfortable, she responds, “America has made me uncomfortable.”
She laments that Black families worry about their children’s safety and have to advise their children how to react if they are stopped by the police, something that white families don’t have to do.
“That day … everybody’s eyes were open to police brutality, to systemic racism, to hatred,” said Selwyn Jones, the uncle of George Floyd.
“No matter what color you are, no matter what race you are, no matter what religion you are, we are all human, and we all want safety for our children and for our families,” said Carr. “Where you live shouldn’t determine if you live. We just got to do better as a nation.”
When asked whether social activism has been a way to cope with their grief, both Carr and Jones said that their work has helped them channel their outrage and pain, but they both recognized the difficulties of grieving in the public eye. “Your life is not your life anymore,” said Carr. “I will be on this battlefield for the rest of my life.”
Carr and Jones shared family memories of Garner and Floyd as they grew up and raised families in Minneapolis and Brooklyn, respectively. Garner was a “gentle giant,” said Carr; he would bring home classmates who were picked on and was very protective of his younger sister. He loved Christmas and the New York Giants, and one of his favorite phrases was “share the love.”
“I just want to keep his name alive,” she said. “I want the world to know who my son was and that he wasn’t just a news story.”
Jones said he remembers his nephew as a big jock, a lover of basketball, and someone who always wanted to make people laugh. “Every time I saw him, he had a beautiful smile,” he said.
When a student in the audience asked the activists what they needed from Black students and from the public to keep the movement for social and racial justice alive, both Jones and Carr asked them to join the struggle.
“We need you,” said Jones. “You’re going to make this world a better place. You are the changemakers.”
“We are entrusting the future to the youth,” said Carr. “We hope that they do better than what we did … We are entrusting you to become lawmakers, to become judges, to become all kinds of politicians, and to make the right decisions and think with your heart as much as you do with your head.”
‘Harvard Thinking’: Forgiving what you can’t forget
Wronged and can’t move on? In podcast, a theologian, a psychologist, and a public health expert discuss why and how to heal.
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
long read
What is forgiveness? In order to answer that question, it’s helpful to start with what forgiveness is not.
“Forgiveness is not the same as condoning the action, excusing it, or saying it’s all right. It’s not the same as foregoing justice,” said Tyler VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the director of the Human Flourishing Program. “My preferred definition for forgiveness is replacing ill will toward an offender with goodwill.”
But it’s not always that simple. Laura Thompson, a clinical and consulting psychologist, suggests that even neutral emotions toward the offender indicate forgiveness has been achieved. And Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, takes it one step further: One can still hold on to negative feelings, but make the choice to not return “harm for harm.”
“Forgiveness has been used by institutions to require people to give up their anger, sometimes anger which is justified,” Potts said. “Especially for victims of abuse, trauma, or violence, that deep pressure to forgive … can be burdensome and retraumatizing.”
Still, forgiveness is good for us.
“We see all kinds of mental health and physical health benefits as a result of [forgiveness],” Thompson said. She recognizes that forgiveness is difficult for many people, and even the term forgiveness has become loaded with expectations, guilt, and shame. Perhaps reframing forgiveness as “grudge management” creates more opportunities for people to explore these painful experiences and find healing.
In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas, VanderWeele, Potts, and Thompson talk about the challenges of forgiveness — and why it may be worth the effort.
Transcript
Laura Thompson: There’s often a lot of pressure on the group or the party with less power to forgive so that it’ll just feel better for everybody and go away. And that just doesn’t work. That’s not forgiveness.
Samantha Laine Perfas: It’s not uncommon for individuals to hold grudges for years, if not entire lifetimes. Yet forgiving someone is good for us. It’s linked to better health, both physical and mental, and it has the power to deepen relationships in profound ways. So why is it so difficult to forgive someone when we’ve been wronged?
Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life.
Today we’re joined by:
Tyler VanderWeele: Tyler VanderWeele, I’m the Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and also the director of the Human Flourishing Program.
Laine Perfas: He studies links between religion and health, as well as the science of happiness and flourishing. Then:
Matthew Ichihashi Potts: I’m Matt Potts. I’m the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University.
Laine Perfas: He specializes in Christian theology and wrote the book “Forgiveness: An Alternative Account.” And our third guest:
Thompson: Laura Thompson, I’m a clinical and consulting psychologist.
Laine Perfas: She was a fellow at McLean Hospital and the Cambridge Health Alliance. Today, she mostly does clinical work and teaches and trains others in mindfulness through the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation and privately.
And I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas, and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll talk about why forgiveness might be worth it, even if it’s hard.
Let’s kick off the conversation with some definitions. How do each of you define forgiveness?
Thompson: This is an interesting question. In the late ’90s, there was a lot of funding made available very generously to promote the research of forgiveness. And it really sparked this question of how do we think about forgiveness? There are these lay definitions that you might find in the dictionary that’ll say things like releasing resentment or anger, but sometimes included in that are things like condoning or pardoning. And from the psychological perspective, there really is a difference there; in looking at what’s happening psychologically when we forgive, it’s helpful to take a step back and think about what creates the conditions for forgiveness to even be an option. Something happens that really violates a person’s sense of either how another person should behave or should be, how the world should be, how they themselves should be. And in that, there’s this natural response of anger or anxiety or sadness, and there’s this opportunity for all kinds of ways to respond to that, and forgiveness is one. And it’s essentially a shift in the thinking, the feeling, the motivation, and the behavior about this transgression from the negative to either the neutral or the positive.
VanderWeele: Just building a bit on what Laura was saying, my preferred definition for forgiveness is replacing ill will toward an offender with goodwill; instead of wanting something bad to happen to them, wanting good to come to them. But understood in that way, forgiveness is not the same as condoning the action, or excusing it, or saying it’s all right. It’s not the same as foregoing justice. One can pursue justice and still want what’s ultimately good for the offender. It’s also not the same as reconciliation; in some cases it may be that the nature of the offense is that two people shouldn’t reconcile. But it’s wanting what’s good for them.
Potts: I think my definition is similar to the others’ but I approach the question as a scholar of religion and a moral theologian and a moral philosopher. In my pastoral experience, the association of forgiveness has been used by institutions to require people to give up their anger, sometimes anger which is justified, right? So the way I think about forgiveness is actually it’s not giving up a grudge necessarily. You might hold a grudge and still forgive. For me, I begin my forgiveness where I feel like the virtue has been abused by power, toward pressuring folks to give up their anger too prematurely, or pressuring folks to reconcile prematurely. And I’ve defined forgiveness as foregoing retaliation. I want to suggest that forgiveness tries to develop an idea of justice where we can imagine a future where we don’t need to return harm for harm or we can move on into the future without retaliation, but with still some sense of justice going forward. And so maybe that means grudges, maybe it means anger. It can include negative affect or negative emotion that might include a reluctance or refusal of reconciliation. But what there isn’t is continued retaliatory and reciprocal violence.
Laine Perfas: Just to summarize: Tyler, you are saying forgiveness is replacing ill will with goodwill; Laura, you’re saying it’s replacing ill will with either goodwill or neutral will. And then Matt, you are saying that forgiveness doesn’t necessitate getting rid of your negative emotions, it’s just foregoing retaliation. Could you talk about that a little bit more, because I’m having a hard time conceptualizing how you could forgive and yet still hold a grudge.
Potts: Yeah, I think a lot of this has to do with how we would define what a grudge is, right? In the Christian tradition, forgiveness is a virtue; in the New Testament it’s a mandated virtue: You must forgive in some ways. And especially for victims of abuse or trauma or violence, that deep pressure to forgive, when it includes a pressure to reconcile or a pressure to give up anger, can be burdensome and retraumatizing to victims. One of the reasons I’m thinking about anger with respect to forgiveness is because we know that there are classes of people who are less allowed to be angry in our culture. A lot of my work developed around hearing victims’ concerns around forgiveness, around the way it transfers responsibility for the repair of wrong from wrongdoers to victims, right? I’ve heard victims’ advocates and people in my congregation who have said, “I can’t do that. Why is it on me to do this? And if I don’t do it, I’m a bad Christian?” That might be conceived as still bearing a grudge. “I don’t want to reconcile with them because I don’t trust them.” But I would say that we have to allow and afford victims the right to decide when they can trust another person enough to reconcile with them. And so much of the Christian ethic is based in an idea of what love is and loving your neighbor and loving your enemy. The idea that anger cannot coexist alongside love, I think, is a dangerous idea. I think that anger and love can go together. And if Christianity is putting pressure on victims of wrongdoing to feel a certain way, that bothers me.
Thompson: You’re pointing at something so important, I think, which is the pressure that can be there either from a religious tradition, from members of a group, and there’s been some research showing that there are pressures that prevent people from forgiving as well as those that push people to do this outward forgiveness when the internal state hasn’t shifted. What’s happening internally? The thing that really seems to undergird a challenge in this shift into the neutral or the positive is this kind of angry rumination, grieving, the kinds of things where the mind gets really caught in cycling through something over and over again. And that’s what we do in response to trauma or to things that really violate our sense of how things should be. So that response is incredibly natural and what people do. In fact, people who are forgiving at a trait level aren’t less likely to respond that way. It’s not that people don’t ever feel those feelings. It’s that they have this capacity to make that shift and a lot of what seems to help that is the capacity to release that ruminative process, that getting really caught in cyclic thinking. And we see all kinds of mental health and physical health benefits as a result of that shift. We know that depression decreases. We know that the angry rumination and anxiety decrease. And along with that, the nervous system, the part of our nervous system that gets so activated when we are in this fight-or-flight mode has this chance to go into a sort of rest-and-restore mode. And I think it opens the door for things that can happen at the societal level or just relationships within families, within a couple, all of those levels. But I think Matt’s pointing at something just so important. It’s something that I found people writing about when we did narrative research, people did write about the pressure that they felt to forgive and to forget, having forgetting somehow linked with forgiving, that somehow the offense wouldn’t be there.
VanderWeele: The psychologist Everett Worthington makes what I think is a very helpful distinction between “decisional forgiveness” and “emotional forgiveness.” And decisional forgiveness is that commitment to replace ill will toward the offender with goodwill. And that’s within our control. It’s something we can do. The emotional forgiveness is the replacement of negative thoughts, emotions, feelings toward the offender with positive ones. And that’s not entirely within our control and may not always even be appropriate. But I think the distinction is helpful both with regard to the experiential aspects of forgiveness: how we can think we’ve forgiven and then the very next day we’re experiencing anger again. We don’t have to say, “Oh, no, that forgiveness wasn’t real.” It was real, but it was decisional forgiveness. It was that commitment to replace ill will with goodwill, but that doesn’t mean that the feelings of anger aren’t going to come back.
Laine Perfas: What is actually happening in our minds, body, spirit, when we’re struggling with unforgiveness? What is it that is being triggered?
