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‘Because Larry has shown up for us’ 

Friends, colleagues gather for 70th birthday conference honoring economic scholar, former Treasury Secretary and University President Lawrence Summers


Nation & World

‘Because Larry has shown up for us’ 

Friends, colleagues gather for 70th birthday conference honoring economic scholar, former Treasury Secretary and University President Lawrence Summers

4 min read
Jason Furman (from left), Olivier Blanchard, and Brad DeLong speaking during the event.

Jason Furman (from left), Olivier Blanchard, and Brad DeLong.

Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

In introducing the final panel, Gene Sperling, who directed the National Economic Council for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, remarked, “This is not a roast.”

But the recent economic policy conference marking Lawrence H. Summers’ 70th birthday was often roast-like — although always affectionate — interspersed with anecdotes from computer labs during Summers’ student days, the halls of Washington, D.C., and the president’s office in Mass Hall. Pointed comments about economic concepts prompted laughter, as did Summers — seated in the front row — who offered some good-natured rebuttals to the ribbing.

The gathering featured panels on Summers’ impact on modern finance, labor and public economics, and macroeconomics and policy. Speakers described a colleague and friend who has had a deep impact on those around him. His trademark probing questions have pushed others to think deeper, while his public positions have made a difference on topics as disparate as the recent rise and fall of inflation, passage of the Affordable Care Act, and his early recognition, in 1992, of the importance of educating girls in the developing world.

Lawrence H. Summers (pictured) speaking during the event.
Summers offered some good-natured rebuttals to the ribbing.

“No one was talking about this, but Larry did, and he single-handedly took that issue from something that education ministers care about to something finance ministers care about,” said former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, “And we all know the power difference between those two posts. Literally millions and millions of girls owe a change in their lives and futures to that speech.”

Today, Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School. His career spans studies at MIT and Harvard; the World Bank, where he was chief economist; the U.S. Treasury department, where he was secretary from 1999 to 2001; Harvard’s president’s office from 2001 to 2006; and the National Economic Council, which he directed from 2009 to 2011 under Obama.

Panelists painted a portrait of a scholar and public servant who is an innovative thinker and fearless in his thoughts and beliefs: Summers at one point remarked about a fundamental concept he still disagrees with, to knowing laughter. “I’ve lost that argument with the world, largely. I’m aware of that, but not to the extent of giving it up.”

Sheryl Sandberg.
Sheryl Sandberg described Summers’ impact on her career as profound.

Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and HKS’ Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, described Summers’ ability to extract knowledge from those around him by focusing on a single issue or question and probing it until he was satisfied he had learned all he could. UC Berkeley Professor Brad DeLong said Summer’s questioning style went both ways: People learned more than facts and figures from him. They learned how to think differently.

“Larry’s nearly unique edge, I think, is an extremely, extremely sharp eye for what pain points are about to become salient, over and over seeing when things are changing in the macro economy so we really need to change our models to deal with skating where the puck is going to be,” said DeLong, who has been a co-author with Summers. “Because the important questions are about now and the next decade. You write even a good paper about an important question in macro from a decade ago, and you have written a paper about an unimportant question.” 

Sandberg, who graduated from Harvard Business School in 1995, said Summers’ impact on her career has been profound. She met him as a student, he advised her thesis, gave her a job at the World Bank when he was chief economist, and later at the Treasury, where she was his chief of staff. Through her career he was always willing to listen, she said, and she knows he listened to others even when they were facing public scrutiny, a time when many would shrink from associating with them.

“He never worried that he would somehow get dragged into someone else’s mess. He just showed up,” Sandberg said. “I know all of us here showed up for this day because Larry has shown up for us.” 


Score another point for the plants

Study finds 1:2 ratio of plant to animal protein lowers risk of heart disease


Photo of plant and meat protein sources.
Health

Score another point for the plants

Study finds 1:2 ratio of plant to animal protein lowers risk of heart disease

4 min read

Increasing the ratio of plant-based protein in your diet may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease, finds a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

According to the researchers, these risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meats. The researchers also observed that a combination of consuming more plant protein and higher protein intake overall provided the most heart health benefits.

While global dietary guidelines recommend higher intake of plant protein, the ideal ratio of plant to animal protein has remained unknown. The study is the first to investigate this ratio and how it impacts health, specifically heart health.

Risk reductions are likely driven by the replacement of red and processed meat with several plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes.

“The average American eats a 1:3 plant to animal protein ratio. Our findings suggest a ratio of at least 1:2 is much more effective in preventing cardiovascular disease. For coronary heart disease prevention, a ratio of 1:1.3 or higher should come from plants,” said lead author Andrea Glenn, visiting scientist in the Department of Nutrition. Glenn worked on the study as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Chan School and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt.

The study was published Dec. 2 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The researchers used 30 years of data on diet, lifestyle, and heart health among nearly 203,000 men and women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study. Participants reported their dietary intake every four years. The researchers calculated each participant’s total protein intake, measured in grams per day, as well as their specific intakes of animal and plant proteins. Over the course of the study period, 16,118 cardiovascular disease cases, including over 10,000 coronary heart disease cases and over 6,000 stroke cases, were documented.

After adjusting for participants’ health history and sociodemographic and lifestyle factors, the study found that eating a higher ratio of plant to animal protein was associated with lower risks of cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease. Compared to participants who consumed the lowest plant to animal protein ratio (~1:4.2), participants who consumed the highest (~1:1.3) had a 19 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 27 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease. These risk reductions were even higher among participants who ate more protein overall. Those who consumed the most protein (21 percent of energy coming from protein) and adhered to a higher plant to animal protein ratio saw a 28 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 36 percent lower risk of coronary heart disease, compared to those who consumed the least protein (16 percent of energy). No significant associations were found for stroke risk and the ratio; however, replacing red and processed meat in the diet with several plant sources, such as nuts, showed a lower risk of stroke.

The researchers also examined if there’s a point at which eating more plant protein stops having added benefits or could even have negative implications. They found that risk reduction for cardiovascular disease begins to plateau around a 1:2 ratio, but that coronary heart disease risk continues to decrease at higher ratios of plant to animal protein.

According to the researchers, replacing red and processed meat with plant protein sources, particularly nuts and legumes, have been found to improve cardiometabolic risk factors, including blood lipids and blood pressure as well as inflammatory biomarkers. This is partly because plant proteins are often accompanied by high amounts of fiber, antioxidant vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats.

“Most of us need to begin shifting our diets toward plant-based proteins,” said senior author Frank Hu, Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School. “We can do so by cutting down on meat, especially red and processed meats, and eating more legumes and nuts. Such a dietary pattern is beneficial not just for human health but also the health of our planet.”

The researchers pointed out that the ratios they identified are estimates, and that further studies are needed to determine the optimal balance between plant and animal protein. Additionally, further research is needed to determine how stroke risk may be impacted by protein intake.

Other Harvard Chan authors included Fenglei WangAnne-Julie TessierJoAnn MansonEric RimmKen MukamalQi Sun, and Walter Willett.

The Nurses’ Health Studies and Health Professional Follow-up Studies are supported by National Institutes of Health grants UM1 CA186107, R01 CA49449, R01 HL034594, U01 HL145386, R01 HL088521, U01 CA176726, R01 CA49449, U01 CA167552, R01 HL60712, and R01 HL35464.


Dance the audience can feel — through their phones

Engineer harnesses haptics to translate movement, make her art more accessible


Shriya Srinivasan with Anubhava Dance Company,

Shriya Srinivasan, artistic director of Anubhava Dance Company (second from left), performing at the Harvard Art Museums.

Photo by Jodi Hilton

Arts & Culture

Dance the audience can feel — through their phones

5 min read

Engineer harnesses haptics to translate movement, make her art more accessible

Shriya Srinivasan danced with precise steps, using graceful flicks of her wrists to depict a heroine holding a mirror and applying makeup and perfume, her expressions lit by hope and excitement. Behind her, centuries-old Indian watercolors depicted similar heroines.

The assistant professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was performing a bharata natyam dance about a common archetype in Indian paintings and dance — a vasakasajja nayika, or heroine eagerly preparing to meet her lover — for a recent event at the Harvard Art Museums. Before the dance, she explained to the audience how the brain’s prefrontal cortex heightens feelings of excitement and anticipation in love by tapping into memories and activating reward centers.

“As a dancer, I aim to enter the emotional and physiological state of the character I am playing, inducing a faster heart rate or slowing the breath, to simulate anxiety or deep loss, for example,” she said. “Mirror neurons in the viewer then assimilate these cues and allow them to resonate with the emotional experience and catharsis of the character.”

Srinivasan combines her passions for science and dance as director of Harvard’s Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics Lab and co-founder and artistic director of the Anubhava Dance Company, an Indian classical dance ensemble that performs nationally.

A recent collaboration between the lab and Anubhava led to the creation of an app that allows audience members to feel dancers’ movements through a smartphone’s vibrations, a project featured last month on the PBS Nova docuseries “Building Stuff.”

“The scientific question at hand was: How can we enhance the experience of dance, reaching beyond just audio and visual input into tactile or other forms of sensory input?” Srinivasan said.

Her research and development team, which included Isabella Gomez ’24 and Krithika Swaminathan, Ph.D. ’23, developed custom sensing devices that are placed on the ankles of Anubhava dancers to capture and classify their complex footwork into patterns. A smartphone app transmits the movements into audience members’ hands. Srinivasan says the technology has the potential to make dance performances more accessible for the lay viewer, as well as visually- or hearing-impaired people.

“Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect.”

Shriya Srinivasan
Shriya Srinivasan

Srinivasan, assistant professor of bioengineering, in her office.

Photo by Grace DuVal

To make the haptic feedback stimuli convey the feel of the footwork, researchers set the vibrations to different intensity levels. Light, flowing movements were represented by vibrations targeting surface-level mechanoreceptors in the skin, while more intense, punchier movements penetrated to deeper skin layers, Srinivasan explained. The project culminated in a dance titled “Decoded Rhythms” for an audience at the ArtLab, where Srinivasan did a 2023-2024 faculty residency.

“For me, dance and engineering are similar in process,” Srinivasan said. “Choreographing a piece is akin to designing a system — both involve carefully crafting elements to achieve a specific effect. Just as engineers design a system to meet certain requirements, dancers create choreography to evoke a particular emotion or reaction from the audience. It’s about problem-solving and design.”

Srinivasan, who grew up dancing bharata natyam under the tutelage of her mother Sujatha Srinivasan, established Anubhava in 2015 with co-founder Joshua George in the hopes of creating a space for Indian forms in the American dance world while also merging arts, science, and humanities onstage.

“There’s a high level of rhythmic and mathematical complexity that goes into the choreography that we produce that might not always translate to an audience if they’re not familiar with the style of music that we utilize, or if they’ve not been trained in the dance form,” George said.

Since this collaboration, Srinivasan said Anubhava has been diving deeper into neuroscience, psychology, and mental health, incorporating portrayals of emotions such as fear and anxiety, which she said are not commonly explored in Indian classical dance tradition, into their recent performances.

“I find it immensely fulfilling to engage in work at the intersection of disciplines,” Srinivasan said. “Exploring a problem from different perspectives can help you envision solutions that aren’t visible from traditional silos.”

Srinivasan is especially interested in further research on how physiological changes in the body of a dancer portraying emotions onstage might evoke a similar response in audience members.

“There are vast opportunities to study why the world makes us feel the way we do. When I experience art, it evokes a certain emotional response in me. Understanding why is deeply fundamental to the work of an artist, but doing so with the lens of science gives me this tangible way to say, ‘OK, if I modulate ABC, I can get somebody to feel XYZ.’ To me, that’s nuanced insight.”


How HIV research has reshaped modern medicine 

Decades of scientific work turned the tide on a fatal disease and yielded insights into immunity, vaccines, and more


Health

How HIV research has reshaped modern medicine 

A bright circular virus particle shines in the center of an image against a dark background, with the edge of an infected cell seen in one corner.

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of an HIV-1 virus particle (yellow/gold) budding from an infected cell.

Credit: NIAID/NIH

long read

Decades of scientific work turned the tide on a fatal disease and yielded insights into immunity, vaccines, and more

In 1981, fresh out of medical school, physician-scientist Bruce Walker began his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital. One day, a young patient showed up with an unusual cluster of infections and cancers. Baffled and powerless to treat him, Walker and his colleagues could only watch as the patient quickly succumbed to the mysterious condition.

“I distinctly remember the first case we saw at Mass General,” said Walker, who is the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “The attending physician said that although we didn’t know what this condition was, we probably would never see another case like it.”

Two weeks later, another patient came in with the same set of symptoms. It quickly became clear to Walker and his colleagues that they weren’t dealing with a rare disease — it was the beginning of a new epidemic.

The baffling condition was acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) — the most advanced stage of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which attacks and destroys infection-fighting immune cells. By 1993, HIV had become the leading cause of death in Americans aged 25-44 years.

In the 40-plus years since it was identified, scientists have made notable progress against HIV, transforming the infection from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition, one that affects some 1.2 million people in the United States and nearly 40 million worldwide.

This decades-long quest for a cure for HIV has also yielded broader insights that have implications for the treatment of COVID-19, cancer, and other diseases.

From molecular insights to frontline medicines

Since the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS, basic science and animal research have played a critical role in illuminating the virus’ complex behavior.

Some of the pivotal studies toward unraveling the structure, biology, and behavior of HIV have emanated from labs across Harvard Medical School. Using a range of imaging techniques, Stephen Harrison’s lab has identified key portions of HIV and studied the evolution of HIV antibodies, which is critical to understanding how the immune system interacts with the virus. The work of Joseph Sodroski, Bing Chen, and Alan Engelman has elucidated how HIV enters host cells and interacts with cell receptors, studying the structure and behavior of the virus’ protein envelope during this process.

This research has illuminated how HIV integrates its genetic material into host cell DNA, a crucial step in the virus’ life cycle. These insights have enhanced vaccine and therapeutic development by revealing how broadly neutralizing antibodies work and guiding the design of new immune-targeting strategies.

Early analyses of patient samples revealed that HIV is a human retrovirus — a type of virus that converts its RNA into DNA upon infecting a host cell. This tricks the host cell into copying the virus’ genetic material into its DNA as part of the cell’s normal replication cycle. The maneuver enables it to use the host cell machinery to make more viruses. HIV specifically goes after CD4 T lymphocytes or so-called helper T cells. These white blood cells coordinate immune response by signaling other immune cells to fight invaders. The virus begins by hijacking the cells’ molecular machinery to assemble thousands of viral particles, which go on to infect other CD4 T cells, spreading the pathogen throughout the body.

Today, the standard treatment for HIV is antiretroviral therapy (ART) — a combination of HIV medications, typically taken daily, that disrupt the virus’ replication cycle. When taken consistently, ART can lower the amount of actively replicating virus in the body — or viral load — to undetectable levels, lowering risk of transmission and allowing people with HIV to live nearly as long as uninfected individuals.

ART has also proved to be useful as a pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) — an approach that can prevent up to 99 percent of sexually transmitted HIV infections from developing after exposure. Notably, a new class of medicines has raised hopes as a game-changer in HIV prevention. Two recent clinical trials of more than 7,500 cisgender men and transgender and nonbinary people showed that twice-a-year injections with the long-lasting drug lenacapavir prevented HIV infections in nearly all participants.

