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. 

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. 

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. 

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.”

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.

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
• 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.”

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.”

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.

Uma Naidoo is an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of the books “This Is Your Brain on Food” and “Calm Your Mind with Food.” We asked her why we experience junk food cravings and how we can stop them.

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 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.

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. 

— As told to Liz Mineo/Harvard Staff Writer

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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. 

“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 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. 

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. 

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.

“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 4.5^oC.

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.”

An obvious stop was Bates College, home to the archives of Maine Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, a key architect of the 1970 Clean Air Act. 

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 1969 moon landing? Fake. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Cuba really did it.  Thomas Jefferson’s bitterly contested election in 1800? Choreographed by hidden hands.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” 

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.

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.

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 task forces on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias have issued preliminary reports. How are you viewing their initial recommendations?

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.

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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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.”

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.

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. 

“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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.” 

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.” 

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.

The Gazette spoke with Eva Schernhammer, a Nurse’s Health Study researcher and adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health about the research, published recently in journal JAMA Network Open.

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 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.

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? 

There are stool samples. We have a study — we are trying to get funding to 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, as most 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.

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.”

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.”  

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.

“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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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?

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.

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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