Thompson: I think that when a person experiences a transgression it shakes everything up. It’s a violation of what we expect or think should be. And that’s very disorienting, and the natural response to that is to relate to it as a threat: This is not what was anticipated. And at some level, there’s a lack of feeling of safety or OK-ness. And that does activate our fight-or-flight response. And I think that’s what we’re seeing when people are responding to transgression not in forgiveness. And it is part of the process. There is no forgiveness without that, right? Because there would be nothing to forgive. So forgiveness is this capacity to hold simultaneously the reality of this very difficult wrong, which is charged and difficult to relate to, with the possibility of not being gripped by that; of releasing and having that transform into something that, at the very least, is at a neutral point.
Laine Perfas: We often hurt people that we’re really close to, or we’re hurt by people that we’re really close to. Is it harder to forgive that transgression when it’s someone who is so close to us?
Potts: I think it can cut both ways with an offense from a loved one. It seems even more wrong. This is someone I trust, and yet wrong has been done. And so I think the fact that the offense, the transgression seems greater, makes it more difficult to forgive. On the other hand, the empirical research also suggests that when we’re in an important relationship that has tremendous potential to contribute to our well-being longer term, it’s actually a bit easier to forgive, in those cases. So I think it’s a both/and: The transgression seems worse, and yet the motivation to forgive is often greater. I tend to think in marriages or in close relationships, it is in some ways fertile ground for developing that capacity to forgive. Because even smaller offenses can seem quite upsetting when it’s someone who is trusted or who is supposed to love you. In the context of marriage and family life and working through struggles and difficulties, that can happen repeatedly. And so there’s need for repeated seeking of forgiveness and offering of forgiveness.
Laine Perfas: One of the reasons we wanted to do this episode is because there’s been more research on forgiveness in recent years showing that there are pretty powerful health benefits. Could you talk a little bit about why forgiveness might be good for us?
VanderWeele: There have been dozens and dozens of studies that have indicated that those who are more forgiving and those who forgive specific offenses over time, improve in health and well-being. I’d say the strongest effects really are on mental health, on anxiety, on depression. The effects on physical health, there’s definitely some evidence that’s a little bit more disputed in what context for what groups of people, but the evidence on mental health is now extremely solid, and this includes now also dozens of randomized trials, the same sorts of study designs we use to look at cancer treatments or vaccines have been used to look at interventions to help people forgive who want to forgive but are struggling to do so. Those who participate have lower depression and lower anxiety as well as greater sense of forgiveness after even a few weeks. I think there’s really something to the effects of forgiveness on mental health. So to my mind, forgiveness tools should be considered even in routine mental healthcare.
Laine Perfas: How does forgiveness or lack of forgiveness affect entire communities?
Potts: One of the scholars that I engage in my book is John Paul Lederach. And although he’s a theorist and trained as a sociologist, his practical job has been going into post-accord conflict situations and negotiating peace between communities that have been doing awful things to each other, sometimes for generations. And he said all the bureaucrats feel like, “OK, there’s a treaty now, let’s all go have peace. Let’s move forward. Let’s do it.” And he said, when you go into the situations, you have to realize that nobody on the ground actually believes peace is possible because they have been so deeply hurt and so deeply wounded because people they love have been killed and places destroyed, their whole world’s turned upside-down. Why would they believe that peace is possible? They have no trust for the other side. They are completely pessimistic. And he said if you go in as an optimist telling them, “Hey, we can do this, peace is possible,” all they will hear is that you do not understand what they’ve gone through. And what they actually need someone to do is to understand how deep their pain is, which means actually engaging their pain really directly. And so what he calls it is the gift of pessimism. You have to believe, like them, that peace is not possible, and just sit with them as they process all the pain that they have to process. And he said that’s really the only way you get beyond it, right? Because the only future that can realistically be built must be built on truth about the past. Then forgiveness, insofar as it is this reckoning with the past in a serious and honest way, is really the only way forward for a peaceful future.
VanderWeele: I think there are very complicated issues with regard to forgiveness at the community level, as Matt indicated. I think another side of that is thinking about how is forgiveness operating at the societal level, just in day-to-day life? As a society, are we more or less forgiving? One might think of that as almost a preventive measure to try to avoid those massive conflicts, which do really require a more communal sense of forgiveness and of seeking of peace. I tend to think as a society we should work toward promoting forgiveness at the individual level. It’s not going to be a solution to the sorts of massive conflicts that Matt was describing, but again, it might help prevent those. So I think there’s a real question whether we’re creating a society in which ill will is spreading or in which goodwill is spreading. And I do think that practice of interpersonal forgiveness, even if it’s just with one’s spouse or friend, that moving toward that more forgiving disposition, I think, can have profound societal effects.
Laine Perfas: Are there any other examples we can point to that show how this failure shows up today?
Potts: If you want to look at what the failure of forgiveness looks like, one great example would be the American carceral system and mass incarceration in this country. If you think the purpose of punishment is to harm the offender, what you get is a criminal justice system which causes historically humongous levels of harm. A forgiving culture would not be one in which there was never discipline. But what we have in this country is a carceral system, which just causes untold misery and harm. In many cases, it seems just for harm’s sake, because returning harm for harm is what we think justice is, and then we mete that out culturally upon vast segments of the population. That’s a societal effect of forgiveness failing, I think.
VanderWeele: I very much agree with Matt, and I don’t think forgiveness is incompatible with seeking just punishment, but that needs to be oriented toward the good of the offender. I do think punishment can serve a role of expressing to the community that some wrong has been done. It can sometimes lead to reform. It can provide deterrence and restraint, but in all those cases we have to ask, is this level of punishment actually good for the offender and the community? And I think in most cases in this country, our punishments are excessive, are incompatible with forgiveness.
Laine Perfas: I like the framing of creating a culture of forgiveness. But at the same time, how do we balance encouraging forgiveness, knowing that it is beneficial for people and society, without pushing people or forcing them to do something that they’re not ready to do?
VanderWeele: I think one can encourage forgiveness by just recognizing the humanity of the other person. One can encourage forgiveness by noting the health benefits, as we discussed earlier, but I don’t think it should be ever forced. I do think it’s, again, not unreasonable to ask, however, are you struggling with anger? Do you want to forgive? If someone wants to forgive and is struggling with forgiveness, I think that’s a time where it’s not unreasonable to try to help them.
Thompson: As Matt has pointed to, there’s often a lot of pressure on the group or the party with less power to forgive so that it’ll just feel better for everybody and go away. And that just doesn’t work. That’s not forgiveness. So I think I would step back and say it’s a broad question about what are the conditions in society that enable groups of people to be safe enough to take that step to reconcile; and those are not always the same conditions that can promote that internal shift. People can make an internal shift in the absolute worst conditions. And that really is a gift that one can give to oneself. And those changes that are internal do support interpersonal changes, and those support societal changes.
I guess my suggestion from a psychological perspective would be that we can invite it in as an intention and invite in daily small habit changes. So it may be as simple as when you’re driving down the road and someone cuts you off in traffic and that huge nervous system response kicks in, right? And there can be all kinds of feelings and thoughts and behaviors associated with that, honking the horn or yelling or whatever it is. There’s that massive activation. It’s an opportunity to, as best you can, pause and invite in this other intention of allowing that to just settle and see the fear; there was this fear, there was this anger. It’s real that something terrible really could have happened. Sometimes what helps people is understanding the common humanity of the other person. I’ve gone into the other lane without seeing the person in my blind spot, right? I’ve been in a hurry. I’ve done all kinds of things. Sometimes just seeing the common humanity can be helpful in shifting this little habit, other times it’s just allowing our physiological self to calm down. Just letting that be and not kicking off the thoughts that keep that escalating and escalating. “I can’t believe that, that was just, who would do something like that?” That just intensifies it. Sometimes it’s easier to work with small things and small habit shifts and then invite those in bigger ways. There are no perfect processes. I think it’s something we’re very much grappling with in humanity.
Potts: I could build on that. I thought that was really wise, Laura. Just in response to your question, Sam, about like, how do we build a more encouraging society of forgiveness? One of the things that I thought that was really important, what Laura said, was that safety is so crucial. And because it is often vulnerable populations who experience pressure to forgive. If a vulnerable population is harmed and they’re angry about it, and then we respond saying, “Oh, be more forgiving,” what we’re basically telling them is, it wasn’t that big a deal. “You weren’t really harmed.” I think maybe ironically, the way to promote a more forgiving culture would be for us to be more patient with the anger of the vulnerable and to pay more attention and to recognize the righteousness of that anger, like where it comes from and why folks are angry. That develops the kinds of safety and develops the kinds of recognition and acts of redress that allow people to not maybe want to retaliate and not to not seek violence as a recourse. I mean, we have a very angry culture, so I feel weird saying this, but paying attention to and not stifling the anger of people who have been harmed and recognizing where the anger comes from and honoring it as natural, I think really that’s one of the first steps toward building a culture where forgiveness is more possible and doesn’t bear out as further oppression for people.
Laine Perfas: I think to do that well and effectively, it’s also important to go back to what is the proper role of anger in life. My view is that it’s to direct us to justice. I think anger that just wants harm for the other for harm’s sake is not going to be helpful, is not going to move us toward a more forgiving society. But when we recognize the wrong, when we take the wrong seriously, when we say we want to pursue a just outcome, I think that’s a really important step. So my final question is really for the listener. There might be people listening to this podcast that are really wrestling with forgiveness in their own life. Maybe they did something or maybe someone did something to them. Do you have any things that you could share that might help them think about forgiveness in a different way?
VanderWeele: I do think realizing what forgiveness is and is not is helpful. I do think some of the resistance toward forgiveness is thinking that this must entail foregoing justice or forgetting or excusing the offense. I think forgiveness really just understood as replacing ill will toward the offender with goodwill, it’s easier to swallow that, than to say, “I’m going to pretend that never happened.” And then second, I would say is that if someone wants to forgive and is struggling to do so, these forgiveness workbooks that Everett Worthington has developed and that in our research is evaluated in this large randomized trial are very helpful. It’s not for everyone. Don’t want to forgive, it’s not for you. But for someone who wants to forgive and is struggling to do so, [they] can download them freely from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, but I’ve found them very powerful, as have many others.
Thompson: One thing we haven’t talked a lot about is self-forgiveness. We tend to think a lot about forgiveness of another person, but as much as there may be a lot of anger outward, there sometimes can be blaming or shaming ourselves around that, for our own behavior and sometimes for things that happen to us. And so I think one piece of that is bringing in some gentleness with the self. I use mindfulness and I teach it. That’s one approach that can be very helpful. I know some people have used contemplative prayer practices, which is more in the Christian tradition and in other traditions. I think cognitive therapy can be very supportive because it really helps with shifting our relationship with what is. It doesn’t change what is. It just helps us change how we’re relating to that.