Yet, millions around the world are already infected. Once inside the body, HIV persists because of its remarkable ability to hide within healthy CD4 T cells, where it can lie dormant for years without triggering an immune response, said Daniel Kuritzkes, HMS Harriet Ryan Albee Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Although these latent reservoirs of HIV do not actively produce new virus particles, they can reawaken at any time, leading to active HIV infection. This chronic immune activation among infected people — even when the virus is kept at bay — can amplify the risk for several chronic conditions.

“People living with HIV often have elevated markers of inflammation. This chronic immune activation can predispose people to long-term complications, including cardiovascular illness.”

Daniel Kuritzkes/
Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the division of infectious diseases, BWH

“People living with HIV often have elevated markers of inflammation,” Kuritzkes said. “This chronic immune activation can predispose people to long-term complications, including cardiovascular illness.”

Indeed, research has shown that people with HIV have a somewhat elevated risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and certain types of cancer. Now, the latest research from Advancing Clinical Therapeutics Globally — a global network of experts conducting HIV research — has found that daily use of statins could reduce risk of cardiovascular disease in people living with HIV by 35 percent. This pivotal work was conceived by and led by Steven Grinspoon, HMS professor of medicine and director of the Metabolism Unit at Mass General Hospital.

While this offers a path toward managing HIV-related complications, Kuritzkes emphasizes that the ultimate quest of research efforts remains achieving sterilizing immunity through a vaccine that halts the virus in its tracks, preventing infection from taking hold in the first place.

The roadmap to a vaccine

With some 1.3 million new infections a year, a vaccine remains the best way to end the HIV epidemic, said Dan Barouch, the William Bosworth Castle Professor of Medicine at HMS and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

“We should use all of our prevention and treatment tools, including education and pre-exposure prophylaxis with antiretroviral drugs, to prevent HIV, but to really end the epidemic, we need a vaccine,” Barouch said.

Despite great strides with PrEP, Barouch notes, it will only reach high-risk individuals, and as many as half of new HIV infections occur in people who are not designated as high risk. Thus, Barouch notes, even if PrEP were available for free and accessible to everyone in the world, which is far from reality, it would still invariably reach a ceiling of population efficacy.

Yet, after 40 years of effort, the HIV vaccine field is at a crossroads. Since the dawn of HIV research, there have been hundreds of attempts at vaccine design, and dozens have made it to early-stage clinical trials, but only five have been tested in large-scale clinical trials.

“There is a lot of exciting basic, preclinical, and early clinical research, but currently no vaccine candidate has a clear trajectory for advanced clinical development,” Barouch said.

Why?

First, the ability of the virus to shapeshift within the host and across the population. The virus mutates rapidly, resulting in an astonishing genetic diversity not seen with any other virus.

“With HIV, you are not targeting a single virus, you’re targeting millions of different viruses,” said Barouch.

Another problem is the fact that the virus integrates itself into the host genome quickly — within days following infection — then goes into hiding, establishing a latent reservoir that can reactivate at any time. This means that a vaccine needs to induce rapid immune response that counters viral maneuvers very rapidly. No other virus seeds reservoirs so quickly, and no other vaccine has been capable of inducing such rapid defense.

Finally, the virus is cloaked in an envelope of sugar molecules — or glycans — that render it largely impervious to antibodies. There are only three or four targets on HIV that render it vulnerable to antibodies. Thus, for antibodies to work, they must be hyperprecise to latch on to these hotspots in order to disrupt the viral shield. This, Barouch notes, may be one of the greatest hurdles to developing a potent enough vaccine.

Among the most recent efforts was a vaccine developed by Barouch and Johnson & Johnson that was tested in Africa and in South and North America. The approach used a so-called “mosaic” platform optimized using computational biology to target multiple strains of the virus.

The researchers used computer design to create a mosaic antigen in the lab. The trial, which concluded in 2021, showed the vaccine had great safety but low efficacy — around 14 percent. A vaccine needs to be at least 50 percent effective, but ideally 70 percent or more, Barouch noted, meaning that it would have to prevent at least seven out of 10 infections.

Despite the disappointing results, Barouch said, the findings helped refocus the field of HIV vaccine research on the importance of neutralizing antibodies — the types of immune proteins that are capable of disabling rather than merely recognizing the virus.

To that end, Barouch and team have redoubled their efforts to design vaccines that create precisely such broadly neutralizing antibody response as well as spark a robust T cell response, thus activating both major arms of the immune system.

Lessons from elite controllers

In the early 1990s, researchers noticed a tiny subset of HIV-infected patients who were living healthy and symptom free without medication. These patients, who came to be known as elite controllers, had undetectable viral levels in their bodies. Their immune systems were powerful enough to naturally keep the virus from replicating. Between 0.15 and 1.5 percent of HIV-infected individuals are estimated to be elite controllers.

“In these individuals, the immune system is able to suppress HIV replication,” said Yu, whose lab focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms behind this remarkable immune response, with the hope of harnessing these insights to develop new antiretroviral treatments for HIV. “And in a rare subgroup, the immune system may even eliminate all cells infected with replication-competent HIV, curing the infection entirely.”

When Gaurav Gaiha, then a first-year student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, learned about elite controllers, he was captivated by the concept of using insights from these unique individuals to develop an HIV vaccine.

At that time, a prevailing scientific theory was that elite controllers had an exceptionally powerful T cell response to HIV. However, when Gaiha began comparing the T cell responses in elite controllers to that of people living with progressive HIV, he discovered something surprising: While T cell function in elite controllers was important, there was another important piece to this biological riddle. Gaiha therefore shifted his focus and instead began to zero in on the specific regions of the virus that these T cells were targeting.

In a 2019 study, Gaiha, Walker, and colleagues applied network theory to tackle this question. They treated each amino acid in the viral proteins as a node in a network, allowing them to quantify how central each amino acid was to the protein’s function. Their findings offered a breakthrough: T cells in elite controllers consistently targeted critical regions of the virus protein network — areas that were essential for its survival and losing or mutating them would significantly hinder the virus’ ability to replicate.

“It’s similar to key players in a network,” said Gaiha, now an assistant professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard. “Key players keep the network connected, while others may be more on the periphery. If T cells target key player amino acids from these critical regions of viral proteins, you may have a chance to control the virus for a long period of time without therapy.”

These insights, Gaiha noted, have implications beyond HIV — they helped guide COVID-19 vaccine developments that stimulate T cells and induce a robust and long-lasting immune response.

Encouraged by promising results in humanized mice, Gaiha and Walker are now collaborating with two biotech companies to translate these insights into a viable HIV vaccine. The group’s viral vector-based vaccine candidate is set to enter a first in human clinical trial in Zimbabwe and South Africa in early 2025, while a second RNA-based vaccine trial is meant to begin in 2026 at Mass General.

“I am hopeful that we will see good outcomes from these initial vaccine trials,” said Gaiha. “But more importantly, I am looking forward to learning key lessons that will guide us, so we can continue to refine. We’re in this for the long haul.”

Ripple benefits beyond HIV

The search for a cure continues, but the sinuous 40-plus-year journey has fueled advances well beyond HIV.

For starters, many of the successes in the identification, testing, and treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that ignited the COVID-19 pandemic, were built on knowledge and hard-earned experiences with HIV.

“Research on HIV really paved the way for the advances that were made with COVID, by laying the platforms for vaccine development that, in particular, the vectors that were used to generate immune responses, the mechanisms for rapid diagnostics, the understanding of viral pathogenesis — all were really contributed by work that had been done on HIV,” Walker said.

“If it wasn’t for the decades of HIV research, we would not have had the COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly.”

Dan Barouch
Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, BIDMC

“If it wasn’t for the decades of HIV research, we would not have had the COVID-19 vaccines so rapidly,” Barouch said.

HIV research also equipped scientists with the tools and know-how to unravel viral structures and monitor the behavior of viruses inside their hosts. This work also led to the development of animal models that allow researchers to study how the body responds to vaccines and treatments and laid the foundation for the modern-day infrastructure needed to conduct clinical trials.

HIV research has catalyzed understanding of immune system function in myriad ways. For example, recent advances in gene therapy and CAR T cells were heavily influenced by research conducted in HIV infection.

“Fundamental mechanisms of how the immune system can recognize, engage, and target virally infected cells were first discovered in the context of HIV infection, and a lot of this progress has subsequently been translated to alternative disease contexts,” said HIV researcher Xu Yu, professor of medicine at HMS and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.

For example, gene therapy uses lentiviruses as vectors to deliver therapeutic genes into the target cells.

“These lentiviruses are very similar to HIV, and a deeper understanding of HIV allowed researchers to use lentiviruses for therapeutic gene transfer,” Yu said.

HIV research also helped advanced the field of CAR T-cell therapy, which uses genetically engineered immune cells for the treatment of blood cancers. One of the first CAR T-cell studies was done in the context of treating HIV infection, more than 20 years ago.

“Experience gained with CAR T cells in this setting was instrumental in advancing them for oncologic indications,” Yu said.


Not so much the form, but the function

Brutalist, iconic Gund Hall undergoes 1st major renovation since opening in ’72. Now, hopefully, the roof will stop leaking.


Campus & Community

Not so much the form, but the function

Gund Hall renovation exterior.

Gund Hall on Quincy Street.

Photos by Jon Ratner

5 min read

Gund Hall may look the same but a major renovation has improved its energy efficiency and accessibility. (And, now, hopefully, the roof will stop leaking.)

Gund Hall, it is safe to say, was overdue for an update after weathering 50 Cambridge winters.

The iconic Quincy Street home of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is open after a major renovation this year, its most significant since the building opened in 1972. While the changes may not be readily apparent, the need was.

The hall’s concrete-and-glass stepped exterior, which encloses GSD’s beloved five-story, central studio area known as “the trays,” had badly deteriorated over the years, allowing moisture and cold air to seep in, and heat to escape. The space was so inefficient, it consumed nearly half of the building’s total energy. Before rainstorms, students covered their desks with tarps.

“The main purpose of this work is to get rid of the leaks once and for all. This building, for the 52 years it has been open, has always leaked. When it rains hard, you see the buckets everywhere,” said David Fixler, a lecturer in urban planning and design at GSD who chairs the faculty building committee, which has been advising on this first phase of what will be a multiyear project.

Other improvements include boosting the amount of natural light coming into the trays and making the adjacent outdoor terraces wheelchair-accessible for the first time.

For decades, the building’s unique design, as well as its historic and educational importance to GSD, have presented major obstacles to undertaking any substantive restoration that would fix these persistent problems without compromising the look and feel of the original design by Australian architect John Andrews, March. ’58.

Studio trays in Gund Hall.
The five-story, central studio area known as “the trays.” Nearly all of the original windows were badly degraded and couldn’t be salvaged.

“When John Andrews was originally tasked to design a new facility for the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, he surprised his clients with a unique building that was at once solid and transparent and that prioritized the student body, united within an enormous, light-filled, single space,” Sarah M. Whiting, dean and Josep Lluis Sert Professor of Architecture at GSD, said in a statement. “Though much has changed since Gund Hall first opened in 1972, the careful rehabilitation of the structure underscores the school’s commitment to this same priority: our students.”

Gund, like other examples of mid-century Brutalist architecture, was constructed before the 1973 global “oil shock” and widespread awareness of climate change. It features large surfaces of exposed concrete, many windows, and is not well-insulated, all of which make it less than well suited to the harsh climate of New England.

“Philosophically, one of the compelling things about brutalism is the structure is the building. What you see is what it is. There’s nothing hidden,” said Fixler, an architect who specializes in mid-20th century building conservation. That means “sometimes they fail spectacularly, and they’re hard to fix.”

Nearly all of the original windows were badly degraded and couldn’t be salvaged. Above, clerestory windows on the roof were replaced with triple-glazed windows.

The curtain walls on each end of the building now have windows made from custom vacuum-insulated glass, a state-of-the-art material not widely used in North America. They provide energy efficiency and noise reduction comparable to traditional triple-glazed windows without the bulk, allowing the new windows to hew very closely to the original window profiles and glass sizes, while delivering two to four times better energy performance than standard glass. They will yield future savings in both carbon and dollars spent on utilities.

Exterior of Gund Hall.
Gund Hall features large surfaces of exposed concrete and numerous windows.

The project takes an aging facade that “had the problems of its time to a facade that is the best-performing glazing system anywhere,” said project architect George Gard, MAUD ’14, of Bruner/Cott Architects. The firm has restored other mid-century buildings at Harvard, including Smith Campus Center and Peabody Terrace.

With so many Brutalist-era buildings around the country now confronting similar challenges because of age, the School hopes the project serves as a model for others, by identifying innovative technology, techniques, and materials and helping define best practices.

“We see a lot of future potential as it becomes more common. And we hope that, this project being a high-profile building on Harvard’s campus, can be part of a growing acceptance of this technology,” said Gard.

Given the project’s unique complexity, Fixler, a conservation architect for many decades, has been incorporating the renovation into his teaching.

“What I find heartening is that [among] the students, there’s a growing understanding that it’s a really responsible thing to do to recycle old buildings, whether you like them or not, and to use that opportunity to test new ideas to make them more resilient, make them more sustainable,” he said.

Not everyone appreciates Brutalist behemoths like Gund Hall or Boston City Hall, often called one of the country’s ugliest buildings, or thinks they’re worth preserving.

“One of the biggest challenges, frankly, is getting people to understand why these are good, interesting buildings, and getting people to love them — because so many people hate them,” he said.

“There are a lot of people, especially younger people of the generation that I’m teaching now and my kids, [who] think these buildings are cool. But an awful lot of people of my generation just don’t.”


Ever wonder why your dog does this?

Study decodes neural mechanism that causes hairy mammals to shake their fur when wet


Science & Tech

Ever wonder why your dog does this?

Study decodes neural mechanism that causes hairy mammals to shake their fur when wet

6 min read

It’s a regular occurrence when taking our canine pals for drizzly walks and summer swims. But until recently, the biology behind the water-flinging, human-drenching, muzzle-distorting “wet dog shake” has mystified scientists working to decode the sense of touch.

Last month, researchers in the lab of David Ginty, the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor of Neurobiology and chair of Harvard Medical School’s Neurobiology Department, reported in work published in the journal Science that they’d used cutting-edge techniques to track sensory signals that underlie wet dog shakes from receptors on the skin to a part of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus.

Using tools — many developed in the Ginty lab — that allow researchers to isolate and trace single neurons and stimulate or block them using light, the researchers determined that the shaking behavior can be evoked by activating a class of sensory neurons called C-LTMRs and, conversely, the number of wet dog shakes evoked by mechanical stimuli decreases when C-LTMRs and the parabrachial nucleus are muted.

The researchers determined that the shaking behavior can be evoked by activating a class of sensory neurons called C-LTMRs.

Though unseen in humans, the motion is universal among fur-bearing mammals, serving as something of an early warning system that insects, dirt, water, and other substances are about to come into contact with the skin. Occurring in everything from grizzly bears to dogs and cats to lab mice, the response is innate, Ginty said, meaning that, though reflexive, it can be controlled by the animal. In humans, Ginty compared it to feeling a bug landing on your arm: You may jerk your arm or flick at it with your other hand with little thought, but it can be controlled if desired. In Ginty’s lab, researchers used droplets of sunflower oil applied to the upper back to trigger the response in mice who’d been genetically engineered so that specific neurons could be stimulated or blocked using light.

“One thing we’ve done over the last 15 to 20 years is generate genetic tools that allow us to study each of the sensory neurons that associate with the skin in isolation and that’s been incredibly powerful,” Ginty said.