The other thing that came to mind was in a lot of studies where we’re looking at forgiveness classes or interventions, the majority of people who tended to sign up were women. The word forgiveness can sometimes be quite confronting or unappealing to men, and I’m talking a lot in Western culture because of the studies I’m talking about, but one thing that was interesting is I’ve seen researchers label their groups “grudge management” to attract men into the groups. That the idea of managing a grudge can feel much more appealing than the idea of forgiving, and so increasingly in my work I’ve moved away from the word forgiveness because it can be so charged with so many meanings in our culture. And I know that’s unpopular as we sit discussing forgiveness in this podcast, but honestly to sort of take a step back and think about it as a phenomenon, what are we discussing? And we’re discussing the capacity to hold simultaneously in our heart and in our minds this really terrible thing with the capacity for the neutral or the positive for the release from that. And I think most people do want that.
Potts: Thank you all for joining me for this really great conversation.
Thompson: Thank you.
VanderWeele: Really appreciated the conversation and discussion.
Potts: Yeah, thank you. Sam.
Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to listen to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Samantha Laine Perfas, with additional editing from Ryan Mulcahey, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima. Additional production support from Jill Radsken. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University.
Departing longtime leader reflects on two decades of growth
Arts First, Harvard’s annual festival showcasing campus creativity, kicks off its biggest year yet on Wednesday featuring five days of concerts, plays, dance performances, visual art displays, and more. Making this year’s celebration particularly poignant is the announcement that the Office for the Arts’ longtime leader — director Jack Megan — will step down on June 30 after 23 years.
During Megan’s tenure, Arts First steadily grew in size and ambition, adding more public art displays and performance opportunities with every passing year. The 2024 schedule will be the largest to date, with an additional day of fun added to the week.
“It’s like an ‘exclamation point’ on the arts year,” Megan said about the festival. “It calls attention in a very large, campus-wide way to the richness of the Harvard arts scene and how vibrant it really is.”
On Thursday, the festival’s first-ever drag show, “Into the Wild,” featuring a cast of Harvard performers donning fashions inspired by nature and the outdoors, will be emceed by environmental activist and acclaimed drag artist Pattie Gonia.
“Since the beginning of time, art has been one of our biggest ways to take action for what we care about and to bring people together,” Gonia said in an interview. “In every single social justice movement in America’s history, art’s been at the center of liberation and community and change.”
Environmental themes also run through student public art displays, including a fiber piece displayed around a red maple tree in Harvard Yard called “Leaf Litter,” by Graduate School of Design student Sophie Chien. The tufted piece represents the natural ecosystem of a tree base without interruption from landscaping.
“It’s not just a piece you look at and think about,” said Chien ’24, who is pursuing a dual master’s in landscape architecture and urban planning. “You can touch it, feel it, understand it.”
“What I’m feeling is not a sense of looking back but looking forward.”
Jack Megan
Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
Other highlights of the week include a talk with Oscar-nominated filmmaker and screenwriter Ava DuVernay; an electronic drone concert composed on vintage synthesizers; and an open rehearsal by dance company RootsUprising of a work in progress called “Witness Trees” that explores relationships between nature and enslaved Africans on a South Carolina plantation. See the full Arts First lineup.
“I am excited for this year’s Arts First celebrations,” said Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College. “First, we celebrate our students, their unique gifts and talents, and all those who support our students as scholars and artmakers. Second, we celebrate the students, staff, and volunteers who generate Arts First and all their work behind the scenes and onstage to bring this gathering to our campus. Third, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Office for the Arts funding and the tremendous progress we’ve seen that inspires the next generation of artmakers at Harvard College.”
It’s also a landmark year for the Office for the Arts itself, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
“What I’m feeling is not a sense of looking back but looking forward,” Megan said. “I’m incredibly happy about the arts at Harvard and joyful that we get to mark it in this way every year. Marking 50 years to me is not the end of 50 years, but the beginning.”
Since Megan was named the Office for the Arts’ second-ever director in 2001, extracurricular arts have become one of Harvard’s most popular student activities. Under his leadership, the Office created the Artist Development Fellowship fund and reimagined campus spaces such as Farkas Hall and the Ceramics Program studio. Most recently, he led the office in a strategic planning process, setting up a future for extracurricular arts on campus.
“We are on the precipice of the next great era in Harvard arts and, with the strategic goals set forth in the report, the OFA is positioned to play a major role in that,” Megan said.
The Harvard Arts Medal, established in 1995, has remained a key tradition. Receiving the honor this year, with a public ceremony slated for Wednesday evening, is poet, scholar, and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture Kevin Young ’92.
Megan leaves with many great memories — like the time he had to fix a giant egg sculpture that toppled over in the Yard, or when he got to watch students perform “Sing Out, March On” in honor of the late Congressman John Lewis when Lewis was Commencement speaker in 2018.
But Megan’s favorites are the simple memories — all the times he saw students collaborate and create good art.
“I feel enormous gratitude to have anything to do with supporting the creative journey that our students go on,” Megan said. “That journey is going to continue and it’s going to get stronger in the years ahead.”
How to untangle ethics of psychedelics for therapeutic care
Experts from law, philosophy, spiritual care discuss issues surrounding research, safer use, kicking off Divinity School initiative
Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
There’s a telling paradox emerging in the world of treatment with psychedelics, according to Christine Hauskeller. In the past, doctors would be concerned if patients said they were hearing voices and seeing spirits. But now, it may be the doctors themselves who are responsible for those hallucinations.
“We use and induce states of what we called ‘madness’ before to cure what we’ve called ‘madness’ before and somehow create health,” said the philosopher with training in sociology and psychology at an April 16 discussion at Swartz Hall. “This is phenomenal.”
Hauskeller spoke at the first event of the Center for the Study of World Religions’ new psychedelics and ethics initiative, part of the University’s recently launched Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture, which seeks to gather scholars and practitioners from different disciplines to discuss the tangle of issues surrounding clinical use of the drugs. In this inaugural session, speakers explored how approaches from law, philosophy, and spiritual care could help better inform ethical research and promote safer use.
Christine Hauskeller.
“[We’re seeing] an explosion of interest and enthusiasm, but perhaps too little regulation — that’s open for debate — and a fast-moving landscape,” said Charles Stang, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions.
“Psychedelic experiences don’t match to psychedelic substances, in not only that the same dose of the same substance doesn’t induce the same effects in different people, or even in the same person twice.”
Christine Hauskeller
Hauskeller said that in her view, there are two ways of approaching the study of psychedelics: by substance or experience. Studying the substance is straightforward: quantify dosages, test the chemical makeup, study the effects on different segments of the population. But studying the way patients experience the drug arguably matters more – and is a lot more complicated.
“Psychedelic experiences don’t match to psychedelic substances, in not only that the same dose of the same substance doesn’t induce the same effects in different people, or even in the same person twice,” said Hauskeller.
Bioethics provides a model for studying ethical questions around research on use. The pillars include promoting the good of society, avoiding harm to patients, and ensuring informed consent, along with fair access and distribution, she said.
These goals should be kept in mind as the medicalization of psychedelics increases, mass production looms, and financial incentives compete with ethical obligations. Hauskeller cited an example: how to keep treatment financially accessible. One session with psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms may cost $2,000, even though “these mushrooms grow basically everywhere.”
Mason Marks, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School from Florida State University College of Law, teaches a course on psychedelic law. He noted many parts of the legal landscape of using the drugs are largely “uncharted territory,” and informed consent is one area that needs improvement.
Mason Marks.
By analyzing publicly available informed consent documents, he found that many psychedelic clinical trials overlooked or underemphasized what he and his colleagues believe are essential elements of informed consent to psychedelic medicine.
“We believe that people should fully understand what they’re getting themselves into.”
Mason Marks
“We believe that people should fully understand what they’re getting themselves into,” said Marks, who is also the senior fellow and project lead of the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.
In many ways, informed consent on psychedelics can follow best practices of other treatments. But psychedelic therapies also present problems that are unique: Adverse effects are often unknown. The prevalence and intensity of certain risks — prolonged side effects, permanent changes to perception, personality changes, altered metaphysical beliefs — require further research, he said.
Practitioners should be transparent about the risks and potential experiences associated with these treatments, with the goal of limiting patient exploitation or abuse, Marks said.
Roman Palitsky.
“In psychedelics, we often talk about these mystical-type experiences as a transformational, transient experience that impart some deep sense of knowledge and having made contact with something real.”
Roman Palitsky
Roman Palitsky, an assistant professor and the director of Research Projects in Spiritual Health at Emory University, took a different approach to the ethics of psychedelic treatment. He suggested that using a SERT-based framework — spiritual, existential, religious, theological — would include the kinds of experiences that tend to arise from these treatments.
“In psychedelics, we often talk about these mystical-type experiences as a transformational, transient experience that impart some deep sense of knowledge and having made contact with something real,” Palitsky said. A SERT framework could include considering the religious or existential beliefs that patients have and how those beliefs overlap with their mental health concerns.
Palitsky mentioned that there are care providers already trained in integrated care: chaplains. They can add a lot to the conversations around incorporating SERT training into psychedelic care, which has a lot of potential to benefit the patient in enormous ways.
“As a colleague of mine once said, we’re not adding religion here,” he said. “We’re just not taking it out.”
The Harvard Alumni Association has announced that Scott A. Abell ’72, Katherine N. Lapp, and M. Lee Pelton, Ph.D. ’84, will receive the 2024 Harvard Medal.
First awarded in 1981, the Harvard Medal recognizes extraordinary service to the University in areas that include teaching, fundraising, leadership, innovation, administration, and volunteerism. Alumni, former faculty and staff, and members of organizations affiliated with the University are eligible for consideration. The medals will be presented to recipients on Harvard Alumni Day on May 31.
Scott A. Abell
One of the University’s most dynamic and valued alumni leaders, Scott Abell has devoted more than three decades in service to Harvard. He has brought his love and deep knowledge of the institution to a variety of executive roles, including president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, president of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA), and dean for development for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
Growing up in a family of modest means, Abell overcame childhood polio to become a multisport athlete in high school. He was encouraged by a Cleveland-area alumnus to apply to Harvard College, enrolling in 1968. After graduating, Abell founded and served as chair and CEO of Abell & Associates, leading its work in financial services and healthcare consulting.
Recognizing the impact that Harvard and its alumni community have had on his own life, Abell has been dedicated to strengthening alumni connection. During his 2000–2001 term as HAA president, he employed his trademark diplomacy to develop relationships within the University and with alumni worldwide, leading a comprehensive strategy that helped reshape the HAA.
In 2004, Abell came out of retirement to lead FAS fundraising activities as associate vice president and dean for development. As a member of the Board of Overseers from 2012 to 2018, Abell chaired its committee on institutional policy and served on its executive committee, nominating committee, and the governing boards’ Joint Committee on Alumni Affairs and Development. In his final year, he led the Overseers as president.
Prior volunteer roles include president of the Harvard Club of Northeast Ohio, where he also chaired its Schools and Scholarships Committee; HAA regional director; and vice chair of the Harvard College Fund executive committee. He received the HAA Award in 2003 in recognition of his work on behalf of the alumni community.