The skin has approximately 20 different types of sensory receptors, including those that detect hot, cold, itch, and touch. Twelve or so receptors detect different types of touch, from a quick stab of pain to vibration to steady pressure to a soft caress. The signal triggering the “wet dog shake” starts in C-LTMRs, or C-fiber low threshold mechanoreceptors, which wrap around the base of a hair follicle. The receptor is one of the body’s most sensitive and can pick up the slightest movement of the hair or a depression of the skin around the hair’s base.

From the receptor, the signal travels along nerve cells into the spine, where it joins with the spinal cord. The signals then emerge from the spinal cord and travel to the brain stem and the parabrachial nucleus. Beyond enhancing our understanding of a basic and familiar mammalian behavior, Ginty said that the techniques developed have allowed researchers to overcome a major hurdle — understanding what’s going on inside the spinal cord.

“We understand the logic of organization of the neural circuitry that underlies visual information processing and sound information processing,” said Ginty, whose lab has been focused on unravelling the neurobiology of touch for decades. “For touch — for somatosensory information processing — we’re kind of in a black box trying to understand it because it’s been so challenging to access and record neural activity in the spinal cord.”

Though they’ve tracked the signal to a specific location in the brain, Ginty said many questions remain. An important one is understanding whether the pathway they identified accounts for all the wet dog shake response or, given the limitations of their functional manipulations, if there’s more going on than they were able to see.

“We’re struggling to answer that question, because the tools we typically use are rarely 100 percent effective in blocking one of these steps,” Ginty said. “So, you never know if a residual 10 percent underlies the remaining behavior or if there’s another pathway or another cell type that you’re missing. In this case, I guess it’s the latter, but we can’t be sure.”

Another important question in the work, supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Lefler Center for the Study of Neurodegenerative Disorders, is why, if C-LTMR receptors are located all over the body, do only those on the upper middle back trigger the response?

“It’s a very exciting time to understand brain-body physiology: how the body is represented in the brain and how the brain, in turn, controls organ systems of the body.”

David Ginty

From a behavioral standpoint, the answer is clear — that part of the body is out of reach of claws and paws and hooves for swatting or scratching — but that doesn’t explain how nerve signals from that part of the body trigger the wet dog shake while other signals that begin in the same type of receptor and go to the same part of the brain do not. Perhaps, Ginty said, the signals emanating from the nerves originating on the upper middle back propagate to unique regions of the parabrachial nucleus from those originating elsewhere on the body. Another possibility, he said, is that the signal from the upper back is somehow amplified in the spinal cord before reaching the brain.

Though Ginty is a dog lover, he said the work began not out of an appreciation for dogs but by accident. Dawei Zhang, then a graduate student in Ginty’s lab, was using optical tools to activate the then-mysterious pathway beginning with C-LTMR and noticed that every time he did, the mouse would give itself a shake. When Zhang and Ginty saw the reaction, they immediately realized what it was.

“It’s a very exciting time to understand brain-body physiology: how the body is represented in the brain and how the brain, in turn, controls organ systems of the body,” Ginty said. “Some of the new tools coming online are really powerful for helping us unravel these circuits.”


Polaroid gave her a shot. She helped revolutionize photography.

Meroë Morse — focus of Baker Library exhibition — led company’s researchers during innovative era 


Images courtesy of Baker Library Special Collections; Ansel Adams test photos. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Arts & Culture

Polaroid gave her a shot. She helped revolutionize photography.

4 min read

Meroë Morse — focus of Baker Library exhibition — led company’s researchers during innovative era 

Meroë Morse had no formal background in business or science when she started at Polaroid in 1945, but within a few years she rose to become manager of black-and-white photographic research and later to director of special photographic research, a notable achievement for a woman in the 1950s and ’60s.

A new exhibition at the Business School’s Baker Library is putting the focus on Morse and her contributions to the development of instant photography — launched commercially by Polaroid in 1948. The collection, “From Concept to Product: Meroë Morse and Polaroid’s Culture of Art and Innovation, 1945–1969,” on view in Baker’s north lobby through April 18, draws on the library’s extensive holdings of the Polaroid Corporation Collection.


“The function of industry is not just the making of goods, the function of industry is the development of people.”

-Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid

Meroë Morse.

A culture of innovation

Edwin H. Land, Polaroid’s founder, cultivated a creative culture within his research and manufacturing enterprise, building an interdisciplinary community devoted to technical and artistic excellence. 

Morse, an art history graduate of Smith College, found exceptional opportunities for women in the post-war era at Polaroid. She oversaw round-the-clock shifts of researchers conducting thousands of experiments in the company’s Cambridge laboratory, and met increasing demands for new Polaroid films as the popularity of instant photography soared. 

Meroë Morse and three male colleagues.
Morse’s affable and commanding presence among her male colleagues. 

Instant photography is launched

The first instant film and camera sold for $1.75 and $89.75 respectively on Nov. 26, 1948, in Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store. The camera measured 10½ by 4½ by 2½ inches and weighed four pounds, two ounces. It featured an optical foldout viewfinder, a three-element 135-mm f/11 lens, and shutter speeds from 1/8 to 1/60 of a second. All 56 cameras sold out that day.

Polaroid camera patent from October 6, 1945.

Research in black and white

In 1948, Morse became the laboratory supervisor responsible for photographic materials. The earliest Polaroid film, Type 40, produced sepia-toned prints that had limited tonal range. Morse and her lab looked to produce black-and-white images that exhibited greater detail and a color palette more familiar and appealing to consumers. In 1950, after two years of intensive work, the company introduced black-and-white film Type 41. The film produced prints that exhibited finer detail and, as U.S. Camera enthused, created “pictures-in-a-minute of exceptional tonal values.” The Detroit Free Press reported that Land credited Morse with “valuable assistance in research that led to the new film.”

Meroë Morse poses for Polaroid test photos. One photo is her posing with a large white hat. And the other photo is her standing elegantly with a pearl necklace.
Meroë Morse poses for Polaroid test photos.

Ansel Adams and Polaroid

Morse also served as chief liaison to Ansel Adams, the renowned landscape photographer. A principal consultant for Polaroid from 1948 until his death in 1984, Adams tested the company’s prototype cameras and film. He reviewed technical and design aspects of Polaroid prototypes, from the wording of instruction manuals to the tonal values of finished prints.

Photo by Ansel Adams of an older woman.

Ansel Adams Polaroid test photos.

Ansel Adams test photos. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Photo by Ansel Adams of Edwin Land.

Portrait of Edwin Land.

Ansel Adams test photos. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Photo by Ansel Adams of an animal skull.

Polaroid test photo from the Southwest.

Ansel Adams test photos. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Photo by Ansel Adams of a waterfall.

Polaroid test photo from California.

Ansel Adams test photos. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

The exhibition was organized by Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, with support from the de Gaspé Beaubien Family Endowment. This text is drawn from the exhibition catalog. Find more information at the Baker Library website.


Updating their 3-word bios

Juniors who talked to us when they first arrived here — and again as sophomores — reflect on how they’ve changed


View outside Littauer Building.

Passing through an autumn campus at Harvard University.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community

Updating their 3-word bios

8 min read

Juniors who talked to us when they first arrived here — and again as sophomores — reflect on how they’ve changed

Gazette photographer Stephanie Mitchell has been conducting a bit of an experiment inspired by her own college years — specifically the address by Nora Ephron to Wellesley’s Class of 1996 expressing, “You are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.” She met with a group of Harvard students during their first year and sophomore year, photographed them, and asked them to describe themselves in three words. The students, now juniors, participated in the exercise once again. The three words they chose appear below in gray (2022), dark gray (2023), and black (2024).


Sofia Chavez.
First Year
Sofia Chavez is pictured.
Sophomore Year
Sofia Chavez.
Junior Year

Sofia Chavez

Currier House

When we first spoke to Chavez in 2022, the student from Hidalgo, Mexico, noted that she was “learning how to be independent for the first time, leaving home and my country.”

This year, she said: “I’m growing. I’m an adult. I have the freedom of choosing my own path, making decisions, making mistakes, and learning from them.”

In all three of her interviews, Chavez described herself as “free” and independent.” She added a new descriptor this year: creativity. “It gives you the tools to solve problems, not only academically, but in your life.”

As a first-year, she listed women’s and gender studies and sociology as academic interests. By the fall of her sophomore year, she was leaning toward a government concentration in the law and justice track with a secondary in economics. Chavez has since declared a government concentration with a language citation in French. She is considering a senior thesis in political theory and a career in law.

“As a perfectionist or overachiever, you always want to have things in control,” said Chavez, but lately she is happier because “I don’t think about those expectations anymore, only my own.”


Bradley Chinhara.
First Year
Bradley Chinhara.
Sophomore Year
Bradley Chinhara.
Junior Year

Bradley Chinhara

Lowell House

Two years ago, Zimbabwe native Chinhara characterized himself as an “adventurous” person with “diverse interests,” from electrical engineering to rugby to playing the marimba. He credited Christianity and love of family as guiding forces.

“I still pray every day. I still love my religion,” said Chinhara. He’s added two new descriptors this year.

“Grateful, because I wake up every day, and I realize that I go to Harvard, which was one of my biggest dreams growing up. … Grateful for my mom. She passed away, but she lived a beautiful life. … And then composed, because I’m a junior now. I know how things work. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. I’m now at a point where I know what I want. I know how to pursue it.”

Chinhara’s interest in computer science hasn’t wavered as he tilts toward tech entrepreneurship and product management. In 2023, he launched a software development startup. He said he will declare a secondary in economics and is considering business school.

Last spring, he “started reaching out more, talking to more people, going to office hours.”

“It dramatically improved my academic life, my social life, my mental health.”


Myra Bhathena.
First Year
Myra Bhathena.
Sophomore Year
Myra Bhathena ’26.
Junior Year

Myra Bhathena

Pforzheimer House

“Building relationships is the most important thing to me,” said Bhathena in her first-year interview. That theme continues today. She feels energized, she said, “reflecting on the people who have gotten me here.”

“It brings me back to my family — my grandparents, my parents, my siblings. I was lucky to spend the end of the summer with a lot of them, and they always ground me.”

Bhathena has completed many foundational requirements for her economics concentration and is turning to her secondary in global health and health policy. Interning at Boston Children’s Hospital doing research this past summer has only reaffirmed her pre-med track. “I am really excited to dedicate my career to medicine and to caring for people.”

She has moved into mentorship roles in clubs and the classroom, for example serving as a Teaching Fellow for EC10. “I love teaching, and I’m excited to meet new freshmen in the class who are just as nervous and scared as I was.”

This year, “I am a more balanced person,” Bhathena said. “Time has given me more freedom to just be myself and take some deep breaths and enjoy my last two years here.”


Dara Omoloja.
First Year
Dara Omoloja.
Sophomore Year
Dara Omoloja.
Junior Year

Dara Omoloja

Leverett House

Omoloja spent the summer back home in Wisconsin. “I had a lot of time to think and contemplate my priorities. There’s so much I need to do and that I want to do in this life.”

In her first Gazette interview Omoloja said she was most looking forward to “immense personal discovery that everyone mentions when thinking about college.”

Now a junior cognizant of how quickly time is passing, she said, “In the past, I spent so much time looking down, be that at my phone, or as I walk, looking at the floor, because I’m thinking about how all these people are seeing me. But now, I really want to pay attention, to be present. Every time I look around, I think, ‘Wow, this world is so pretty, and I want to just take that in more.’”

Reflecting on last year, Omoloja said, “I learned to advocate for myself more. … My biggest lesson was although it is important to show kindness and to have community, it shouldn’t go at the expense of your personal comfort and happiness. … I’m more comfortable in my identity this year. I’m very happy to be me.”

“Ambitious,” a word she used to define herself in 2022, re-emerged as she studies for the MCAT and takes the courses “Medicine and Health in America” and “Therapeutic Rationalities,” concrete steps toward becoming a doctor.


Austin Wang.
First Year
Austin Wang.
Sophomore Year
Austin Wang.
Junior Year

Austin Wang

Lowell House

Wang describes himself as both excited and relaxed this year. “I think believing in yourself and having confidence is really important,” and when things become hectic “it’s good to be relaxed and Zen.”

Rejuvenated from a summer of seeing friends and family, doing genetic computational research at the Medical School, and volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, Wang also feels a bit melancholic.

“I looked down at my Pset, and I look up, and it’s already junior year. It went by really quickly … I’m looking forward to the second half.”

Since his last interview, the Canada native has declared his concentration in chemical and physical biology with a secondary in computer science and has continued to find ways to break out of his comfort zone, a goal he emphasized in previous years.

Ringing the Lowell House bells every Sunday has been “super fun.” He shares the recruitment joke for the bells, known for waking up students at the bright hour of 1 p.m. on Sundays: “If you feel like you’re too well liked, feel free to join!”


Nali Gone.
First Year
Nali Gone.
Sophomore Year
Nali Gone.
Junior Year

Nali Gone

Eliot House

Creativity has been a constant for Gone over the past three years. “It’s a great way for me to engage with the world and understand what people think and feel.”

This year, “I’m not as worried about what’s going to happen. I’m just living in the moment. I am really trying to put myself out there and try new things. Now is such a formative time in my life.”

Gone has declared a concentration in women, gender, and sexuality with a secondary in psychology, and is currently taking a history class about the relationship between guns, property, and power, as well as a First Amendment seminar. “I’m in my amendment era, one might say.”

Last year Gone helped stage-manage for the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club musical “Jekyll and Hyde” and the musical comedy “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” and continues this year with the musical “Pippin.”

A key lesson from sophomore year: how to find balance and take breaks between time commitments.


Riley Flynn.
First Year
Riley Flynn.
Sophomore Year
Riley Flynn.
Junior Year

Riley Flynn

Eliot House

Softball continues to be a focus for Flynn, a rise ball and curveball pitcher who was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 2023. While athletics can be time-consuming, she enjoys the camaraderie while traveling the country with her teammates.

Last season, Flynn underwent elbow surgery. “I’m finding my way, working through rehab, and my team has been great through all of that, supporting me and helping me. I should be able to play in the spring.”

What else has changed? “My first years were definitely more about exploring, and this year, I have found things that I am passionate about, whether it’s making friends, playing sports, what I’m studying, and I’m definitely going to go deeper into that in the next two years.”

She’s delving into her concentration in human developmental and regenerative biology with a neuroscience secondary, taking courses in organic chemistry and psychopharmacology.

“I feel that I’ve found my place here and now it’s more about growing in order to continue finding people and places that I love.”


Rhodes scholars share their Oxford ambitions  

8 students to pursue social, political, computational sciences


From left top row Aneesh Muppidi, Sofia Corona, Thomas Barone, Laura Wegner; second row,
Matthew Anzarouth, Ayush Noori, Lena Ashooh, Shahmir Aziz.

From left top row Aneesh Muppidi, Sofia Corona, Thomas Barone, Laura Wegner; second row, Matthew Anzarouth, Ayush Noori, Lena Ashooh, Shahmir Aziz.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell and Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographers; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Campus & Community

Rhodes scholars share their Oxford ambitions  

long read

8 students to pursue social, political, computational sciences 

Whether examining animal ethics, combating AI bias, or weighing the values essential to a functioning democracy, Harvard’s newest Rhodes Scholars have made their mark across a wide expanse of disciplines. These eight seniors, representing four countries and several U.S. states, will continue their academic pursuits at the University of Oxford next year. They shared their plans, accomplishments, and what it was like to receive the news of their award.   