Katherine N. Lapp
Harvard file photo
Through skillful leadership and perseverance, Katherine “Katie” Lapp expertly guided Harvard’s administrative and operational functions for 13 years. As executive vice president, she built a resilient organization that was able to weather times of uncertainty, including the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that the University could continue its core mission of teaching and learning.
As a member of the president’s senior management team, Lapp was responsible for areas in finance, administration, human resources, and capital planning. She oversaw Harvard’s development efforts in Allston, including the creation of the Science and Engineering Complex, a proposed residential project at Barry’s Corner, and the Enterprise Research Campus. Lapp helped steer Harvard’s campus sustainability goals — notably meeting initial targets of a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2016 — and co-chaired the Presidential Committee on Sustainability.
In 2019, as the pandemic began to unfold, she played an integral role in the University’s response, managing its surveillance and tracing procedures; the technology infrastructure that enabled remote learning; and the return of students, staff, and faculty to campus.
Lapp joined Harvard in 2009 from the University of California at the height of the recession, bringing stability and vision to planning and budgeting across the University as she worked to strengthen financial management practices and modernize administrative operations and risk management protocols. She stepped down from her role in 2022.
Prior to Harvard, Lapp served as executive director and CEO for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, as well as director of criminal justice and commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services in New York State.
Lapp continues to sit on the boards of the Museum of Fine Arts, Mount Auburn Hospital, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Cambridge Public Library Foundation.
M. Lee Pelton
A distinguished academic and civic leader, Lee Pelton has dedicated his career to advancing social justice and expanding educational opportunities — a calling that has driven him as a college president for 23 years and now as president and CEO of the Boston Foundation.
A steadfast Harvard volunteer, Pelton served on the Graduate School Alumni Association Council from 1996 to 2005 and on the Board of Overseers from 2000 to 2006, including one year as vice chair of the executive committee. He also served on visiting committees for Harvard College, Harvard Library, and Athletics, as well as the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.
The grandson of sharecroppers, Pelton was the first in his family to go to college, attending Wichita State University before pursuing a doctorate in English and American literature at Harvard, where he was senior tutor at Winthrop House and a lecturer on English. After leaving Harvard, he held decanal roles at Colgate University and Dartmouth College.
In 1998, he was appointed president of Willamette University. There he increased the school’s ranking as a top-tier liberal arts college, established a college access program for historically underrepresented youth, and earned the university inclusion in President Barack Obama’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.
In 2011, he became president of Emerson College, where he increased faculty, enhanced student body diversity, developed national and global programs, and emerged as a powerful voice on social issues. In the wake of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, he rallied over 250 college and university presidents to call for gun legislation. After the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, Pelton’s impassioned written address to the Emerson community went viral as he candidly relayed his own experiences with racial profiling.
Since 2021, Pelton has led the Boston Foundation, committed to equity and to closing the gaps on the region’s greatest disparities for historically marginalized communities.
Lawyers reap big profits lobbying government regulators under the radar
Study exposes how banks sway policy from shadows, by targeting bureaucrats instead of politicians
Christy DeSmith
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
A new study reveals the secret world of lawyers who earn top dollar lobbying government regulators.
“Most people think of lobbying as something that happens in Congress,” said political scientist Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and chair of the Department of Government. “We’re pointing to lobbying that happens in administrative agencies.”
The research, published recently in the journal Perspectives on Politics, specifically pulls back the curtain on regulatory advocates — almost always attorneys — with clients in the U.S. finance sector. Carpenter and his co-author drew from a variety of empirical sources, including years of meeting logs kept by government administrators following passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. They found a regulatory advocacy market so large, and so lucrative, it eclipses the formal lobbying sector.
“It’s tough to get a precise estimate on the amount of money that moves around when these meetings happen,” Carpenter said. “But even our most conservative estimates imply that it’s double or more of what’s spent in congressional lobbying.”
Carpenter, who studies bureaucratic politics and the administrative state, emphasized that most of the rules governing American life are not written by elected officials. They are drafted by employees of government institutions such as the Federal Reserve.
“And if you violate a rule that’s been finalized by a federal agency, it’s a civil or even criminal violation of the law — just like it was a statute passed by Congress or a state legislature,” he said.
Dodd-Frank contained more than 300 separate rulemaking mandates aimed at consumer protection and stabilizing the banking sector. More than a decade later, many of these provisions are still not implemented. According to the paper, this is due “in large part to the blistering lobbying campaigns waged against federal financial agencies charged with developing those statutory provisions into operative regulations.”
Legislative lobbyists, who press for client interests in Congress, must register with the government under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. But no such rule applies to those who advance client interests at regulatory agencies. That explains why regulatory advocates rarely appear in public lobbying records. However, they do turn up in government meeting logs.
Carpenter and his co-author, Northwestern University’s Brian Libgober, Ph.D. ’18, collected data on 905 meetings scheduled between 2010 and 2018 with members of the Federal Reserve Board. The researchers identified 6,155 individuals who specifically met with the board concerning Dodd-Frank, with just 953 registered as lobbyists. Compare that with the 4,516 officially registered lobbyists who reported activity on Dodd-Frank or a related predecessor bill.
Cross-referencing names with LinkedIn and personnel databases specific to lawyers allowed Carpenter and Libgober to learn more about these unregistered influence-seekers. One thing stood out about the organizations they worked for. Most of the firms regularly top American Lawyer magazine’s annual rankings by profit-per-partner.
Lobbying revenues and profits per partner in the American Lawyer magazine’s Top 200 Firms (2010–17). Each point represents a firm-year among the American Lawyer magazine’s annual survey of the top 200 U.S. law firms.
Source: “Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance”
Lobbying revenues and profits per partner in the American Lawyer magazine’s Top 200 Firms (2010–17). Each point represents a firm-year among the American Lawyer magazine’s annual survey of the top 200 U.S. law firms.
Source: “Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance”
Lobbying revenues and profits per partner in the American Lawyer magazine’s Top 200 Firms (2010–17). Each point represents a firm-year among the American Lawyer magazine’s annual survey of the top 200 U.S. law firms.
Source: “Lawyers as Lobbyists: Regulatory Advocacy in American Finance”
“Law firms that are involved in regulatory lobbying are far more profitable than the law firms that are involved in legislative lobbying,” Carpenter said.
Also noteworthy was the disproportionate representation of senior, high-ranking attorneys. The researchers found 319 exact name matches in an online database called ALM Intelligence Legal Compass, with 235 being law firm partners and 15 in top leadership.
H. Rodgin Cohen, managing partner for more than a decade with the elite firm Sullivan & Cromwell, was the individual who appeared most frequently, with 21 documented meetings with Federal Reserve Board officials. Cohen was formally registered as a lobbyist at times between 1998 and 2004. But he wasn’t registered in the years following the Great Recession, when he is well-documented in news media and books as engaging in regulatory advocacy on behalf of clients including Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase.
Carpenter emphasized that Cohen appears to be in perfect compliance with the law. “The claim we’re making is that scholars should regard him as a lobbyist — and that Congress may want to think about writing a law that makes people like him register,” Carpenter said.
The researchers also sized up the total marketplace for regulatory advocacy. Making this endeavor possible was the fact that banks, which are heavily regulated by the U.S government, must submit detailed reports of legal expenditure and legal exposure alike. Carpenter and Libgober went line by line through disclosures from 798 bank holding companies, with special attention paid to legal spending that coincided with meetings with the Federal Reserve Board.
“What you see across time is that precisely when banks are setting up these meetings — the year before, the year of, and the year after — they’re just spending a lot more money on legal services,” Carpenter said.
The paper uses a range of methodologies to assess how much money might be spent when these meetings happen, producing estimates that range from $137.5 million to $1.17 billion on annual regulatory advocacy spending by U.S. bank holding companies. For comparison, the same sector reported a total of $54 million on lobbying in 2019.
“Do pharmaceutical companies meet with the FDA as they’re writing rules? Do energy companies meet with the EPA as they’re writing a rule? Do health companies meet with the Department of Health and Human Services when they’re ready to roll out new rules?” Carpenter wondered.
He hopes the new study inspires others to take up these questions. “It’s a vital research agenda, not only to scholars and students of politics, but also to all of us as citizens.”
Despite ‘hippie’ reputation, male bonobos fight three times as often as chimps, study finds
Anne J. Manning
Harvard Staff Writer
3 min read
Credit: Lukas Bierhoff/Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project
The endangered bonobo, the great ape of the Central African rainforest, has a reputation for being a bit of a hippie. Known as more peaceful than their warring chimpanzee cousins, bonobos live in matriarchal societies, engage in recreational sex, and display signs of cooperation both inside and outside their immediate social groups.
But this relaxed reputation isn’t quite reality, according to a new Harvard study in Current Biology. Researchers observing bonobos and chimps in their natural environments over roughly three years found that actual rates of aggressive acts were notably higher among male bonobos than among male chimps.
“These findings draw a much more nuanced picture of the use of different forms of aggression in our closest living relatives,” said senior author Martin Surbeck, professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, who conducted the field study with first author Maud Mouginot, Michael Wilson, and Nisarg Desai of the University of Minnesota.
The researchers point to the different ways aggression can be defined and measured. Males of the two species exhibit consistently contrasting patterns of aggression: Male chimpanzees sexually coerce females and sometimes kill male competitors; male bonobos exhibit less of this sexual coercion and have never been reported to kill a competitor.
But looking at overall rates of aggression, which constitute acts that don’t necessarily result in injuries, bonobos overtook chimps. Using 14 community-years of data (years multiplied by number of communities observed), the researchers found that male bonobos engaged in about three times the number of aggressive acts toward other males as chimps did, even when limiting for only “contact aggression” — physical violence, as opposed to charging or chasing. Observations between females and males were less surprising: As expected, given that females often outrank males in bonobo communities, bonobos exhibited lower rates of male-female aggression and higher rates of female-male aggression than chimps.
In other words, when chimps are aggressive, they’re aggressive to a more lethal degree. But bonobos, one could say, engage in more frequent but less intense squabbling.
The researchers think these comparisons may boil down to different ways chimps and bonobos evolved to form coalitions. Chimps depend heavily on the strength of their male coalitions to defend territories and achieve reproductive success by mating with fertile females. Infighting within those coalitions thus “costs” chimps more, so they do it less often.
Bonobos are more independent, less in need of strong coalitions, so they can “afford” to fight more and risk group strife, with less at stake for their reproductive success, according to Surbeck.
“I think what this study reminds us to do is be more specific and more nuanced about understanding that there are different types of aggression, which may underlie different selection pressures,” Surbeck said.
For the study, the researchers and their on-the-ground partners observed three bonobo communities in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and two chimpanzee communities at Gombe National Park in Tanzania.
Philosopher Barba-Kay on CAPTCHA dilemma, Aristotle’s good life, and how the internet is changing us — not for the better
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Digital technology has transformed human nature to the point that we are becoming “different kinds of creatures,” further from Aristotle’s ideal of the good life, said philosopher Antón Barba-Kay in a talk last week as part of the Department of Government’s Vik-Bailey Lecture Series.
Barba-Kay, the Robert B. Aird Chair of Humanities at Deep Springs College, has written about the dehumanizing effects of technology in his book “A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation.” Although he acknowledges the benefits brought by the digital revolution, he bemoans its negative effects on human well-being so much he would like to go back in time before the arrival of the internet.
“If it were in my power to go back in time to prevent or delay the invention of the internet, I would do so even if it meant being forever condemned to ask strangers for driving directions.”
Antón Barba-Kay
“I think a new kind of human being is taking shape, under the presumption that what most counts about us can be quantified and codified, but that presumption, while it eliminates many forms of friction and oppression, is also progressively devastating the deepest forms of human communion,” Barba-Kay said. “If it were in my power to go back in time to prevent or delay the invention of the internet, I would do so even if it meant being forever condemned to ask strangers for driving directions.”
The effects of digital technology on creativity, privacy, community, and well-being in general are self-evident, said Barba-Kay, and they’re growing by the day as people depend more and more on smartphones and electronic tools, social media, and the internet. According to U.S. Census data from 2018, smartphones were present in 84 percent of American households and 78 percent of households owned a desktop or laptop.
In 2011, the United Nations declared internet access a basic human right. Thirteen years later, it makes sense to ponder whether the internet is at odds with human flourishing, the pursuit of the highest aims of a human being, and the building of an ideal society, or utopia, Barba-Kay said in his talk, “Digital Technology and the End of Human Nature.”
“Is the internet part of the good life in the way that shelter, clothing, and music are? Is a smartphone? Is social media?” said Barba-Kay. “If you were asked to envision utopia, will Gmail, Tinder and Hulu have a place in it? But if you could make the choice never to use digital technology again, would you do so? The question of the transformation of our values and standards beyond our power to recognize them becomes all the more perplexing and urgent when we raise questions about human nature itself.”
The impact of digital technologies on human nature differs from that of other new technologies (i.e., the automobile, radio, television) in that it is making humans feel alienated from their tools, said Barba-Kay. Except for software engineers and coders, most people don’t know how digital technologies work. “At the utmost verge of the Enlightenment we thereby find ourselves at the beginning of a new Dark Age in which our material circumstances will become more and more opaque to us,” he said.
As digital technologies develop, humans are challenged to prove their humanity not only to themselves but also to the same digital technologies developed by humans. Barba-Kay pointed to the use of CAPTCHA, (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), a test to determine whether the user is a human to deter bots and spam. For Barba-Kay, CAPTCHAs call on humans to perform acts of humanity online, but it has become a parable of how human nature is being threatened by advances in digital technology.
“The test initially involved a transcription of squiggly letters into a box, if you’re old enough to remember,” he said. “But as the bots got better, the letters had to get squigglier. In a 2014 study, Google discovered that AI was already able to solve 99.8 percent of the puzzles; meanwhile, the letters had gotten so squiggly that only 33 percent of humans could solve them.
“The point of CAPTCHA is to test for universal humanity in a manner that is rote, unambiguous, and in no way context-dependent,” Barba-Kay said. “Yet tasks that are rote, unambiguous, and in no way context-dependent are precisely the sort of thing that automation does best. Which is why each time we succeed in establishing that we are human through CAPTCHA we take one more step toward obsolescence.”
Barba-Kay worries that rapid developments in digital technology are affecting key aspects of the human experience: their sense of community, time, and reality, and more broadly what it means to be human and what the purpose of life should be.
In a discussion following the talk, audience members peppered the speaker with questions. Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and chair of the Government Department, asked whether there were similar cries over the end of human nature with the invention of the automobile, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and other technological breakthroughs. For Barba-Kay, the effects of the digital revolution are qualitatively different. “It’s transformative to have something that doesn’t take any time to go from A to B in the way that the railroad did,” he said.
Michael Sandel, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, who was moderating, dropped a question to Barba-Kay at the end of the event.
“I received a paper from a student that I thought was pretty good,” said Sandel. “I called the student in and asked the student about it. The student denied that it was written by ChatGPT, and I wondered after we spoke, which should worry me more: whether he had cheated and lied about it, or whether he had come to write like ChatGPT. What do you think?
With a response that summed up his views on the effects of digital technology on human nature, Barba-Kay said, “The latter.”
For first-year Yona Sperling-Milner, the talk helped her think more critically about the role that electronic devices play in people’s lives; not only as time-suckers, but mostly as an activity that could be detrimental to her purpose in life.
“I thought that everything the speaker was saying rang very true to my experience with technology, especially as a young person,” said Sperling-Milner. “It made me think that the negative association with cellphones might not only just be, ‘Oh, this feels like a waste of time,’ but somewhat deeper in the sense that it might impact me and my striving for what he was calling the good life.”
Art from a long-dead civilization springs back to life
Moving experience at the Museum of the Ancient Near East adds ‘layer of mixed reality’ to exhibits
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Opening the Snapchat app in this third-floor museum gallery summons a moment of unexpected magic.
Soldiers, carved on replicas of panels that once decorated the walls of ancient Assyrian palaces, come to life and send a volley of arrows to rain on their enemies. Royal attendants lead horses by richly colored bridles. The king pours a red wine offering over the bodies of dead lions as harpists strum nearby.
The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East recently launched an augmented reality Snapchat Lens that offers a new way to experience their “From Stone to Silicone” exhibition. Visitors can view the AR on a smartphone or tablet anytime by searching “Intimidation Art” in the Snapchat app and aiming the device at the art. Every detail of the scenes — from colors used in the animation to music playing in the background — is based on historical research.
“One of our goals at the museum is to enhance the visitor experience with interactive and immersive technologies where appropriate,” said Peter Der Manuelian, director of the museum. “Not to compete with the art, but rather to add a layer of mixed reality to our exhibits that we hope will be engaging, informative, and fun.”
Der Manuelian with Aja.
“The Art of Intimidation: Journey to Assyria” immerses visitors in the ancient city of Nineveh — located in modern-day Iraq — circa 640 B.C. It even gives them an assignment: to deliver a critical message to the king. All are welcomed by palace overseer Dan-Assur, an animated character who directs visitors’ attention to the wall art while they await the busy king.
Carved with scenes of battle, hunting, and ceremony, the wall panels are examples of powerful royal propaganda. But they also shed insight on everyday life in the ancient Near East.
Adam Aja, the museum’s chief curator, wanted to use modern storytelling techniques to engage audiences in the history of the panels. Part of his inspiration came from video games like “Assassin’s Creed: Origins,” which is set in ancient Egypt, and “Apotheon,” which is animated in the style of ancient Greek vase painting.
“As a player in a game, you create a character that you inhabit for the time you’re playing that game,” Aja said. “You roam the world and you become invested in the success of that character and the story as it plays out. I thought, maybe there was some way we can provide that kind of experience for our visitors.”
Gojko Barjamovic, senior lecturer on Assyriology in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department, co-wrote the script with Aja, incorporating ancient Assyrian phrases such as the greeting “Good health, visitor.” Narration was voiced by Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Shady Nasser, a specialist on Arabic literature and Islamic civilizations.
“Even though the narrator is speaking in English, there is still a turn of phrase that will strike the modern ear as, ‘Well, that sounds a little archaic,’” Aja said. “It’s actually from Assyrian text.”
Assyriologist Shiyanthi Thavapalan from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam advised on the colors based on her knowledge of recent infrared and ultraviolet imaging techniques that can detect remnants of ancient pigment. Archaeomusicologist Richard Dumbrill, formerly of the University of London, advised on the period music and soundscape. Dan-Assur’s character design was inspired by Donald Barkho, an Assyrian costumes and weaponry specialist and content creator who lives in Australia.
“It’s been a team of people from literally around the world that we’ve tapped into, to make this a bit more interesting and authentic, and based upon scholarship,” Aja said.
This isn’t the museum’s first foray into augmented reality. One floor down, visitors can use an app called “Dreaming the Sphinx” to immerse themselves in a story told by hieroglyphs inscribed on a replica of the “Dream Stela,” a stone slab that sits between the paws of the Great Sphinx in Giza.
“The visitors to museums approach the art in different ways,” Aja said. “I’m hopeful that even if this doesn’t appeal to every single museum visitor, that it will provide a new avenue of exploration for those who are interested.”
Younger votes still lean toward Biden — but it’s complicated
New IOP poll shows they still plan to show up to vote but are subject to ‘seismic mood swings’ over specific issues
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
2 min read
Younger voters turned out in historic numbers to help lift Joe Biden past Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. This year, the match-up is the same, but the feelings are much more complicated.
Gen Z and late Millennial voters (ages 18-29) are more dissatisfied with their choices and worried over kitchen table issues such as inflation and housing. But most still support Biden over Trump, contrary to some earlier polls,and they do still intend to make their voices heard in November, according to a new Harvard Youth Poll released Thursday.
John Della Volpe, the IOP’s longtime polling director, said he sees “seismic mood swings” in the results as young people feel “angst” over a host of issues.
“They’re deeply concerned … about the direction of the country. They are deeply concerned about their own economic well-being, the cost of housing, inflation, [the] day-to-day cost of living. They’re concerned about conflicts around the world,” he said. “But at the same time, the choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden isn’t necessarily close.”
The poll surveyed just over 2,000 Americans nationwide between the ages of 18 and 29 from March 14-21. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.02 points. Launched in 2000, the Harvard Youth Poll is the largest political survey of young Americans and is administered by the Harvard Public Opinion Project, an undergraduate-run organization.
In a head-to-head matchup, Biden leads Trump by eight points (45 percent-37 percent). Among those most likely to vote, his lead expands to 19 points (56 percent-37 percent). That’s considerably smaller than Biden’s advantage in spring 2020 when he was up by 23 points among all young voters and 30 points among likely voters.
When third-party and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West are included, Biden’s lead over Trump shrinks from 19 to 13 points among likely voters.
Trump enjoys significant enthusiasm (76 percent) from those who already favor him but can’t seem to garner more than 37 percent of support from young voters.
The outcome of his current criminal trial in New York City, however, could damage that support.
Trump has been charged with falsifying business records to conceal an extramarital affair in 2016 in a case prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg ’95, J.D. ’99. The survey showed that if Trump is found guilty, Biden would get a nine-point bump among likely voters and a 10-point bump among all young people.
Asked whether the country is on the right or wrong track, more than half (58 percent) said the wrong track, and nearly one-third were unsure. Only 9 percent said the country is moving in the right direction, the first time this number was in the single digits in the poll’s 24-year history, organizers said. Four years ago, 21 percent said the nation was headed in the right direction.