Matthew Anzarouth

Matthew Anzarouth.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Matthew Anzarouth

Montreal, Canada

Concentration: Social studies

Matthew Anzarouth was at home with family in Montreal when he got the phone call that he had won a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. Anzarouth was one of two recipients from the region that includes Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces.

“I felt a mix of shock, excitement, and profound gratitude,” Anzarouth said. “This opportunity is an extraordinary privilege, and I’m really keen to make the most of it.”

Anzarouth is currently writing a thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism, with an emphasis on language policy in Quebec and Indigenous self-determination. The Mather House resident is using political theory to examine the challenge of reconciling universal individual rights with group rights specific to Canada’s national minorities.

“I’m using political theory as a way of understanding — and hopefully better resolving — the challenge of coexistence in a culturally diverse federation,” Anzarouth said. “The thesis work has helped me stay engaged with my country’s politics and reflect on how I want to contribute.”

On campus, Anzarouth is an undergraduate research fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and an editor and podcast host for the Harvard Political Review

At Oxford, he hopes to continue his studies of political theory, focusing on questions of how to balance competing claims for cultural preservation and how to balance power between legislative and judicial bodies of government. He hopes to eventually attend law school.


Lena Ashooh

Lena Ashooh.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Lena Ashooh

Shelburne, Vermont

Concentration: Special concentration in animal studies

The summer after her first year on campus, Lena Ashooh worked as a research assistant in Puerto Rico, studying the impacts of natural disaster and trauma on the behavior of a colony of free-ranging macaque monkeys. It was a pivotal moment for the Kirkland House resident, who said it felt like observing an “extremely sophisticated society of individuals.”

“That was where I initially had the idea that, were the conditions that animals are in to change completely, they might behave in ways that we never imagined,” Ashooh said. “This led me, in philosophy, to working out how we might wrong animals in the beliefs we have about them and to be interested in how we’re managing land, the decisions we’re making about who has access to land, and who should be involved in the decision-making process.”

Ashooh designed a special concentration in animal studies, combining political philosophy, government, and animal psychology. She is an undergraduate fellow at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, has written for the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and co-founded Harvard College Animal Advocates. Off-campus, she works as a lab manager in animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg’s parrot lab at Boston University.

“I say that to study animal studies is to study social injustice and gives us a new way of understanding how oppression and violence occurs, and how moral complacency and inaction occur,” said Ashooh, who is planning to eventually attend law school. “One of the key questions that animal studies allows us to address is: How is it that people can be led to look at suffering and decide not to act on it?”

Ashooh hopes to study philosophy next year, focusing on the question of what it means to treat and respect an animal as an individual.


Shahmir Aziz

Shahmir Aziz.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Shahmir Aziz 

Lahore, Pakistan 

Concentration: Biomedical engineering and mathematics, secondary in computer science, language citation in French 

As an undergraduate researcher in different Harvard labs, Shahmir Aziz has analyzed the impact of physical exertion on the glycolytic levels of diabetes patients and has investigated nano-lipids as potential drug delivery vesicles. As an intern at Novo Nordisk, he has focused on optimization of drug-delivery processes. 

He wants to keep working on the cutting edges of biotechnology, and he wants to help others do so as well, in his native Pakistan. 

“In the long run, I hope to help start a culture of startups and biotech in Pakistan, so that students and other innovators can grow out their ideas,” said the Adams House resident named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan.  

A first-year course in quantitative physiology taught by Linsey Moyer solidified Aziz’ chosen field of study. He also took courses in government and political philosophy, feeding an equal passion for international relations. 

At Oxford, Aziz plans to pursue a master’s in bioengineering, followed by a second degree in diplomacy and global governance — arenas in which he’s also made meaningful contributions on campus.

A member of the leadership team of Harvard’s International Relations Council, Aziz helped the University’s Model United Nations team win two major intercollegiate competitions. “The opportunity I have cherished most at Harvard has been to interact with students from all extremes and opposites of background, pursuing all nature of subjects, and dreaming all ranges of noble dreams,” Aziz wrote in his scholarship application. 

Some of those interactions have come in his four years playing Harvard Club Tennis, as a sports editor with The Harvard Crimson, and as a course assistant in the Department of Mathematics. 


Tommy Barone

Thomas Barone.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Tommy Barone

Little Falls, New Jersey

Concentration: Social studies

Tommy Barone wants to understand what people believe, and why.

Barone currently is studying what he calls a “crisis of liberalism,” or the philosophical values essential to healthy democracy. In particular he’s interested in how best to understand the beliefs of people engaging in illiberalism in democratic societies.

“It’s so easy to create a narrative about why something important or worrying or disruptive in society is happening that serves your ends,” Barone said. “I think it’s a civic obligation that we listen to what people have to say and try to understand them. If you are trying to theorize something that involves people without speaking and listening to the people who are part of that phenomenon, you’re going to be missing something.”

Barone said that when he learned he had been named a Rhodes Scholar, all he could do was start “breathing heavily.”

“I didn’t cry until I called my parents,” Barone recalled. “Then I cried. Then I had to get it together to talk to the judges afterward.” 

The Currier House resident, who hopes to pursue journalism in the future, is co-chair for the editorial board at The Crimson. Their coverage won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2023 Mark of Excellence Awards.

“I’ve had the unique challenge, but also the really educational, enriching experience, of being tasked with bringing people together to have difficult discussions in one of the most challenging years on campus in decades,” said Barone, who plans to study history at Oxford. “I’ve had the privilege to publish a really broad diversity of perspectives on a range of important issues on campus.”


Sofia Corona

Sofia Corona.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Sofia Corona

Miami, Florida, and Pereira, Colombia    

Concentration: Applied mathematics and economics, secondary in government 

From watching her mother commute several hours a day for work in Maryland to biking throughout her community, Sofia Corona learned early on that how people move is fundamental to the human experience. 

Helping people get where they need to go — within cities, towns, and systems that benefit all — has become her life’s work. “I’m interested in how communities are engaged in infrastructure planning, especially when the benefits of that infrastructure are collective and widespread, but the burdens are localized,” said Corona, a Currier House resident graduating in December. 

Corona, who hopes to work in the transportation sector, thinks seismic shifts toward sustainable modes of transportation are possible. “At the same time, our transportation networks are often superimposed on inherited, segregated landscapes, both racially and socioeconomically,” she said. “We can’t be agnostic to that.” 

At Oxford, Corona’s master’s coursework will contextualize mobility systems within broader economic development and sustainability frameworks. At Harvard, she worked in the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, conducting research on inclusive decision-making in renewable energy projects. She also spent time in the MIT Transit Lab. Her professional experience includes internships at Uber, BMW, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and McKinsey & Co. 

Her interests have taken her all over the world, from working on carbon dioxide pricing for the Chilean Ministry of Finance to collaborating with researchers at the Technical University of Munich on a tool that advises local transit agencies. 

The Colombian American was a walk-on on Harvard’s varsity sailing team and is an avid mountaineer with the summits of Denali and Kilimanjaro among her feats, and she has run the Boston, New York, and Berlin marathons. Among her most cherished moments at Harvard have been as a dog-walker to Currier House dogs Huckleberry and Ari.  


Aneesh Muppidi 

Aneesh Muppidi.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Aneesh Muppidi 

Schenectady, New York 

Concentration: Computer science and neuroscience, concurrent master’s in computer science 

Waiting in a room with other Rhodes Scholar finalists, Aneesh Muppidi did a homework problem set and chatted about South Asian politics, having already made peace with not winning. 

“In my head I thought, ‘This has been an amazing process, but now it’s time to go back to the real world,’” the Lowell House resident said. 

Then, he heard his name.   

“I called my little brother first,” he said, followed by his parents and two best friends. 

Muppidi has spent time mulling the question Alan Turing famously posed in 1950: Can machines think? He’s come to believe that understanding human intelligence — and computationally scaling up that intelligence — can solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as diagnosing complex medical conditions or giving personalized tutors to every child in every classroom. 

At Harvard, he’s immersed himself in the power and promise of artificial intelligence through projects on deep reinforcement learning in Assistant Professor Heng Yang’s Computational Robotics Lab; particle filter machine learning algorithms with the Fiete Lab at MIT; and autonomous agent detection with Professor Sam Gershman’s Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

Outside the lab, Muppidi is equally passionate about AI policy and ethics. Ensuring technologies are developed safely is a cornerstone of Muppidi’s research, which he plans to continue while pursuing master’s coursework in computer science and public policy at Oxford. 

Muppidi served as president of Harvard Dharma and as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society. He includes among his mentors Sanskrit instructor Nell Shapiro Hawley, now at Vassar College, with whom he took two years of the ancient language of India. “How she taught had a very beautiful effect on my life, in the sense that I was able to get closer to my spiritual identity, who I am as a person, and what I believe in.” 


Ayush Noori.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Ayush Noori

Bellevue, Washington 

Concentration: Computer science and neuroscience, concurrent master’s in computer science 

When Ayush Noori was 7, his grandmother, Munira Brooks, was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that slowly robbed her of the ability to speak, move, or breathe. Assisting in her care and witnessing her long struggle inspired Noori to pursue science and medicine. “My mission is to give people with neurological disease more time with their loved ones,” said Noori.

Noori has championed this mission for nearly a decade. Since the age of 12, working or volunteering in various labs, he has conducted research at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and precision medicine, seeking to develop new AI-enabled diagnostic and treatment options for patients with neurological disorders.

As an undergraduate, Noori has authored 25 peer-reviewed publications — including seven as first author — in scientific journals including CellNature NeuroscienceNature Machine IntelligenceNature AgingAlzheimer’s & Dementia, and NBD, and his work has been featured at more than a dozen international conferences. He has been advised by professors including Marinka Zitnik at Harvard Medical School; George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Materials; and Sudeshna Das, Alberto Serrano-Pozo, and Bradley T. Hyman in the Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He plans to do graduate study in clinical neurosciences at Oxford next year. 

The recipient of more than a dozen fellowships at Harvard and a Roberts Family Fellow at Harvard Business School, the Goldwater Scholar and Adams House resident is also devoted to teaching and mentorship as co-founder of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory and as a peer adviser at Harvard College.

“I have an immense debt of gratitude toward Harvard because I’ve studied and trained here since I was a teenager,” he said. “The College, SEAS, MGH, and Harvard Medical School have enabled me to contribute to the global fight against neurological disease and given me hope for a healthier future, for my loved ones, and for the world.”


Laura Wegner

Laura Wegner.

Photo courtesy of Laura Wegner

Laura Wegner

Walsrode, Germany

Concentration: Economics, secondary in computer science 

Laura Wegner, Currier House resident and Germany Rhodes Scholarship recipient, wants to address patients’ fragmented medical records and revolutionize healthcare technology to improve patient outcomes.

It’s a cause driven by personal experience. While in high school, Wegner, formerly a competitive swimmer, had to undergo surgery for a knee injury. Doctors used the “wrong surgical method,” Wegner said, due to not having access to her full medical history, including information about a pre-existing health condition, leaving her unable to continue swimming.

“That was a personal experience where I thought, ‘Wow, parts of my patient data are stored in so many different places, and I wish they were together somehow.’”

To improve experiences for future patients, Wegner co-founded the startup Mii in 2022, a patient healthcare passport that securely stores patient data so patients can bring their medical history from doctor to doctor, around the world. 

Wegner has taken Harvard courses in health economics, privacy and technology, and entrepreneurship, and has worked as a fellow with the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Eager for global perspectives, Wegner has studied digital healthcare systems in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, and she is writing her thesis on systems in Estonia and Lithuania.

Looking forward to improving her technical skills at Oxford with the hope of continuing her work in healthcare technology, Wegner says she loves both the creative and technical sides of entrepreneurship.

“It’s just about having an idea and then immediately being able to build a prototype, test it out, and see where it goes. It’s an amazing opportunity to bring any idea to life, and hopefully have it improve people’s lives.” 


What Trump got right

Kellyanne Conway, president-elect’s 2016 campaign manager and former senior adviser, discusses election, what comes next


Nation & World

What Trump got right

Setti Warren and Kellyanne Conway.

Setti Warren and Kellyanne Conway.

Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

3 min read

Kellyanne Conway, president-elect’s 2016 campaign manager and former senior adviser, discusses recent election, what comes next

The Democrats got it wrong.

It wasn’t threats to national security or democracy, and it wasn’t the U.S. Supreme Court’s undoing of Roe v. Wade. What voters cared most about this election was “safety, affordability, fairness, and education,” said Republican operative Kellyanne Conway during a sometimes testy 90-minute talk at the JFK Jr. Forum about the 2024 election and what to expect from the incoming Trump administration. 

That’s why ads and other messaging about crime, inflation, immigration, student loan forgiveness, and school choice proved so effective in the campaigns of President-elect Donald Trump and several other Republican candidates, she told Setti Warren, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. 

Trump won by running up the numbers of voters already predisposed to vote for him and “peeling off” some support among “core Democratic” Party constituencies, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, union households, Jewish, and younger voters, improving on his own 2016 and 2020 numbers, said Conway, who managed the final months of Trump’s 2016 campaign and served as an adviser during his first term.

Conway said she thinks Democrats underestimated how motivating the issue of K-12 education was to many across the political spectrum, particularly women, who did not support Harris as robustly as they had Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Trump was seen as “authentic” and a proven commodity who had already done the job and ran a “joyful” and “forward-looking” campaign, she said, pointing to Trump’s visit to a McDonald’s franchise, rallies at concert venues, and his garbage truck ride. 

Kellyanne Conway.

Conway credited the campaign’s embrace of “new, new media” like TikTok, podcasts, and social media influencers, as a strategic move that paid real dividends in the final weeks reaching young men and low propensity voters. Also important was the campaign’s under-reported effort to educate disengaged voters about the many ways they could cast a ballot before Election Day, which also helped the former president prevail. 

Over the past two weeks, Trump has announced more than two dozen nominees for White House and Cabinet positions, primarily top campaign staffers and high-profile business executives.

“What they all have in common is they know him; he knows them; and they are fluent in the America First agenda, meaning: This is what we’ve been elected to do,” Conway said. “So he’s got people who are willing to work with alacrity and energy to get that agenda through.”

At times, Conway flashed the quick and cutting fast-talk that has made her a polarizing figure on the left, sparring with student questioners.

She called for students to try to bring their friends who suffer from “Trump derangement syndrome” back to their senses.

“You all know someone afflicted by it. … It wrecks the nervous system. It addles the brain. There is no vaccine, cure, or therapeutic, but you all have a role to play in helping people at least unwind a little bit from it” by not canceling those who have a different point of view. 

“I certainly hope that the new government that’s forming can rely upon, if not all of you right away, most of you along the way, to help in any way, shape, or form that you possibly can,” she said.


Use of new diet drugs likely to mushroom

Study estimates over half of Americans eligible to take them based on conditions, underscoring need to ensure equity of access.


Two packages of 5 dosing pens each of semiglutin .
Health

Use of new diet drugs likely to mushroom

Study estimates over half of Americans eligible to take them based on diagoses, underscoring need to ensure equity of access.

4 min read

In a new analysis of national data, an estimated 137 million U.S. adults, more than half of the adult population, would qualify for the anti-obesity drug semagludtide.

“These staggering numbers mean that we are likely to see large increases in spending on semaglutide and related medications in years to come,” said corresponding author Dhruv S. Kazi, associate director of the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Ensuring equitable access to these effective but high-cost medications, as well as supporting individuals so that they can stay on the therapy long-term, should be a priority for our clinicians and policymakers.”

The findings, which were presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions and simultaneously published in JAMA Cardiology, underscore the need to increase equitable access to this new class of pharmaceuticals.

Semaglutide belongs to a class of drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists. It is currently approved to manage diabetes, treat overweight or obesity, and of recurrent cardiovascular disease. About 15 million adults take semaglutide, which stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin and reduces the hunger hormone ghrelin, decreasing the appetite and slowing down the rate of stomach emptying. As a result, semaglutide helps lower blood sugar levels and promotes weight loss.

Semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease.

In 2023, it was the top-selling drug in the U.S. in terms of total pharmaceutical spending. But rapidly emerging data about its effectiveness for other health conditions is likely to further expand its use in future years. For instance, semaglutide is found to improve symptoms in sleep apnea and in some types of heart failure, and slows the progression of chronic kidney disease. Semaglutide and others in its class are currently being evaluated for treatment of liver and kidney diseases, substance use disorders, and dementia.

Ivy Shi, who is a resident in internal medicine at BIDMC, worked with Kazi to produce the analysis. They used five years’ worth of recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a long-running survey of the U.S. population run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to identify U.S. adults aged 18 years or older who would be eligible for semaglutide treatment based on currently approved indications. They analyzed information about 25,531 survey participants gathered through in-person interviews, physical examinations, and laboratory testing.

They found that of the 136.8 million U.S. adults who qualified for semaglutide, 35 million would administer it for diabetes management, 129.2 million for weight loss, and 8.9 million for secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. The semaglutide-eligible population includes 26.8 million adults covered by Medicare, 13.8 million covered by Medicaid, and 61.1 million covered by commercial insurance.

“The large number of U.S. adults eligible for semaglutide highlights its potential transformative impact on population health,” said Shi. “Prior studies have shown that more than half of the individuals who have taken these medications state the therapy was difficult to afford. Interventions to reduce economic barriers to access are urgently needed.”

Co-authors: Ivy Shi, Robert W. Yeh, Jennifer E. Ho, and Issa Dahabreh of BIDMC; and Sadiya S. Khan of Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University.

Disclosures: Sadiya S. Khan reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute outside the submitted work. Jennifer E. Ho reported grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Issa Dahabreh reported a contract with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and grants from the National Institutes of Health during the conduct of the study. Kazi reported grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, American Heart Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Institute for Clinical and Economic Research outside the submitted work. No other disclosures were reported.

Funding/support: Dahabreh is supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine (R01 LM013616), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01 HL136708), and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (ME-2021C2-22365).


He didn’t come all this way to lose to Yale

Dream job and a winning season for Aurich, but one big test remains: The Game.


Campus & Community

He didn’t come all this way to lose to Yale

Andrew Aurich (pictured) answers questions from the media. Photos

Harvard coach Andrew Aurich answers questions from the media.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

5 min read

Dream job and a winning season for Aurich, but one big test remains: The Game.

For many Crimson football fans, devotion can be measured by consecutive years of attendance at the Harvard-Yale game. But Saturday’s showdown will be a first for the man who now leads their beloved program.

“All the time I was playing at Princeton, and coaching at Princeton, I was kind of jealous of Harvard-Yale,” said Andrew Aurich, Thomas Stephenson Family Head Coach for Harvard Football. “I’m really excited to experience it.”

The first-time head coach, who came to Harvard from Rutgers University, has led the Crimson to an impressive 8-1 record. The team clinched at least a share of the Ivy League title with a dramatic win over the University of Pennsylvania last weekend, making Aurich the first head football coach in Harvard history to win a league title in his first season.

We caught up with Aurich to learn more about preparations for one of the biggest dates on the Crimson calendar. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.


The Crimson are having a great season under your leadership. To what do you attribute your early success?  

Former head coach Tim Murphy played a big part in what’s happening this year. When I got here, it was very clear these players were already training to win a championship. They are very tough mentally. We’ve had some close games where our ability to focus at the end, and really execute, has allowed us to win.

Tell me about your leadership style.

One of the core parts of our culture is 100 percent honesty; the players are always going to get 100 percent honesty from me. Whether or not they like what they hear, they should know it’s coming from a good place. I expect the same from them. If there’s a better way to do something, I want to find a way to do that.

Andrew Aurich on sidelines during Stetson game.

Aurich on the sidelines during the Harvard-Stetson game in September.

Credit: Harvard Athletics

What changes have you brought to the program?

My plan all along was to get an Ivy League head coaching job. But my experiences outside the league helped me see there were opportunities to help these young men become better players and a better team overall. If you ask them, they’ll say there’s a little more emphasis on sports science, whether it’s in the weight room or the emphasis we’re putting on nutrition, hydration, and sleep.

You said something interesting just now — that you always wanted to be a head coach in the Ivy League. Say more about that.

I knew I wanted to get into coaching when I was playing at Princeton. My dad had been my high school football coach, so I went back to St. Paul, Minnesota, and coached with him for a year and confirmed that I loved it. I ended up at a small Division 3 school in Pennsylvania for two years, and then I got the opportunity to go to Rutgers for my first stint as a defensive assistant.

From there I got the running backs coaching job at Princeton. My experience with the student-athletes there was so enjoyable. They’re just so driven and fun to be around. The next year I went to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with my former boss at Rutgers, coach Greg Schiano. But as soon I got to the NFL, I immediately thought: “The Ivy League is where it’s at, I’ve got to do everything I can to become an Ivy League head football coach.”

What happened next?

I ended up back at Princeton. I was there for a long time, but saw that I needed something more than just Ivy League experience. When coach Schiano got the head coaching job at Rutgers again, I knew that working for him would help prepare me for success.

Landing the top job at Harvard must have felt like a dream fulfilled.

I was on the road recruiting with coach Schiano as the whole hiring process was underway. He doesn’t know the Ivy League all that well, so he was trying to get some perspective. “What is it like?” he wanted to know. I told him: “Coach, this is like being at Ohio State or [University of] Michigan in the Big Ten.” The entire time I was at Princeton — whether I was a player or a coach — I saw Harvard as top dog in the Ivy League.

How are you preparing for Yale?

Well, there’s definitely a different kind of energy right now. My job is to make sure our players are going about their business the same way they have been for the last nine weeks. This game means a lot to a lot of people. Even the level of the interest from the outside, including the number of media requests, is completely different from previous weeks. But ultimately, I can’t get caught up in it. Because if I am, I know the players are.

The Crimson fell to the Bulldogs in 2022 and ’23, but you’re the favorite this year. What do you hope to see on the field Saturday?

I want to see a team that is protecting the football on offense, that is taking the ball away in defense. I want to see a team that is executing 11 guys every play. I want to see a team that’s on the attack every single play. That’s how we define ourselves as a football program.

Will you get to participate in any of the fun stuff this weekend?

Hopefully the fun stuff I’ll be doing is celebrating a win.


Ketanji Brown Jackson? Present!

Supreme Court justice revisits Michael Sandel’s class, which left her with lessons that lasted long beyond her time in it as first-year


Campus & Community

Ketanji Brown Jackson? Present!

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (left) speaks with Michael J. Sandel and Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge Margaret Marshall d

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (left) with Michael Sandel and Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Photo by Grace DuVal

3 min read

Supreme Court justice revisits Michael Sandel’s class, which left her with lessons that lasted long beyond her time in it as first-year

In a passage from “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, is a Harvard College first-year drawing a smiley face in her notes for the course “Justice.”

“I want to laugh at the way my mind spins as I listen to the opinions being expressed,” she writes in a College essay excerpted in the new memoir. “I want to know the answers. I glimpse that there are no answers. Yet to wonder is not enough. We must never stop asking the questions.”

On Tuesday, Jackson was met by 800-plus smiles — and a standing ovation — as she returned to visit a course that proved influential in her life. Welcoming her at Sanders Theatre was Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, who has taught “Justice” since 1980. Jackson credits Sandel’s Gen Ed offering with building her confidence while instilling a passion for healthy debate.

“I felt myself expanding and growing more visible to myself as I engaged the great philosophical conundrums,” she writes in the book. “The animated discussions about open-ended ethical dilemmas made me come completely alive.”

Seated with Jackson under the bright stage lights, Sandel invited students to engage with the issue of affirmative action while drawing on insights from influential philosophers, ancient and modern. Primary readings this semester include works from Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. But the syllabus also features the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative-action policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina.

Some students lined up to share responses to Jackson’s dissent in the UNC case. (She recused herself in the case of Harvard, having served on its Board of Overseers.) Jackson may have been a quiet participant in “Justice” three decades ago, as she notes in the book. But she was much less so on her return to the two-hour lecture as she laid out her legal and moral reasoning on affirmative action. The whole exchange was off the record.

Taking the stage to address the class for the final 45 minutes of the session was Margaret Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, former chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Sandel assigned students to read her 2003 opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which established the right to same-sex marriage for the first time in U.S. history. Sandel said that Marshall’s opinion is a rare piece of legal writing with the resonance of prayer. It has found second life as a popular reading at weddings nationwide.


Harvard, MIT, Mass General form renewable energy collaboration

Group will include higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, seek to leverage buying power to advance cost-effective, green production projects


Campus & Community

Harvard, MIT, Mass General form renewable energy collaboration

Group will include higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, seek to leverage buying power to advance cost-effective projects

4 min read
The Big Elm Solar Project located in Bell County, Texas, came online in 2024.

The Big Elm Solar Project located in Bell County, Texas, came online this year.

Credit: Apex Energy

Harvard announced on Wednesday the formation of the Consortium for Climate Solutions, a first-of-its-kind renewable energy collaboration of higher education, healthcare, and cultural institutions, as well as state and local government entities, led by Harvard, Mass General Brigham (MGB), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

The consortium will leverage its members’ collective purchasing power to overcome market conditions that serve as barriers to development of projects that advance cost-effective renewable energy and allow for larger-scale investment.

“With these new utility-scale renewable electricity projects, Harvard will purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, fulfilling a key component of our approach to meet our goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026.”

Heather Henriksen.
Heather Henriksen, chief sustainability officer

“Investing in new, large-scale renewables marks a significant step forward for Harvard in its commitment to a clean energy future,” said Meredith Weenick, executive vice president. “By founding the consortium with MIT and MGB, we are not only catalyzing the transition to a cleaner grid but also demonstrating a collaboration model that will enable a variety of nonprofit organizations and municipalities to work together to address the urgent challenges of climate change.”

The consortium recently finalized negotiations that will result in the development of 408 megawatts of new renewable energy through two large-scale, utility-grade projects — the Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota. The 200-megawatt Big Elm Solar project came online earlier this year, and the 208-megawatt Bowman Wind project is expected to come online in 2026. Collectively these projects will generate clean power equal to the electricity use of 130,000 U.S. homes annually.

“With these new utility-scale renewable electricity projects, Harvard will purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, fulfilling a key component of our approach to meet our goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026, while we simultaneously work on the longer-term effort to decarbonize our historic and urban campus,” explained Heather Henriksen, Harvard’s chief sustainability officer. 

Achieving fossil-fuel neutrality by 2026 is a bridging strategy to mitigate the negative impact of fossil fuels on emission levels and air pollution while the University develops longer-term technology and infrastructure changes to eliminate its use of fossil fuels by 2050. In addition to purchasing electricity from renewable sources, the University looks to seek greater energy efficiency and heat recovery on campus, replace fossil-fuel equipment at the end of life, increase its electric vehicle fleet, and find other reductions of fossil-fuel use.

“There is plenty of scientific evidence that fossil fuels are negatively impacting health, community stability, and ecosystems around the world. As Harvard continues on its path to become a fossil fuel-free campus, it is critical that the University not only conduct research on how to drive down global emissions and bolster adaptation, but to use our purchasing power to help produce cost-effective renewable energy solutions at scale,” said Mike Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School, faculty chair of the Business and Environment Initiative at HBS, and co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Sustainability. “The consortium is an excellent example of engaging with the renewable electricity markets to expand their scale and impact.” 

The consortium founding members, Harvard, MGB, and MIT, sought opportunities to collaborate with smaller nonprofits and municipalities. This resulted in the partnership with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying organization, enabling the city of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass. Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and WGBH to join under the PowerOptions umbrella. The consortium is providing PowerOptions members with access to affordable, large-scale renewable energy purchases that would typically be out of reach for individual buyers. 

The creation of the consortium, supported by Harvard’s leadership, was led by the Office for Sustainability working with faculty and other key stakeholders. The projects chosen for investment align with the recommendations and criteria set forth by the Fossil Fuel-Neutral by 2026 Subcommittee of the University’s Presidential Committee on Sustainability. The consortium vetted more than 100 potential projects, ultimately choosing the Big Elm Solar and Bowman Wind projects from developer Apex Clean Energy.

Locally, the consortium’s power-purchase agreements with the Big Elm and Bowman projects will enable its members to accelerate progress toward their individual sustainability goals consistent with local emissions-reduction regulatory targets, while simultaneously reducing fossil fuel emissions at a national scale. 

“The locations and scale of each project, in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States, mean that the potential positive impact is significant, creating a more robust and cleaner grid,” explained Henriksen.


Rapid relief for the severely depressed? There’s a catch.

Ketamine carries risks, say researchers. Yet for some patients, it’s ‘the only thing that works.’


Health

Rapid relief for the severely depressed? There’s a catch.

woman sitting on bed alone
6 min read

Ketamine carries risks, say researchers. Yet for some patients, it’s ‘the only thing that works.’ 

At the Ketamine Clinic for Depression at Massachusetts General Hospital, patients make their way each day to receive intravenous infusions of the powerful anesthetic that has become an alternative therapy for treatment-resistant depression. 

Many of the clinic’s patients have not been helped by traditional treatments, including psychological counseling, antidepressant medication, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroconvulsive therapy. With its rapid antidepressant effects, ketamine is sometimes the only option that provides relief, said clinic founder and director Cristina Cusin, who has been researching depression and mood disorders for the past 25 years.  

“We don’t have good weapons to treat some severe forms of depression, just like we don’t have treatments for advanced-stage cancer,” said Cusin, who is also an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “We’re always looking for the next thing so that we can continue to offer hope to patients who don’t respond to standard treatments.”

In 2000, after a study reported that small doses of IV ketamine rapidly reversed symptoms of depression while standard antidepressants often took several weeks to have an effect, ketamine became the next new thing. In 2019, based on years of research, the FDA approved a nasal spray medication, derived from ketamine, to be administered under medical supervision.

Depression is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of sadness and hopelessness, that affects 18 percent of Americans. One-third of those diagnosed with depression don’t respond to standard treatments, with acute consequences to their personal and professional lives. The stigma associated with depression makes it harder for people to seek treatment, said Cusin. 

“There are some forms of depression that have a strong biological component; there are neurocircuits in the brain that are not functioning right. In many cases, it’s not for lack of trying.” 

Cristina Cusin

“In our society, if you suffer from depression, you may be told to ‘try harder,’ ‘stop complaining,’ ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps,’ and so on,” Cusin said. “But there are some forms of depression that have a strong biological component; there are neurocircuits in the brain that are not functioning right. In many cases, it’s not for lack of trying.” 

Patients follow a strict protocol to be admitted to the MGH Ketamine Clinic; not only do they have to be referred by their primary prescribers, but also prior treatments for depression must have failed. Ketamine therapy is integrated with other treatments and is done in the clinic under medical supervision and in coordination with patients’ primary medical teams. The clinic doesn’t admit self-referred patients or those with active substance use disorders or a history of psychosis. Ketamine produces hallucinogenic effects and dissociation, which can exacerbate psychotic symptoms. 