Some Democrats have voiced concerns that significant numbers of young voters, dissatisfied with their election choices, might sit out the 2024 election. According to the poll, 53 percent say they’ll “definitely” vote this fall, compared to 54 percent who said the same and did so in numbers that helped propel Biden to victory in 2020.
Poll results showed that two issues closely associated with under-30 voters — the Israel-Hamas war and student debt relief — may not be especially consequential ones when it comes to casting votes.
Biden gets good marks (39 percent) for his efforts to reduce student debt, and poor marks for his handling of the war in Gaza (18 percent). But young people ranked these as least important among the issues facing the country. The majority said inflation, healthcare, and housing were the top three matters, followed by gun violence, according to the poll.
Confidence in the nation’s institutions has plummeted among younger Americans over the last two election cycles. Since 2015, trust in the presidency has dropped 60 points and in the Supreme Court by 55. Wall Street (9 percent) and the media (10 percent) are trusted least, but even the U.S. military, once considered largely above doubt, is now trusted by only 36 percent surveyed.
Posting your opinion on social media won’t save democracy, but this might
Tanner Lectures explore models of engaged citizenry from ancient agoras to modern megachurches
Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
4 min read
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Donating money, signing petitions, and sharing views on social media are some of the common ways Americans exercise their civic duty. Hahrie Han ’97 says they aren’t enough.
The professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, who delivered the first of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Paine Hall last week, said revitalizing American democracy will require an additional ingredient. She argued that today’s citizens are not given enough opportunity for collective activities that cultivate feelings of belonging and agency.
“Part of what we’ve lost in 21st-century America is a particular form of collective action that teaches people the commitments and capabilities of power-sharing that are necessary in pluralistic democracy,” said Han, who directs Johns Hopkins’ SNF Agora Institute and P3 Research Lab.
The political acts most Americans engage in are low-risk and low-commitment and require little more than expressing one’s opinion.
Hahrie Han
In her lectures, Han said the political acts most Americans engage in are low-risk and low-commitment and require little more than expressing one’s opinion. Participants are interchangeable — signatures on a petition, bodies at a march.
“People are spoon-fed a menu of actions they can take that are most likely to be solitary, expressive acts, in which their individual gifts and complexities are ignored,” Han said.
Han’s solution is to design civic spaces in which people experience a sense of belonging while discussing, listening, and grappling with complex topics. To be politically effective, these diverse, small groups should be part of a larger structure without being hierarchical.
As an example, Han pointed to Crossroads Church, an Ohio megachurch with 35,000 regular attendees that in 2016 mobilized hundreds of volunteers to help with passing Issue 44, a ballot initiative that funded universal preschool to benefit low-income families in Cincinnati.
When Han, who studied the church over several years, asked members what motivated them to become civically engaged, most credited a church antiracism program. Led by an organization called Undivided, the initiative brought together thousands of congregants in small, multiracial groups to learn more about racial injustice. At the program’s conclusion, a group called the Amos Project stepped in to organize faith communities and provide “next steps” for getting politically engaged with a variety of pressing issues, including Issue 44.
“By nesting people within these carefully designed organizational structures, we can cultivate opportunities for them to realize their own agency, to connect with each other, and then to engage in a kind of deliberative action that’s necessary to make democratic action work,” Han said.
Responding to Han’s second lecture, Doran Schrantz, who was consulting for the Amos Project at the time, emphasized the critical moment when they harnessed the energy of the thousands of people who had been participating in the antiracism workshops and directed it toward a political end. “Undivided constructed social capital, it made more willing people, it fostered curiosity, it built trust and respect and built relational skills,” Schrantz observed.
Han cited other groups within the Crossroads Church community, such as a men’s social club, that offer ways for people to connect across difference, find belonging, and commit to further civic action. “People who are in these small groups can simultaneously draw the benefits of deep, intimate connection that comes from a small group, but also a sense of feeling connected to something larger than themselves, because of the large community they’re a part of,” Han said.
Faith communities are particularly well set-up for political organizing, especially megachurches which have the power that comes with massive numbers of loyal attendees, Han said. But other community-based organizations, like nonprofits, social clubs, libraries, and barbershops, have similar potential. Han and her colleagues at the SNF Agora Institute have an ongoing project in which they are mapping these civic spaces.
Moving forward, Han said it’s important to reframe what political participation looks like for most Americans, broadening their vision to include different kinds of collection action.
“Shifting this paradigm is particularly important, given the historical moment of uncertainty that we’re in right now,” Han said. “Too many of the civic opportunities that we provide are trying to get people to ‘do a thing,’ which is different from getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.”
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
For Dora Woodruff, it’s math or bust.
“I don’t really have a backup plan,” said the graduating mathematics concentrator, who was drawn by the beauty and abstraction of numbers from a young age.
Woodruff arrived at Harvard from New York City knowing she wanted to dive deeply into pure mathematics and stretch herself into subfields such as topology, combinatorics, and extremal graph theory. She’s also been able to explore nonmathematical interests, taking courses in literature and linguistics, and playing oboe in the Harvard Bach Society and Harvard College Opera.
Yet it’s through mathematics that Woodruff accesses her most creative side. “To make any kind of progress in math, you have to have original ideas and be inventive,” she said.
Her senior thesis explored “equivariant topology and its combinatorial applications.” As the recipient of the department’s Friends Prize, Woodruff was invited to give a thesis seminar.
“For me, this thesis was an opportunity to read a ton of papers that I wanted to read — and would have had fun reading anyway — and then explain them to someone else,” she said. “It was also a way for me to learn a lot more advanced techniques around topology and do so in a fun way.”
“To make any kind of progress in math, you have to have original ideas and be inventive.”
Woodruff will next pursue a Ph.D. at MIT in algebraic combinatorics, a branch of mathematics that applies methods found in abstract algebra to discrete counting problems. The way she explains it: “The motivation behind algebraic combinatorics is to take problems from other areas, like algebraic geometry, or representation theory, and try to translate them into combinatorial problems, and then use combinatorics to solve them.” She loves the interplay between different ways of thinking about solutions and breaking big problems into more manageable bites.
“One of my favorite ways to solve a problem is to kind of start with small cases, small examples, and see if patterns that I notice generalize,” she said.
Unearthing connections between fields via the common language of combinatorics aligns with Woodruff’s desire to be a public ambassador for math. At Harvard, she has most appreciated moments in which mathematics communities have been “inclusive on purpose”; she’s found most of her professors to be hyper-conscious about creating welcoming environments.
Even so, the lingering effects of mathematics as traditionally male-dominated are pervasive and subtle — so much so that Woodruff suspects many think such problems don’t exist anymore. “Microaggressions are definitely a thing,” she said. She recalls well-meaning distant family members who, upon finding out she was interested in math, assumed she wanted to teach elementary school math.
Among her efforts to promote equity in the mathematics community, Woodruff served as co-president of Harvard Undergraduate Gender Inclusivity in Mathematics. The group has hosted events from department town halls to seminars about research experience opportunities for undergraduates.
Woodruff herself participated in multiple undergraduate research projects over three summers at different institutions, resulting in co-authorship on three research papers now under review.
She also served on the department’s Community Committee, launched by Michael Hopkins, Math Department chair and George Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The goal was to address longstanding culture issues within the department.
“[Dora] was extremely insightful about things we might need to do to change,” said Hopkins, who was also her thesis adviser. He was impressed by the leadership roles Woodruff took on atop her challenging coursework and teaching. “Brilliant, humble, gracious, and inclusive” was how he described her.
Woodruff worked as a course assistant for Math 55, a first-year honors course in algebra and analysis with a reputation for being extremely difficult. “I think the legendary status is maybe a little bit overhyped,” said Woodruff. “I think anyone with a proof-based background and a real desire to spend a lot of time on math can do well in the class. And honestly, I feel like I’ve taken classes that were a little bit crazier.”
Woodruff has been a course assistant nearly every semester — in ring theory, algebraic topology, and others. Revisiting material as a teacher has helped her nail down concepts in her own head. “Having to explain it to other people in a clear way helps me clarify it for myself, too,” she said.
After her four years at Harvard, Woodruff found that her conception of being “good at math” has evolved.
“I think I’ve gotten better at not getting discouraged when I don’t immediately get something,” she said. “I think building up resilience is important. As a mathematician, especially when you’re doing research, a lot of being ‘good’ at math is not giving up on a really hard problem and being willing to think about the same thing over and over again for many days. It’s just really loving it. I think those are qualities I have.”
Environmental law expert voices warning over Supreme Court
Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus talks to students about the conservatism of the current Supreme Court and its impact on environmental law.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Richard Lazarus sees conservative majority as threat to protections developed over past half century
The current conservative bent of the U.S. Supreme Court threatens to erode environmental law and reverse a series of important protections secured over the past 50 years, Richard Lazarus, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law, said Tuesday afternoon at a Harvard Law School event.
In what he warned would be an “unhappy talk,” Lazarus, the Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law, offered a chronology of shifts in the court and environmental law over the last half century.
“Everything environmental law has accomplished over the last sort of 50 years is just extraordinary,” said Lazarus, during a talk hosted by the Environmental & Energy Law Program and Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic. “It has been an incredible legal revolution in this country and has managed to bring down an enormous amount of air, water, and land pollution, while at the same time not leaving the kind of devastating economic effects that people thought we might have.”
The appointments of Neil Gorsuch, J.D. ’91, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court by former President Donald Trump has given conservative justices a majority in the court, a situation that doesn’t bode well for the future of environmental legislation, said Lazarus.
“We have three nominees to the court during the Trump administration who are very conservative individuals,” he said. “And with their votes, we’ve now had, in a very short period of time, a series of rulings that are very portentous to the future of environmental law.”
Lazarus cited two recent cases that represent a reversal of protections: the 2022 Clean Power Plan case, which limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plant emissions, and the 2023 Sackett v. EPA case, where the court dramatically curtailed the Clean Water Act of 1972, which governs water pollution.
This year, two cases before the court seek to overrule the 1984 decision known as the “Chevron doctrine,” which recognizes the decision-making authority of federal regulatory agencies. The doctrine has been the bedrock of administrative laws for decades, and if it is overturned, the ruling could significantly restrain the power of regulators and weaken administrative and environmental laws.
In Lazarus’ view, the Supreme Court had been “relatively moderate” on environmental issues until 2020. In an overview of the court spanning 50 years, Lazarus said pastRepublican appointees made “fairly balanced” decisions with a “win some, lose some” philosophy.
He pointed to the roles of Justices Harry Blackmun (1970-1994), John Paul Stevens (1975-2010), and David Souter (1990-2009), who, despite being Republican appointees, turned out to be “sensitive to environmental concerns,” and aware of the need to tackle some issues in environmental law while balancing them with property clause protections, administrative law, and deference to agencies.
Republican nominees Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (1981-2006) and Anthony Kennedy (1988-2018) shared their colleagues’ concerns, and there were occasions when they joined more liberal justices against conservative colleagues in key decisions.
“Justices O’Connor and Kennedy were deeply concerned about government overreaching, but they were very fact-dependent and worried about fairness,” Lazarus said. “Justice O’Connor particularly worried a lot about fairness, whether something made sense or not, and there were times when she would vote for the property owner. Justice Kennedy was very different from O’Connor, but as someone from California, he understood the time and space issues inherent in environmental cases and how land could be fragile.”
Another source of concern for Lazarus, who has represented the federal, state, and local governments, and environmental groups before the Supreme Court in 40 cases, is the fact that Congress has not passed a significant environmental law since 1990.
“Paralyzing partisanship has shut down Congress in 1990 for most things environmental,” said Lazarus, who teaches environmental law, natural resources law, Supreme Court advocacy, and torts. “During the 1970s and the 1980s, there was unbelievable bipartisanship on environmental law … Since 1990, we’ve had complete gridlock in Congress.”
The need for new environmental legislation and new statutory language is urgent, Lazarus said. The Clean Air Act has not been amended since 1990, the Water Quality Act since 1987, the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments since 1984, and the Endangered Species Act since 1973.
Making environmental legislation is hard, concedes Lazarus, given the complexities of the issues. Lawmakers must deal with regulations whose causes and effects are spread out over long stretches of time and geography. But the consequences of inaction can be tragic.
“If you wait too long, a species is gone,” said Lazarus. “You wait too long, and the glaciers melt. If you wait too long, then the ocean currents change direction.
“We have problems that are massive, like climate change,” he said. “And the clock is ticking at the same time. The longer you wait, the exponentially harder it is to do anything about it. The potential for catastrophic effects happening with irreversible effects looms larger every year.”
Einat Wilf, who is also former Knesset member, says shift needed in Palestinian ideology on legitimacy of Israel
Christina Pazzanese
Harvard Staff Writer
6 min read
Einat Wilf speaks with Tarek Masoud.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Calls for a cease-fire in Gaza may be well-intentioned, but a halt to the current fighting will not repair the enduring rift between Israelis and Palestinians. That can only happen once the Palestinians abandon an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state, said Israeli political scientist Einat Wilf ’96.
During a conversation Friday with Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, Wilf spoke about the war in Gaza and why she thinks there’s been so little progress reaching a resolution over the years. The talk was the fifth in an ongoing Middle East Dialogues series at Harvard Kennedy School, organized by Masoud, which aims to showcase a range of viewpoints on the current crisis and promote informed dialogue.
Describing herself as “the poster child of the Israeli Two-Stater Left,” Wilf served in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 2010 to 2013 as a member of the Labor Party, which supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state. She said she still favors such a goal, but no longer believes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is just about land.
“I voted for [Yitzhak] Rabin; I voted for [Ehud] Barak,” she said of the former Labor prime ministers. “I was euphoric in the ’90s, like many Israelis … when Barak goes to Camp David,” she said. “I believed in the vision of a new Middle East.”
“Sometimes you have to do things that don’t feel good but will actually begin to do good. So, if we want to get out of this conflict … we need to go to the core ideology that sustains it and begin to transform it.”
Einat Wilf, Israeli political scientist
But in 2000 and again in 2008, she watched Palestinian leaders refuse the terms of proposals from the Israelis for a state in the West Bank in Gaza.
“And I began to ask myself, ‘What is going on? What do the Palestinians want — because it’s clearly not a state,’” said Wilf, a former intelligence analyst. “They could have had that, and they walked away” without being criticized by the Palestinian people.
She came to that realization after conversations she’s had with many highly educated, moderate Palestinians over the last 20 years. “They basically tell me things like, ‘The Jewish people are not a people. You’re only a religion. This idea that you have a connection to this land, you invented it to steal our own,’” she said.
“And I realized from the conversations with them that how they think about the conflict, and how I think about it, don’t even meet. For them, the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state is illegitimate.”
Masoud said some might agree that walking away from the Camp David summit in 2000 and the Ehud Olmert peace deal in 2008 was “a huge error.” But he suggested the Palestinian leadership may have felt there wasn’t enough specificity in the Israeli proposals and turned them down on that basis, not because they couldn’t accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.
If that were true, Wilf argued, Palestinians in the leadership and intellectual classes would have criticized those decisions and urged a return to the bargaining table. “There [were] no such voices, and there are still no such voices,” she said.
All of the factors cited by today’s critics of Israel — its occupation of the West Bank, the settlements, the blockades, or the existence of Palestinian refugees — are not to blame for the current failure to achieve peace. None of these existed in 1947 when the United Nations adopted the partition plan for Palestine, Wilf said. At its crux, this is a conflict about the Jews who want a state and the Palestinians who don’t want them to have one, she said.
Palestinian leaders have expressed support for the two-state framework over decades of negotiations. They have also argued, however, that “the right of return is holy, sacred, non-negotiable, [and] belongs to every Palestinian in perpetuity,’” which, if fully exercised by all Palestinians, would preclude the possibility of a Jewish state, Wilf said.
The right of return is a United Nations principle that would permit displaced Palestinians and their descendants, a group estimated at nearly six million, to return to their former or ancestral homes.
As for the obstacles to peace, the Israeli settlements are “not helping the matter.” But they are “not the reason we do not have peace.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has this “catastrophic failure on his watch,” Wilf said.
“And unfortunately, it’s not just him. There are so many people who refuse to engage with the Palestinian ideology and to understand that we can never move forward without that ideology changing.”
That’s why simply calling for a cease-fire right now in the midst of a century-long war without such changes would be ineffective at best, she said.
“A lot of people in foreign policy, they want to feel good,” said Wilf. “But it doesn’t always do good.” In governance, “Sometimes you have to do things that don’t feel good but will actually begin to do good. So, if we want to get out of this conflict … we need to go to the core ideology that sustains it and begin to transform it.
“Peace has to be based on the mutual recognition of the two sides to the right of self-determination,” she said. “There’s a clear Jewish state that is embraced, that is accepted, and there is an Arab Palestinian state that is embraced and accepted.”
The next Dialogues, slated for April 29, will feature Bret Stephens, opinion columnist for The New York Times and founder and editor-in-chief of SAPIR, a quarterly devoted to issues of Jewish concerns. Past events have included conversations with Jared Kushner, former senior adviser to President Donald Trump; Matt Duss, executive director of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Dalal Saeb Iriqat, professor of diplomacy and conflict resolution at Arab American University Palestine and columnist for Al-Quds newspaper; and Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority from 2007-2013.
Tarek Masoud, organizer of Middle East Dialogues, wanted to show that Harvard could confront the tensions around Israel-Gaza without vitriol or shouting. So far, it’s worked.
Wandering through glass-walled hallways giving sweeping views of the Harvard stadium, the Allston neighborhood, and the Boston skyline in the distance, visitors peered into labs and collaboration spaces filled with white boards and monitors, where the Kempner’s researchers work together to delve into the deepest recesses of minds and machines.
A view inside the institute from its front door.
SEAS teaching fellow Sonja Johnson-Yu.
The collaboration is the point.
“We really tried to think about shared spaces, about how to design a space that facilitates true collaboration and connection,” said the institute’s executive director, Elise Porter, as she gave groups of students, faculty, scientists, and administrators a tour. “The space is important because it gives life to the Kempner’s entire premise that collaboration across disciplines is a critical driver of new scientific discovery.”
Jennifer Hu, Kempner Institute research fellow (from left), Jennifer Shum, research assistant in SEAS, and Kempner Institute research fellow Ilenna Simone Jones.
Sham Kakade, Co-director of the Kempner Institute, and Clara Mohri.
Ph.D. student Mozes Jacob makes use of one the buildings many white boards.
As the event came to a close and visitors chatted in the Kempner’s lofty atrium, many of the researchers headed back into their offices and collaboration spaces. The buzz of activity was underway again, the vast white boards filling with code, numbers, and new ideas.
Directors and researchers at the Kempner Institute discuss its mission.
A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.
A family sits around a fire pit in their backyard on the Cahuilla reservation in Southern California in a scene from “Menil and Her Heart,” Isabella Madrigal’s thesis screenplay.
“Do you know who gave the arts to the Cahuilla people?” the father asks his two daughters. Menil, the youngest, says no, and the father tells the story of her namesake, Menil, the moon maiden, who “painted the world into being.”
Weaving together old family traditions of oral storytelling with modern mediums like screenwriting and acting is a skill Madrigal ’24, an English concentrator with a psychology secondary, has honed for many years.
The Adams House resident from Temecula, California, is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, and of Anishinaabe, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent. An emerging screenwriter and actress, Madrigal has appeared in Marvel’s “Echo” (2024) TV miniseries and the show “Rutherford Falls” (2021-2022) and wants to increase Native representation onscreen and amplify overlooked voices and narratives.
“If you only have a very limited idea of who you can be — what previous media has shown — that impacts artistic creation and how you show up in the world,” Madrigal said.
It’s a different direction from where she started at Harvard. Madrigal had begun on a pre-med track, but the absence of an artistic outlet left a void. Her decision to shift her focus to arts and humanities ended up “really changing my Harvard experience,” she said.
“This idea of community- building and community-healing was always something I knew I wanted to do,” Madrigal said. “I saw an opportunity for that in medicine, but being at Harvard I’ve been able to see there are so many ways that you can engage in that kind of work.”
“I feel very different than when I came into Harvard. I have a better understanding of what I want to do and what values I have in a career space.”
“As one of the vice presidents of Natives at Harvard College, Isabella is a leader in our community,” said Jordan Clark, assistant director of the Harvard University Native American Program. “Creating space for new students to find community, providing programming, and always showing up to support other students when they need it — she plays an important role as a mentor and role model.”
Madrigal’s senior thesis screenplay, a genre-bending family drama full of magical realism, centers the issues of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and two-spirit people.
When teenage Menil suddenly goes missing, her devastated family is met with indifference from local law enforcement. Older sister Nesune travels to a parallel universe to search for her, and there she discovers all the Cahuilla stories from her memory are real.
For Madrigal, who has been developing the story since age 16, the screenplay is a way to raise awareness about a crisis. The National Crime Information Center noted 5,712 reports of missing Native women and girls in 2016, and a 2018 report by the Urban Indian Health Institute identified 506 missing and murder cases across 71 U.S. cities. Abigail Echo-Hawk, the report’s co-author, was one of Madrigal’s mentors during the project.
“Theater has an incredible capacity to engage audience members and actors with social issues, inspire hope, and incite change,” said Madrigal, who hopes to one day see the screenplay become a feature film.
Madrigal staged an early play version of “Menil and Her Heart” in high school, starring her sister Sophia Madrigal ’26 and their father, Luke Madrigal.
Luke, who was instrumental in preserving the tradition of Cahuilla bird singing, passed away four months before Isabella started at Harvard. For the oldest daughter, much of her work is about honoring his legacy.