Other risks associated with ketamine are the possibility of developing addiction and a host of medical problems, but for patients who experience rapid relief from their symptoms of depression after treatment, ketamine is a game-changer, said Cusin. “Our patients have failed other treatments, so they don’t have a lot of other options,” she said. “If this is the only thing that works, they keep coming.” 

Scientists continue researching ketamine’s antidepressant effects on treatment-resistant depression. A recent clinical trial found that ketamine was as effective for non-psychotic treatment-resistant depression as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which has long been the gold standard for hard-to-treat depression.

Conducted by Amit Anand, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, the study found that 55 percent of those receiving ketamine and 41 percent of those receiving ECT had at least a 50 percent improvement in their self-reported depression symptoms. Anand co-authored the pivotal 2000 study that revealed the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine.

Encouraged by his recent study’s results, Anand is conducting a follow-up clinical trial comparing ketamine and ECT treatments among patients with suicidal depression. If ketamine can affect suicidal thoughts, it could be lifesaving. “What we’re trying to see is that if ketamine can cause a very rapid reversal of the troubling kind of depression leading to suicidality,” he said. “People are suffering, and even if it is for a short time, it is beneficial to provide a rapid change.”

“What we’re trying to see is that if ketamine can cause a very rapid reversal of the troubling kind of depression leading to suicidality.”

Amit Anand

Even though doctors and researchers are hopeful regarding the promise of ketamine, there is growing concern about the proliferation of private ketamine clinics, which began to crop up around the country after restrictions on telemedicine relaxed during the pandemic. These clinics offer IV ketamine infusions, with prices ranging from $600 to $800 per infusion. 

Most ketamine private clinics operate in a gray zone, with almost no oversight, and function as for-profit businesses, said Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician, educator, and cannabis specialist at MGH. 

“The end result is that now our population has broad access to ketamine, and it’s a little bit of an uncontrolled experiment,” said Grinspoon. “Whether it’s going to alleviate many people’s depression or whether it’s going to get a lot of people addicted to ketamine is going to be an open question. We don’t know how much it is going to help or harm things.”

Ketamine is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or opioids, but its use as a recreational drug poses serious risks. Actor Matthew Perry died last year of “acute effects of ketamine.” His autopsy also found opioids in his blood, but the level of ketamine found was equivalent to the amount that would be used during general anesthesia. 

The other troubling issue for Grinspoon is affordability. “I work as a primary care doctor in an inner-city clinic,” he said. “None of my patients can afford six $800 injections. … The last thing we need is for ketamine to be another treatment for just the well to-do. … This has got to be affordable.”

At the MGH clinic, patients receive low doses of ketamine in long intervals and have mixed experiences. While some report feeling relaxed, others find it unpleasant, but most said their symptoms of depression improve and don’t interfere with day-to-day functioning. Still, 

Cusin warns that ketamine should not be a first-option treatment for depression. 

“If someone is depressed or suicidal, there are alternatives out there,” said Cusin. “There are 50, 80 different treatments to consider. It’s rare that somebody has tried everything. Usually, there are entire classes of medications or treatments that have not been considered. There is always hope.”


Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants awarded to 12 projects

Grant recipients foster a culture of innovation and belonging on Harvard campus


Campus & Community

Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants awarded to 12 projects

Grant recipients foster a culture of innovation and belonging on Harvard campus

6 min read
The Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project holding an in-person lighting master class for Harvard media professionals.

The Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project holding an in-person lighting master class for Harvard media professionals.

Photo by Julia King

Twelve projects have recently been awarded grants from the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund (HCLIF) for the 2024–2025 cycle. Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and fellows submitted grant proposals for projects aimed at fostering an inclusive environment at the University. Each project aligns with HCLIF’s mission to “encourage experimentation, build a culture of inclusion, and grow a network of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging innovators at Harvard,” while also supporting the University’s goal of achieving inclusive excellence. Funded by the Office of the President and administered by the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, these grants range from $5,000 to $15,000.

“Harvard is committed to continuing its investment in innovative ideas that promote a campus culture of inclusion and belonging,” said Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer. “These grassroots projects unite community members at all levels of the University — researchers, students, faculty, postdocs, and staff — who identify pressing campus needs and apply their expertise to develop solutions. From a series exploring faith and justice to a project creating inclusive medical illustrations, the HCLIF projects are transforming ideas into action and making a significant impact.”

“From a series exploring faith and justice to a project creating inclusive medical illustrations, the HCLIF projects are transforming ideas into action and making a significant impact.”

Sherri Charleston
Sherri Charleston, chief diversity and inclusion officer
 

This year’s project teams showcase cross-University collaboration, with members representing Schools and units from across Harvard.

The awardees include the Lighting for Diverse Skin Tones project, a second-year grant recipient. It is a University-wide training resource that educates video producers and media professionals at Harvard on how to create lighting that captures a variety of skin tones effectively in photography, especially skin tones previously overlooked in photography and film training. With additional funding, they will work to identify a host site for the project and complete editing of previously recorded videos. “This project started with the intention of honing media producers’ skills in the craft of inclusive cinema lighting, but we ended by finding the time and space to really see people and understand how they want to be represented,” said Julia King, creative video producer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jacob Beizer, senior digital content producer and strategist at the Harvard Kennedy School in a statement. “We are excited to provide this resource to the entire Harvard community.”

The Inclusive Anatomical Images project stems from collaborations between Harvard Medical School, Harvard Art Museums, and the University of Global Health Equity based in Rwanda. The project seeks to ensure diverse patients have a higher chance of being better served and aims to improve patient outcomes by creating more inclusive educational medical literature. It creates materials reflecting a diversity of bodies — including various sizes, ancestries, genders, and skin tones — to better serve a wide diversity of patients. With this year’s funding, the team will expand their reach by making their resources more accessible to institutions, researchers, and health professionals beyond Harvard, while expanding their team to meet the demand for their expertise and images. Martha Ellen Katz, a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, said, “Our project has the potential to validate the life experience of historically excluded patients, physicians, dentists, and student learners at HMS, and curricula worldwide. Our equitable work culture, which strives to be as non-hierarchical as possible, also encourages student leadership and acknowledges the essential contributions of all team members, collaborators, and supporters.”

The Connecting Community Through Food project celebrates Harvard’s student body through food. By collaborating with Harvard College students, student organizations, and employees, the Harvard University Dining Services team aims to develop recipes and menus authored by Harvard undergraduates from a diversity of backgrounds. These meals will be served more regularly in dining halls. Smitha Haneef, executive director of the Harvard University Dining Services, explained, “We want students to experience the dining halls as welcoming, comforting places, hopefully like their home kitchens. For this to happen, the menus must feel like home. This project helps us realize that vision for more community members.”

Additional 2024 HCLIF Recipients

  • Community Project on Faith and Justice cultivates inclusivity and engagement centered on faith by hosting speaker series and community events where affiliates can explore the influence of faith in their lives.
  • Disability Awareness Series aims to increase awareness about the resources available for, and challenges faced by, those with disability and accessibility needs at Harvard. It engages Harvard College students, staff, researchers, and faculty through an awareness campaign and series of events.
  • Disability in Health Professions Mentorship Program cultivates a supportive community for current and future health professionals living with disabilities and chronic illness, fostering a greater sense of belonging at Harvard.
  • Emerging Scientists Program connects high school students from Cambridge and Boston with Harvard graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff, providing meaningful and accessible life sciences research experiences.
  • Harvard Career Capsule empowers graduate students by providing professional attire and equipment to support their career development.
  • Harvard University Peer Coaching Initiative aims to reduce loneliness and enhance interpersonal skills by pairing Harvard students and researchers. Participants engage in weekly sessions over the course of a semester to practice effective listening with one another.
  • Justice-Impacted Inclusion seeks to make Harvard more inclusive of formerly incarcerated people and others impacted by the justice system. The initiative consults with formerly incarcerated policy experts and creates resources, such as a guide on inclusive language and practices.
  • LifeSaveHer develops trainings to address misconceptions regarding performing CPR on women, including modifying male CPR mannequins to represent female bodies, ultimately aiming to reduce cardiac arrest survival disparities for women.
  • Trans+ Community Celebration at Harvard seeks to uplift the trans+ community by creating inclusive spaces within the University.

Applications for the 2025-2026 funding term of Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund grants are now open to Harvard students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and academic personnel. Harvard community members interested in participating as judges for the 2025-2026 HCLIF grant applications can now sign up.


New frontiers in cancer care

In podcast, experts discuss breakthroughs in treatment, from genomic sequencing to AI, and how close we are to personalized vaccines


Illustration of a target over a cancerous cell.

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Health

‘Harvard Thinking’: New frontiers in cancer care

In podcast, experts discuss breakthroughs in treatment, from genomic sequencing to AI, and how close we are to personalized vaccines

long read

Cancer kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year, but advances in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are ushering in a new era of treatment.

Alumnus Levi Garraway, who runs late-stage drug development at the biotech company Roche and previously worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said the field has come a long way.

“Although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA,” Garraway said. That’s why the pillars of cancer treatment — surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy — are so limited in their applications. Moving to more personalized treatments based on a patient’s genetics has revolutionized the field. “[Genetic sequencing] was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.”

Connie Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham, said artificial intelligence has shown remarkable promise in detecting breast cancer, with success rates that far exceed what the human eye can detect alone. “What [other industries] are doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.”

Treatment and prevention will only become more personalized and effective as researchers continue to explore the human genome and genetic structure of cancers, said Catherine Wu, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. One question that drives some of her research: Is it possible to vaccinate against cancer?

“That’s the vision,” said Wu, a recent recipient of the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research. “Can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was? That was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely?”

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Garraway, Lehman, and Wu about some of their most cutting-edge cancer research — and what hope lies on the horizon.

Transcript

Levi Garraway: And now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Advances in technologies like genomic sequencing and artificial intelligence have ushered in a new era in the fight against cancer, which kills nearly 10 million people worldwide every year. Researchers are now working on therapies that can be genetically tailored to individual patients and they’re also working on methods for discovering cancers at much earlier stages. Someday, we might even have vaccines that can prevent the disease altogether.

How close are we to turning a corner on cancer?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, we’re joined by:

Garraway: Levi Garraway. I run late-stage drug development at Roche, which in the U.S. is known as Genentech.

Laine Perfas: Levi attended Harvard as an undergraduate, graduate, and medical student. He also worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for 11 years. Then:

Connie Lehman: Connie Lehman. I’m a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and I’m a breast imaging specialist at Mass General Brigham.

Laine Perfas: She’s also a founding partner at Clairity, which uses the power of artificial intelligence to better inform precision care. And finally:

Cathy Wu: Cathy Wu. I am a professor of medicine and division chief for transplant and cellular therapies at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Laine Perfas: She was an undergraduate at Harvard and completed her clinical training at the University. Recently she received the Sjöberg Prize for cancer research.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. This episode looks at the future of cancer treatment.

Historically, how have we approached cancer treatment and how has that shifted in recent years?

Garraway: Historically you had surgery, you had radiotherapy, and you had chemotherapy. I put historically in quotes because these are all in wide use today, and they’re probably not going anywhere anytime soon. And the reason why they’re not going anywhere is because they actually can be effective in treating many cancers, even curing some cancers, but there are well-known limitations. And of course, I think for all of us who went into this field, it was in part to try to counter those limitations. And one is that there’s a whole lot of cancers that can’t be cured with those therapies, and the other is that these are all blunt instruments. I mean, often you get damage to normal or adjacent cells and tissues as well as cancer cells. And that’s a big problem. You often can’t tell in advance who’s going to respond or who’s not going to respond, for example, to chemotherapy. So it’s a vexing issue when you have a patient and you know they need treatment, but you can’t tell them that they’re going to benefit from a potentially toxic treatment.

Wu: Yeah. I agree with Levi. I think we were taught that the pillars of cancer care have been chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery. I think what’s been exciting in the lifetime that we are going through our training and treating our patients is that we’ve seen so much evolved that there are actually new pillars that have been coming up and so I think that one of the things that kind of worldwide that we’re excited about is immunotherapy because this has emerged as a fourth pillar that is touching on all the different disease types and has proven to be really important.

Lehman: It is really exciting to see this transition to more targeted and more personalized treatment. Also at the other end of the spectrum is, can we actually even prevent cancers? Like, are there domains where we don’t need to wait until they’re so far advanced that cure is really elusive even with the most advanced therapies? So in my part of the sandbox, we’re really focused on early detection and also accurate risk assessment so we can have the right interventions to prevent the cancer from developing. It’s so interesting to look at the changes in how breast cancer presents. You can have women moving from one country to another, to adopting different diets, different lifestyles, and their breast cancer risk goes up within their lifetime. So there are these correlations between modifiable risk factors and lifestyle, diet, exercise, environmental, carcinogens, and how can we be better at identifying those and really stopping the cancer from occurring?

Laine Perfas: Treatment has become a lot more personalized in many ways. The historical treatment, if this is accurate, it seems like it was very much one-size-fits-all. What were some of the problems of that approach and why did that need to change?

Garraway: One major recognition that happened over time is that you could have two women with breast cancer, they’re both called breast cancer, but they behave very differently. They may show up very differently. They respond differently to treatment. There’s now a lot more understanding about why that is. And one big reason is that although cancers may look the same under the microscope, they can be very different when you look at the DNA, the genomes of those cancers. They’ve acquired mutations of various types. Some of them are completely random and they don’t matter to the cancer, but others are critical. They become what we call drivers of the cancer. So when we talk about what made cancer become more personalized, it was the recognition that some of those mutations, they occur over again in certain subsets of cancer, but you can design medicines against the resulting mutated proteins that drive the cancer. And those medicines are now much more selective. Now all of a sudden, it’s not quite such a blunt instrument. You’re able to get a much more selective killing effect of the cancer. Now you have a way to tell in advance who might respond to this treatment. That was one of the first breakthroughs that allowed cancer treatment to start to become a bit more personalized.

Wu: A lot of innovation follows technology. So I think that it’s always been recognized that you can try to do one-size-fits-all. But the reality is that not everyone responds and patients do or do not have toxicities. So I think the kind of technology that has brought so much insight has been through unraveling the molecular secrets of cancer cells through sequencing. I think that very, perhaps, simple technological advance has meant the world to what we understand about cancer now. And at some level, I think that the personalization is what is fighting fire with fire. You’re confronting that heterogeneity up front. You’re not trying to hide from it. You’re acknowledging that it exists and that it actually mandates that we become more selective in terms of how and what we can offer to our patients.

Lehman: I really like how both Levi and Cathy talk about [how] this personalized domain is about getting the fit with the patient and that patient’s tumor and the treatment. We see that in other domains of medicine. So, for example, we can look back at old studies and there was a drug therapy that people were very excited about, and the results were mediocre and everyone abandoned and moved on. But there were some patients that responded really well. So you want to go back and say, it wasn’t necessarily a bad treatment. It was a bad selection of the patients that could benefit. If we can be more tailored and more personalized and more targeted, will there be a lot of drugs that had been like, this isn’t a great way to approach treating quote, breast cancer, which is far too broad of a term to use. Exactly the same analogy happens in the imaging sciences and radiology. We had a boon in developing new technology for breast imaging from old film screen to digital mammography to tomosynthesis to contrast-enhanced mammography to MRI to nuclear medicine scans to ultrasound. Everyone’s really excited, and we were trying to use these in screening, and some of them give orders that, well, we can’t screen with ultrasound, there are too many false positives, we can’t screen with MRI, it’s too expensive and we can’t afford it and the value proposition isn’t there. But what we needed to do was to say, what if you targeted the right population, that, one, is disadvantaged with mammography and, two, is really at high risk for having a cancer aggressively grow and fail to be detected by mammography? And if you targeted those high-risk patients, all of a sudden these technologies look a lot better, look a lot more powerful.