“Some of the strongest memories I have are doing that [play] together,” Madrigal said. “This project feels like it’s so wrapped up in him, which is why I see it continuing with me for so long.”
Madrigal got experience with Native-directed projects through roles in the small-town sitcom “Rutherford Falls,” filmed during sophomore winter recess, and in “Echo” the summer before her junior year. In “Echo” she played a younger version of the superhero’s grandmother Chula (Tantoo Cardinal) in a flashback scene of a dramatic birth.
“It was top secret. I didn’t have the script until a couple days before,” Madrigal recalled. “I’ve never given birth! I was asking everybody — my mom, my aunts — if they could share any tips.”
Madrigal said she has been thrilled to see more Native projects in recent years.
“Without that surge, which was decades in the making by native creators, I wouldn’t have been able to have these roles,” Madrigal said. “Native script writers and directors open up opportunities for so many more people.”
An essential part of filmmaking, Madrigal said, is working with communities to tell their stories in a responsible way, a skill she cultivated in the Harvard class “Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film,” with associate senior lecturer on screenwriting Musa Syeed, who was also Madrigal’s thesis adviser.
“Part of the responsibility of telling that story requires conversations with culture bearers, with elders,” Madrigal said. “For me, that looked like talking through the story with people, sharing intention.”
After Commencement, Madrigal plans to shoot “Menil and Her Heart” as a short with the help of a Culture Bearer grant she was awarded by the Center for Cultural Power and the California Arts Council.
“I feel very different than when I came into Harvard,” Madrigal said. “I have a better understanding of what I want to do and what values I have in a career space. I thought an ‘artist’ was somebody who had to fit into one box. Seeing that you can do so many different things as an interdisciplinary artist has been amazing to discover.”
Bernie Sanders sees red lights flashing for election
Vermont senator warns of growing income, wealth, and political inequality
Anna Lamb
Harvard Staff Writer
5 min read
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders sees warning lights flashing in America.
“In our country today, we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society,” Sanders told a packed room at the Harvard Kennedy School last Friday. “What we are seeing now, and what I think we have never seen before, is a very small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful people who are significantly increasing their power over both our economic and political systems.”
Sanders, a progressive who is an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, was joined by award-winning journalist and current IOP fellow Allison King on Friday to discuss issues facing the nation ahead of the 2024 elections. Sanders, an Institute of Politics fellow in 1989, sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, and at the center of his platforms was income and wealth inequality, which he said has gotten worse.
“The very wealthiest people are doing phenomenally. Meanwhile working people all over this country are struggling.”
Bernie Sanders
Sanders noted that on a recent trip to Los Angeles he witnessed large numbers of people “sleeping out on the streets,” and he spoke to residents who say they are “paying 50, 60, 70 percent of their limited incomes on housing.” He visited a Black community in Baltimore that was a food desert, without a single grocery store, and older people isolated in their homes.
“The very wealthiest people are doing phenomenally,” Sanders said. “Meanwhile working people all over this country are struggling.”
During his talk, Sanders quoted Federal Reserve statistics showing $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent over the past 50 years.
The inequity has spilled over into politics, he said. “What you are increasingly seeing is not campaigns between candidate X and candidate Y. You’re seeing campaigns against this super PAC versus that super PAC,” financed by “hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from the billionaire class to defeat candidates who stand with workers and who will support the ruling class in America.”
Sanders’ remedy? “I think what we have to do is create a real political revolution in America, which understands that we have a very formidable and powerful enemy who really are truly greedy people,” he said.
The economy is widely expected to be a major campaign issue, with concerns over consumer prices, which have been moderating in recent months, at the top.
Sanders told the audience the major factor in inflation is corporate greed — that food manufacturers and oil companies can be blamed for high prices hurting American’s pockets at the grocery store and the gas pump.
An audience member captures video of Sanders speaking.
“Workers have not benefited from the increased worker productivity and technology — people on top have,” he said. “So I think it is time that workers benefit from it.”
Sanders’ talk also repeatedly underscored one of his other major congressional agenda items — Medicare for all.
“What is the role of government in society?” Sanders asked. “It would seem to me when you boil it down, it’s to create a society in which people live long, happy, and productive lives … despite this huge expenditure on healthcare, our life expectancy is significantly less than … many, many countries’.”
Sanders did a talk at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health earlier in the day, critiquing the nation’s healthcare system and highlighting his belief that healthcare is a human right.
When asked whether he supports President Biden’s bid for re-election, Sanders applauded Biden’s support of issues such as student debt relief, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, and organized labor.
During the talk, Sanders was also asked about his stance on the Israel/Gaza conflict, on which he has taken a humanitarian stance on the side of Palestinians. Sanders has urged the president to cut funding to Israel for weapons and leverage U.S. political power to get aid to Gaza.
“My view was that if somebody invades your country and does terrible things, you have the right to defend yourself,” Sanders said. “But what Israel has done in the past many, many months since that invasion has been engaging in a war not against Hamas, but it has been a war against the Palestinian people.”
And when asked about advice he would give to students looking for jobs after graduation, he said he hoped many of them would “choose to stand on the side of justice, and not on the side of big money.”
“We need strong voices who will stand up for the poor, who will stand up taking on the fossil-fuel industry so our planet is not destroyed, will stand up for a sane foreign policy, who will stand up for military policy to not spent 10 times more than more than the next 10 countries combined,” he said.
“You are getting the best education America can provide. And I think you need to make very fundamental decisions. We are on the Titanic, and it’s going down. And you are about to decide whether or not you can play a role in preventing that destruction.”
Exercise cuts heart disease risk in part by lowering stress, study finds
Benefits nearly double for people with depression
MGH Communications
2 min read
New research indicates that physical activity lowers cardiovascular disease risk in part by reducing stress-related signaling in the brain.
In the study, which was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, people with stress-related conditions such as depression experienced the most cardiovascular benefits from physical activity.
To assess the mechanisms underlying the psychological and cardiovascular disease benefits of physical activity, Ahmed Tawakol, an investigator and cardiologist in the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues analyzed medical records and other information of 50,359 participants from the Mass General Brigham Biobank who completed a physical activity survey.
A subset of 774 participants also underwent brain imaging tests and measurements of stress-related brain activity.
Over a median follow-up of 10 years, 12.9 percent of participants developed cardiovascular disease. Participants who met physical activity recommendations had a 23 percent lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease compared with those not meeting these recommendations.
Individuals with higher levels of physical activity also tended to have lower stress-related brain activity. Notably, reductions in stress-associated brain activity were driven by gains in function in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in executive function (i.e., decision-making, impulse control) and is known to restrain stress centers of the brain. Analyses accounted for other lifestyle variables and risk factors for coronary disease.
Moreover, reductions in stress-related brain signaling partially accounted for physical activity’s cardiovascular benefit.
As an extension of this finding, the researchers found in a cohort of 50,359 participants that the cardiovascular benefit of exercise was substantially greater among participants who would be expected to have higher stress-related brain activity, such as those with pre-existing depression.
“Physical activity was roughly twice as effective in lowering cardiovascular disease risk among those with depression. Effects on the brain’s stress-related activity may explain this novel observation,” says Tawakol, senior author of the study.
“Prospective studies are needed to identify potential mediators and to prove causality. In the meantime, clinicians could convey to patients that physical activity may have important brain effects, which may impart greater cardiovascular benefits among individuals with stress-related syndromes such as depression.”
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Genomic findings challenge thinking on what makes a species
Clea Simon
Harvard Correspondent
4 min read
Writing to Charles Darwin in 1861, naturalist Henry Walter Bates described brightly colored Heliconius butterflies of the Amazon as “a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species.” More than 160 years later, an international research team including Harvard scientists also focused on this genus of butterflies to document the evolution of a new species.
In a paper published April 17 in Nature, the team found that hybrids between two Heliconius species of butterflies produced a new species genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier forebears.
“A lot of species are not intact units. They’re quite leaky, and they’re exchanging genetic material.”
Neil Rosser, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology
Researchers used whole-genome sequencing to show that a hybridization event some 180,000 years ago between Heliconius melpomene and the ancestor of today’s Heliconius pardalinus produced a third hybrid species, Heliconius elevatus. Although descended from hybrids, H. elevatus is a distinct butterfly species with individual traits — including its caterpillar’s host plant and the adult’s male sex pheromones, color pattern, wing shape, flight, and mate choice. All three species now fly together across a vast area of the Amazon rainforest.
“Historically hybridization was thought of as a bad thing that was not particularly important when it came to evolution,” said Neil Rosser, an associate of entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology who co-authored the study and handled its genetic mapping with Harvard postdoctoral fellow Fernando Seixas. “But what genomic data have shown is that actually hybridization among species is widespread.”
The findings may alter how we view species. “A lot of species are not intact units,” said Rosser. “They’re quite leaky, and they’re exchanging genetic material.”
Historically, hybridization has been thought to inhibit the creation of new species. Yet in this case, the researchers say, hybridization is driving the evolution of a new species. “The species that are evolving are constantly exchanging genes, and the consequence of this is that it can actually trigger the evolution of completely new lineages,” said Rosser.
“Historically hybridization was thought of as a bad thing that was not particularly important when it came to evolution,” said Neil Rosser (left, pictured with co-author James Mallet). “But what genomic data have shown is that actually hybridization among species is widespread.”
“Normally, species are thought to be reproductively isolated,” added co-author James Mallet, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. “They can’t produce hybrids that are reproductively fertile.” While there is now evidence of hybridization between species, what was difficult to confirm was that this hybridization is, in some way, involved in speciation. As Mallet put it: “The question is: How can you collapse two species together and get a third species out of that collapse?”
The new research provides a next step in understanding how hybridization and speciation work. “Over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been a paradigm shift in terms of the importance of hybridization and evolution,” Rosser said.
This research has the potential to play a role in the current biodiversity crisis. Understanding something as basic as what we mean by a species is important for saving species and for conservation, particularly in the Amazon, Mallet said. In addition, such work may prove useful in understanding carriers of disease. Multiple species of mosquito, for example, can carry malaria. Although these mosquitos are closely related, “almost nothing is known about how they interact, and whether they hybridize with each other,” he noted.
In addition to co-lead author Kanchon Dasmahapatra of the University of York in England, the international crew of researchers included Lucie M. Queste, Bruna Cama, Ronald Mori-Pezo, Dmytro Kryvokhyzha, Michaela Nelson, Rachel Waite-Hudson, Matt Goringe, Mauro Costa, Marianne Elias, Clarisse Mendes Eleres de Figueiredo, André Victor Lucci Freitas, Mathieu Joron, Krzysztof Kozak, Gerardo Lamas, Ananda R.P. Martins, W. Owen McMillan, Jonathan Ready, Nicol Rueda-Muñoz, Camilo Salazar, Patricio Salazar, Stefan Schulz, Leila T. Shirai, and Karina L. Silva-Brandão.
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