Laine Perfas: Cathy, one of the things you mentioned that I wanted to ask about was genetic sequencing. I believe it just was so time-consuming and expensive in the past that it wasn’t really a practical thing that could be done on a patient-by-patient basis. How has that changed and what doors has that opened with research?

Wu: It’s been huge. In short, I think the big change happened around 2008-09, more or less, where suddenly from the exorbitantly expensive experience of running the Human Genome Project, there was new technology available that suddenly made it possible to sequence on the order of hundreds to low thousands, which still sounds like a lot. That was back then. Now we’re coming down to the low hundreds per sample. We are already testing the waters, but I really do think it’s a reality that in the not-too-distant future that this should be a diagnostic test that can be offered that is a standard part of your cancer workup. As we as a community gain more experience, this experience can be aggregated and we can look for patterns and we can look for opportunities that can at one level afford personal opportunities, but also at a population level find perhaps therapies that can benefit another population that may share those kind of genetic characteristics.

Garraway: I’ll add a couple of points. One is that what Sam described, the laborious nature of sequencing, the unlock, as you point out, that happened coming close to two decades ago, was the ability to sequence at scale. So this technology called Massively Parallel Sequencing came on the scene, and now all of a sudden, where it used to be so laborious to even sequence one gene, and there are 20,000 genes in the genome and there are many hundreds that are critical in cancer, now all of a sudden you can sequence dozens or hundreds of genes at a time. Eventually, as Cathy mentioned, it’s become possible to sequence whole genomes routinely and many times over. So the expansion of technology has been remarkable. The other thing that it is enabling is possibly a new generation of what Cathy mentioned: immune therapy. It may be that in the fullness of time, the same sequencing technologies will figure out mutations that actually now cause a tumor to look more foreign. There can be new ways to target the immune system with that information, but that’s also very personalized information. Each tumor will have a different set of mutations or changes like that. So this is a direction that immunotherapy is taking. It’s early days but it looks very intriguing.

Laine Perfas: Is it accurate to say that there could be a future where we might be able to vaccinate against cancer or treat people with personalized vaccines for their specific case?

Wu: That’s the vision. I think that if we are going to be able to offer sequencing as a routine test, then the information content that is provided by that test not only allows you to understand maybe some of the origins of where that kind of cancer came from, what were the steps that made it into the cancer that it was, but it also provides you with different therapeutic opportunities. That gets into another interesting topic, which is, how can we, for example, make cancer vaccines as available as, say, the COVID vaccine was, right? So that was a huge rollout given to all citizens of our country. How were we able to roll that out quickly and safely? A cancer vaccine is far more complicated. Some of the principles, though, are very similar. But because of the scale of that difference in the personalization, it is more complex. On the other hand, the ingredients to make that type of vaccine are contained within the sequencing information that I think we would all envision would be a routine test in the not-too-distant future.

Lehman: I also think it’s exciting, and we’re becoming more and more sophisticated and not thinking of the multitude of cancers as cancer. So a vaccine against cancer is almost like thinking, will we have a vaccine against a virus? And so we have areas that have been incredibly exciting during my career where I certainly didn’t think when I was a medical school student and learning about cervical cancer that we would have a vaccine to prevent HPV infection and that would eradicate a very large percentage of cervical cancers in patients that are vaccinated and that also can reduce the occurrence of prostate cancer. So there’s a whole domain that you can actually stop the trigger for the cancer to be able to develop rather than wait and then see that there’s circulating cancer cells and now let’s come in and let’s try to have the body help fight away those cancer cells.

Laine Perfas: Connie, early detection is an area that you’re really passionate about. And actually in the work you’ve been doing, you’ve been using AI. I would love to hear more about that and how AI is being used to detect breast cancer sooner.

Lehman: Part of the different changing face of breast cancer has been mammography screening. Mammography is a very imperfect tool, but it did change the spectrum of patients presenting with breast cancer. We shifted historically from women coming forward when they noticed that there was a lump in their breast, or a doctor noticed that, and we could find cancers preclinical before that happened, and we really saw a shift in both the morbidity of the treatment, but also the survival.

That was a big win, but as I said it’s limited, and we have women presenting with advanced cancer despite routine screening. We have the costs and the false positives and the challenges of using mammography effectively. So I think that what I’m most excited about is changing the paradigm of how we screen and moving away from a very archaic age-based approach and moving into a risk-based approach.

Everyone has seen over the years the arguments about screening mammography. In Europe they tend to start at 50 and screen every two to three years. In the U.S. we constantly battle about whether you start at 40 or 50 and it’s every year or every two years. That argument is so limited. It’s almost unbelievable to me that we’re still having a basic argument about 40 or 50 or every year or every two years when there’s such a diversity of the risk profiles of women within their 40s, within their 30s, within their 50s, and we ignore that. Now one of the reasons why we’ve ignored it is our traditional risk models are inadequate. So the area I’m most excited about with artificial intelligence is using computer vision, not to look for cancer currently on the mammogram, but to predict whether that woman will develop cancer within the coming five years. So if you can look out into the future, is there something about this tissue that is putting this woman at increased risk? And our research to date shows that the AI applied to the basic regular mammogram can predict future breast cancer at a level that we just haven’t seen before.

It also eliminates the really unfortunate racial biases in our traditional risk models, which were built largely on European Caucasian women, and just don’t perform for us in Black, Hispanic, and Asian women. There’s a whole other domain, too, of having the computers learn how to read the mammograms, because one of the limitations of mammography is you need these highly specialized humans to read them, which really reduces the impact of screening mammography globally, because we just don’t have enough highly specialized radiologists to interpret the mammograms. So I think we’ll also see that shift.

Garraway: We could have a whole conversation, of course, on AI in medicine, and what Connie described in radiology is so exciting. It’s really going to be revolutionary. I’ll just say at a high level that AI is already changing every component of the research and development of new medicines, starting all the way from the very beginning, where you can use AI to conduct a lot of the compound screening or chemical screening in a computer. Where it used to be, you have to have lots of expensive chemical libraries and iterative screening of things. A lot of that can be done in silico, as we call it, because of AI, and even design of therapeutic antibodies from scratch, using AI-first principles. Then when you get into the clinic, the ability to synthesize all kinds of patient data to predict the kinds of patients that one should study so that you’re not fooled either in the positive or the negative way about whether a medicine is working. So it’s hard to come up with a component of the research and discovery of medicines that’s not being impacted by AI.

Laine Perfas: A lot of Connie’s work involves using AI for mammography and then Levi, you mentioned really every area of medicine is being revolutionized. Are there other emerging technologies that are really changing the landscape of cancer detection, treatment, and lowering morbidity rates?

Wu: I think there’s a lot of exciting technologies that are among us right now. It’s not for nothing that we’re in the age of human biomedicine that we actually can learn directly from human biospecimens as opposed to fruit flies, worms, and mice, which is really how we gained our insights in the past. Along the lines of some of the AI work, there’s a tremendous interest, not only unlocking the secrets one cell at a time, looking at the DNA, the RNA, the protein expression, but also looking to see how all of these cells in, for example, tumor tissue, are patterned, are organized in space. These patterns on the one hand are teaching us how the cells are interacting with each other and allowing us to relate that to patient characteristics. So for patients who are destined to respond or not respond to a particular therapy, what were the patterns that were seen? And what does that tell us about the biology that happened? A lot of that information can also be fed into AI-related algorithms so that we can become better at pattern recognition.

Lehman: Yeah, Cathy, I like how you’re presenting that because it is where, again with these multidisciplinary approaches, the more I interact with specialists in computer science and artificial intelligence, the more I realize how much we really need their expertise just infusing healthcare. Because what we deal with is, we’ve had this incredible renaissance where we have so much technology that can collect so much data and in the imaging sciences alone. I think about, when I started, the kinds of images I would look at with plain films and a chest X-ray and a mammogram and then the complexity of the way that we can image the human body and the data that results from that. But the technology to collect that information, to create those patterns, just far exceeds our ability as humans. From the military, from the auto industry, I mean, what they’re doing in computer vision is just unbelievable. And bringing that into healthcare to improve the lives of our patients is incredibly exciting.

Garraway: Sam, you asked the question about other kinds of technologies. Of course, as Connie’s mentioning, AI pervades all of them, but I will mention there are technologies that are also allowing new kinds of cancer treatments to emerge. There are now what we call treatment modalities, which are different than were possible in the past. I’ll just mention a couple of them.

One is what we call cellular therapy. So this is a technology platform. You basically collect certain kinds of immune cells from an individual and then you expand them in the laboratory. You engineer them so that they can destroy tumor cells very effectively and then you give them back to patients. And so, the first generation of cell therapy, you would collect those cells from a patient with, let’s say a blood cancer, and then you engineer them and you give them back to the same patients. That actually often works remarkably well. You can get very profound clinical benefit in patients who otherwise weren’t going to benefit at all. But as you might imagine it’s logistically challenging to do this for every patient, and in every center and every context. So not as many patients have access to cell therapy as one might like.

So there’s now a new kind of emerging generation of cell therapy. The technical term is allogeneic cell therapy. In that setting, what you do is you collect immune cells from completely unrelated donors, and you expand them and you engineer them, just like we talked about, but then you can store them so that in the future, you have, like, an off-the-shelf way of leveraging this cell therapy. You don’t have to do the whole start-to-finish process on every single patient, every single time. We think this is potentially a really exciting, future promise. Then the other platform I’ll just mention very briefly, it’s called bispecific antibodies. Traditionally one kind of therapy we call a therapeutic antibody, it’s a mimic of the immune system but it allows you to design an antibody that binds a particular disease target very tightly. But bispecific antibodies work by binding not just one target, but two targets. So if one target is on the tumor cell and the other target is on the immune cell, the bispecific antibody can bring the immune cell to the tumor cell and activate the immune cell and kill the tumor cell. So I just want to bring up that we talked a lot about AI as it’s revolutionizing everything, but there are other kinds of platforms that we use more and more in the pharmaceutical arena to try to develop new kinds of medicines that can bring new kinds of benefits.

Laine Perfas: Hearing about all these emerging therapies is so exciting and amazing and miraculous-seeming, especially as someone who is not a cancer researcher. But I also want to acknowledge that there’s still challenges there, you know, there’s costs, resources, still limitations on technology. A lot of it is just a lot of work.

Wu: We know. Oh, we know.

Laine Perfas: So what keeps you all hopeful with the current trajectory and where do you see us being or hope we’ll be 10 years from now, 20 years from now?

Wu: I think the hope comes from all the progress that we see. It is incremental. I think all of us know the challenges but experience the positive signals that kind of give us hope and tell us that we’re on the right track, and you’ve got to have the focus and the vision to get you through the finish line.

Garraway: Yeah, Sam, I think it’s a really prescient question because I know that both Connie and Cathy are part of outstanding institutions where unfortunately, the waiting rooms are still all too full with patients, some of whom are benefiting from these approaches, but others are not benefiting enough, or even at all from these approaches. So the unmet need is still quite considerable, and sometimes it feels like the pace of advance, it’s almost like, there’s a concept of how evolution happens, which is punctuated equilibrium: There’s a bunch of evolution, and then it plateaus, and there’s a bunch more, and then it plateaus. Cancer research and drug development can be like that. So you have this flurry of activity that led to targeted therapies, and then you have this flurry of activity that established immunotherapies, but all the while, you can be in these plateau phases also, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s not happening fast enough.” But the fact that these advances have happened and that we’ve been fortunate enough in our careers to either witness or, in some cases, participate in those advances, it doesn’t get old. You don’t forget those moments of impact, those opportunities to bring the advances. That’s what motivates you to bring more of those. I know for me, that’s what wakes me up in the morning.

Lehman: I actually think our strongest energy is around what we know needs to be done and the technology we have to make that happen. So we need to have the right people agree that this is the direction we have to go in. You can be in those domains where dogma, and this is the way we’ve always done it, and politics, can slow down the implementation and the progress. And so that’s really in the domain that I’m working the most in. The early detection-prevention side is to change the guidelines, to change the approach, to change how we think about how we screen to detect breast cancer early.

COVID was such a horrible period for so many, but one of the silver linings was we realized that we can be both safe and fast in certain domains of healthcare. I had been struggling with how many barriers there were to telehealth and to providing services to women in rural areas and in healthcare deserts. All of a sudden, all those barriers with COVID, it’s like, we can probably do these things that we used to always say weren’t safe, weren’t OK. But now that we need to do it, we can do it. I think it gave people new vision in what can be accomplished. That is something that’s going to be exciting as we continue to move forward in the next few years.

Laine Perfas: Thank you for this wonderful conversation.

Thanks for listening. To find a transcript of this episode and links to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.




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Kempner AI cluster named one of world’s fastest ‘green’ supercomputers

Computational power can be used to train and run artificial neural networks, creates key advances in understanding basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems


Science & Tech

Kempner AI cluster named one of world’s fastest ‘green’ supercomputers

The Kempner AI cluster’s graphics processing units are networked together to allow for incredibly fast parallel processing.

The Kempner Institute AI cluster’s graphics processing units are networked together to allow for incredibly fast parallel processing.

Credit: Harvard University

long read

Computational power can be used to train and run artificial neural networks, creates key advances in understanding basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems

Researchers at Harvard now have access to one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers in the world.

Built to support cutting-edge research at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, and Harvard University more broadly, the Kempner’s AI cluster has just been named the 32nd fastest “green” supercomputer in the world in the Green500, the industry’s premier, independent ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally. In addition to cracking the top 50 list of green supercomputers, the cluster has been certified as the 85th fastest supercomputer overall in the TOP500, making it one of the fastest and greenest supercomputers on the planet. 

“The Kempner AI cluster’s ranking in the latest Green500 and TOP500 lists positions us squarely among the fastest and most eco-friendly AI clusters in academia and the world,” said Max Shad, Kempner senior director of AI/ML research engineering. “It is no small feat to have built this kind of green high-performance computing power in such a short period of time, enabling cutting-edge research that is innovating in real time, and allowing for truly important advancements at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neuroscience.”

High-performance computing forms the backbone of the massive growth in the field of machine learning, and researchers at the Kempner Institute are leveraging this immense computational power to train and run artificial neural networks, leading to key advances in understanding the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.

The Kempner AI cluster is housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, MA,

The Kempner Institute AI cluster is housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and uses a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to minimize energy usage.

Credit: Harvard University

Measuring green compute power, from flops to gigaflops

The Kempner’s AI cluster opened with an initial pilot installation in spring 2023, and now represents the forefront of Harvard’s growing engagement with state-of-the-art computing resources. Composed of 528 specialized computer processors called graphics processing units (GPUs), which are networked together in parallel with “switches” to enable fast and simultaneous computation, the cluster can run rapid computations on hundreds of research projects at once. 

To gauge the cluster’s green computing power and overall computing power, engineers from Lenovo measured the speed of the cluster’s highest-performing GPUs (called H100s) using the LINPACK Benchmark, which requires solving vast linear algebra problems. This is expressed in terms of floating point operations per second, or “flops.” The system’s efficiency, or “green” computing capacity, depends on how many flops the H100s can perform with a given amount of power, which is expressed as gigaflops per watt of power used. 

The Kempner’s H100s demonstrated the capability to perform 16.29 petaflops, at an efficiency of 48.065 gigaflops per watt of power used.

A supercomputer supporting new research at the Kempner, and across Harvard

With this magnitude of computing power, Kempner researchers are able to train state-of-the-art AI systems like large language models (LLMs), of which ChatGPT is perhaps the best known, quickly and efficiently. For example, the Kempner cluster can train the popular Meta Llama 3.1 8B and Meta Llama 3.1 70B language models in about one week and two months, respectively. Before the Kempner’s cluster was established and operational, training the Llama models on the next-fastest computer system at Harvard would have taken years to complete. 

Beyond using the cluster to create faster models, researchers are also employing the cluster to better understand how and why they work. “With this enhanced computational power, we can delve deeper into how generative models learn to reason and complete tasks with greater efficiency,” says Kempner Institute Research Fellow Binxu Wang. 

In addition to providing researchers with the capacity to train complex models quickly and efficiently, and to understand the mechanisms behind how they learn, the Kempner cluster enables scientists to compare vast numbers of model architectures and learning algorithms in parallel, with important applications in fields ranging from medicine to neuroscience. One example: In research recently published in Nature Medicine, Kempner associate faculty member and Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor Marinka Zitnik and colleagues used the cluster to develop and train TxGNN, an AI system that distills vast amounts of medical data into knowledge graphs, and then uses the graphs to predict the effectiveness of a drug for treating rare diseases. 

The Kempner GPUs form part of Harvard University’s growing computational ecosystem, joining new or soon-to-be-available GPUs supported by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC). More than 5,200 researchers across the University make use of these computing resources in a wide array of scientific and technological applications.  

The power of parallel processing

So what exactly is a cluster? As the name suggests, a computing cluster gathers together multiple devices, each of which can function as a full-fledged computer in its own right. Linking devices together unleashes the power of parallel computing, which leads to massive speed-ups in processing time by performing large numbers of tasks simultaneously. 

Until a few decades ago, most computers were powered by a central processing unit (CPU) that could only perform one computational operation at a time. By the early 2000s, computer scientists had figured out how to create “multicore” CPUs that perform multiple computations in parallel. 

The road to supercomputing clusters like the Kempner’s involved stacking several levels of parallel processing on top of each other. After the introduction of multicore CPUs, the next level of parallelism was enabled by the use of GPUs. Controlling the graphics on a computer screen requires large numbers of very similar computations that can be done simultaneously. For example, displaying a video game requires computing the brightness and color of millions of pixels up to 120 times per second. GPUs perform these numerous yet simple computations in parallel, freeing up the CPU to perform more complex computations.

Computer scientists realized that the capacity of GPUs to perform vast numbers of parallel computations could be repurposed for other tasks, such as machine learning. Running an artificial neural network such as OpenAI’s GPT or DALL-E, for example, involves vast numbers of mathematical operations that can be performed in parallel. But the parallelism doesn’t stop here: Yet another level of parallelism is enabled by linking multiple GPUs together in a network. The Kempner’s network involves hundreds of NVIDIA GPUs — 144 A100s and 384 H100s — that can work in concert. This multilevel parallelism empowers the Kempner’s researchers to perform the dizzyingly intensive computations involved in the study of natural and artificial intelligence and to develop new AI applications in areas such as medicine. 

When it comes to fast and flexible experimentation, iteration, and computationally intensive research, the Kempner AI cluster is, in the words of Boaz Barak, “absolutely instrumental.” Barak, a Kempner associate faculty member and professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, says his lab group “relies on extensive computational experiments using the cluster” to study the mechanisms, capabilities, and limitations of deep learning systems. This, he says, allows his lab group to “hone intuitions and study questions as they arise.”

A powerful supercomputer, built to be green

Intentionally built for optimal energy consumption, the Kempner’s AI cluster is also setting a standard for “green” supercomputing. Modern machine learning has resulted in unprecedented advances in AI, but the methods are increasingly energy-intensive. Lowering the carbon footprint of AI is therefore crucial so that advances in AI do not come at the cost of exacerbating global warming. 

Housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computer Center (MGHPCC) along with other FASRC resources, and located in the town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the Kempner’s AI cluster uses a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to minimize energy usage and make every megawatt of power count. The center is powered by the Holyoke municipal electric company, which delivers 100 percent carbon-free energy through a hydroelectric power station and several solar arrays that they operate.

As the central computing hub employed by most of the state’s research universities, including Harvard, MIT, UMass, Northeastern and Boston University, the MGHPCC was the first university research data center to achieve LEED Platinum Certification, the highest level awarded by the Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Program. Moving forward, the Kempner’s partnership with MGHPCC will allow it to continue to grow with efficiency in mind, keeping the Kempner’s AI cluster green and efficient even as it grows into an even faster and more powerful tool for advancement in the field. 

“Building an AI cluster that is not just blazing fast but also energy-efficient fits squarely into the Kempner’s mission, both to advance the field of intelligence, and to do so in a way that benefits people,” said Kempner Executive Director Elise Porter. “We have worked closely with MGHPCC to ensure this cluster is built with energy efficiency top of mind, and ranking as the 32nd fastest green supercomputer in the world is a testament to that work.”

Fast, green — and human

While landing a top spot on the TOP500/Green500 list is no small accomplishment, the real power of the Kempner’s work is knowing how to leverage its impressive computing resources to facilitate groundbreaking research. This involves more than building the AI cluster and giving researchers access to it. After all, researchers can’t just copy and paste old code into new machines — certain types of algorithms that work on traditional computers have to be reconceptualized and reformatted to be used with the Kempner’s computing infrastructure. 

To this end, the Kempner has assembled a “full-stack” team of professional research engineers and research scientists with expertise ranging from distributed computing to data architecture to computational neuroscience. This Research & Engineering team develops codebases and standards, working with researchers to enable a seamless pipeline connecting scientific problems to computational solutions. The team also ensures that scientific findings are reproducible by helping students, fellows and faculty adopt industry-tested best practices for coding, testing, and maintenance of open repositories for models and data. 

This human know-how is central to the ability of the Kempner community — and researchers all across Harvard University — to harness the scientific and technological potential of the green supercomputing power now available at its collective fingertips. 

To find out more about the latest Kempner Institute research, check out the Deeper Learning blog.


How free-market policymakers got it all wrong for decades

Conservative economist says singular focus on deregulation, unfettered trade failed to deliver for American households


Oren Cass giving his presentation.

Across history, Republican presidents rarely fell in line with what many today consider GOP economic orthodoxy, said economist Oren Cass.

Photo by Beth Pezzoni

Work & Economy

How free-market policymakers got it all wrong for decades

Conservative economist says singular focus on deregulation, unfettered trade failed to deliver for American households

6 min read

The free-market policymakers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have “an empirical problem,” said Oren Cass, J.D. ’12, founder and chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass.

“The stuff they were doing on economics did not work.”

Cass, author of “The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America” (2018), argued in a talk last week hosted by the Department of Government that the era’s Republicans, with their focus on deregulation and unfettered trade, marked a departure from the party’s longer, more productive traditions of building the economy by bolstering the labor force.

Cass’ ideas, anchored by social conservatism, are gaining traction with a younger set of policymakers on the right. But his pro-worker rhetoric overlaps at times with language used on the left. “Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance on one side and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the other actually see a lot of the same problems in the economy and are willing to say it,” offered Cass, who rang a note of optimism over this “increasing consensus.”

Across U.S. history, he said, Republican presidents rarely fell in line with what many today consider GOP economic orthodoxy. Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and Richard Nixon all used tariffs to shore up domestic industry and protect the country’s wage earners.

Former President Ronald Reagan, celebrated by conservatives for his embrace of free enterprise, raised taxes at least five times and was far more protectionist than his reputation might suggest. Cass underscored this point by offering background on Reagan’s famous quote: “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Reagan uttered these words in 1986 while announcing record-breaking aid to American farmers, including drought assistance and price supports. “One of the very funny things about what we think of as Reaganomics, conservative economics — what I call market fundamentalism — is it’s actually a post-Reagan phenomenon,” Cass said.

How did the market fundamentalism come to dominate politics on the right? Cass, a policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, pointed to the distinct interest groups that comprised the famous “three-legged stool” of Reagan’s electoral coalition: social conservatives, economic libertarians, and national security hawks. 

“What do these three groups have in common?” Cass asked. “They all really, really, really hate communists. And in the middle of the Cold War, in the context where the Democratic Party was — let’s be honest — a little squishy on communism, getting together everybody who really, really, really hated communism turned out to be a powerful strategy.”

This coalition collapsed in 1989 with the Berlin Wall, Cass continued. That left the three-legged stool in splinters, with each faction vying for supremacy. “That is the economic libertarians unchained from any actual Cold War just running amok,” he argued. “This is [activist] Grover Norquist getting everybody to agree they will never raise taxes under any circumstances.

“And by the time you get to the 2000s, you have a bunch of [President George W.] Bush tax cuts that bear no relationship to any economic priority and manage to send us back into debt while producing no economic growth whatsoever. You have several massive new wars starting to no apparent effect. And you have social conservatives sort of sitting there, losing on their priorities for the most part.”

For 30 years, that group ceded all territory on economic issues, Cass said. “And then they started to say, ‘Wait a minute. The economy that the economic libertarians are producing does not align with any of the things we actually believe equate to human flourishing.’”

Core to Cass’ critique is the economic libertarian focus on cheap consumer goods over building a labor force where workers can support strong families.

As evidence that the free-market era has failed to deliver for the average American household, Cass showed a series of charts detailing everything from the growing U.S. trade deficit to 50 years of stagnant wage growth even amid rising per-capita GDP. Over the same period, deregulation led to the rise of offshoring, while an increasingly dominant financial sector embraced high-speed trading and speculation over investments in U.S. communities.

Cass also shared a data visualization of America’s growing reliance on government transfers, recently published by a bipartisan Economic Innovation Group associated with Facebook founding president Sean Parker. The display can be read as a “massive victory” by free-market thinkers focused, above all, on individual purchasing power, Cass argued.

But he ventured that most Americans are unsettled by increased dependence on Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and other federal aid programs. “This is not actually a sustainable model for a thriving nation either socially or economically,” he said.

“This is not actually a sustainable model for a thriving nation either socially or economically.”

Oren Cass,
Oren Cass

Conservatives like to approach the market in definitional terms, Cass explained. What is the market, and what is it for? He rejected the terms put forth by former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey during a 2020 talk at the Heritage Foundation.“The market is … really just the name that we assign to the sum total of all the voluntary exchanges that occur every day by free men and women,” Toomey said.

“That’s not a market,” Cass countered. “A market is a much more complex mechanism that allocates labor and capital in response to conditions, rules, and institutions.”

What is the market actually for, in his view? “It’s not just for optimizing consumption,” Cass said. “We need to do a lot more than that, because we don’t want to rely on government to do everything else. We need it to empower workers to support their families. We need it to strengthen the social fabric. We need it to foster domestic investment and innovation.

“And if that’s the case, the role for policymakers isn’t as little as possible,” he concluded. “Their role is to create the rules and support the institutions that will lead to productive applications.”


How humans evolved to be ‘energetically unique’

Metabolic rates outpaced ‘couch potato’ primates thanks to sweat, says new study


Science & Tech

How humans evolved to be ‘energetically unique’

Andrew Yegian and Daniel Lieberman.

Andrew Yegian and Daniel Lieberman.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

4 min read

Metabolic rates outpaced ‘couch potato’ primates thanks to sweat, says new study

Humans, it turns out, possess much higher metabolic rates than other mammals, including our close relatives, apes and chimpanzees, finds a new Harvard study. Having both high resting and active metabolism, researchers say, enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to get all the food they needed while also growing bigger brains, living longer, and increasing their rates of reproduction.

“Humans are off-the-charts different from any creature that we know of so far in terms of how we use energy,” said study co-author and paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner Professor of Biological Sciences in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

The paper, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges a previous consensus that human and non-human primates’ metabolic rates are either the same or lower than would be expected for their body size. 

 Comparisons of resting, active, and total metabolic quotients among various species and human populations, as defined by the Harvard researchers’ new method.

Comparisons of resting, active, and total metabolic quotients among various species and human populations, as defined by the Harvard researchers’ new method.

Credit: Andrew Yegian

Using a new comparison method that they say better corrects for body size, environmental temperature, and body fat, the researchers found that humans, unlike most mammals including other primates, have evolved to escape a tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates. 

Animals take in calories through food and, like a bank account, spend them on expenses mostly divided between two broad metabolic categories: resting and physical activity. In other primates, there is a distinct tradeoff between resting and active metabolic rates, which helps explain why chimpanzees, with their large brains, costly reproductive strategies, and lifespans, and thus high resting metabolisms, are “couch potatoes” who spend much of their day eating, said Lieberman. 

Generally, the energy animals spend on metabolism ends up as heat, which is hard to dissipate in warm environments. Because of this tradeoff, animals such as chimpanzees who spend a great deal of energy on their resting metabolism and also inhabit warm, tropical environments, have to have low activity levels.

“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates,” said co-author Andrew Yegian, a senior researcher in Lieberman’s lab.

“The result is that we are an energetically unique species.”

“Humans have increased not only our resting metabolisms beyond what even chimpanzees and monkeys have, but — thanks to our unique ability to dump heat by sweating — we’ve also been able to increase our physical activity levels without lowering our resting metabolic rates.”

Andrew Yegian

The team’s analysis shows that monkeys and apes evolved to invest about 30 to 50 percent more calories in their resting metabolic rates than other mammals of the same size, and that humans have taken this to a further extreme, investing 60 percent more calories than similar-sized mammals.

“We started off questioning if it was possible that humans and other primates could have comparatively low total metabolic rates, which other researchers had proposed,” Yegian said. “We tried to come up with a better way to analyze it using quotients. That’s when we hit the accelerator.” 

The research team — which includes collaborators at Louisiana’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the University of Kiel in Germany — plans to further investigate metabolic differences among human populations. For example, subsistence farmers who grow all the food they eat without the help of machines have significantly higher physical activity levels than both hunter-gatherers and people in industrial environments like Americans. However, all human populations, regardless of activity levels, spend similar amounts of energy for their body size on their resting metabolic rates.

“What we’re really interested in is variation among humans in metabolic rates, especially in today’s world of increasing technology and lower levels of physical activity,” said Yegian. “Since we evolved to be active, how does having a desk job change our metabolism in ways that affect health?”


Seeing schools as ‘laboratories of democracy’

Encounters with different perspectives are a key part of the learning experience, panelists say


Host Meira Levinson (clockwise from top left), Carlton Green, Richard Weissbourd, and Kara Pranikoff speak during the online session.

Host Meira Levinson (clockwise from top left), Carlton Green, Richard Weissbourd, and Kara Pranikoff.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nation & World

Seeing schools as ‘laboratories of democracy’

Encounters with different perspectives are a key part of the learning experience, panelists say

3 min read

An Ed School panel highlighted the critical role schools can play in helping students learn to listen to different perspectives and have conversations across divides in a webinar on Thursday.

“Schools are one of the places where people with diverse perspectives are often together,” said Richard Weissbourd, senior lecturer on education. “Other settings are often not diverse, or at least they’re contained or bounded in ways that schools are not … Schools can be laboratories of democracy.”

Led by Meira Levinson, Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society, the panel made the case for schools as ideal settings for lessons in compromise and civil disagreement.

“Schools are socializing agents,” said Carlton Green, an assistant clinical professor and co-director of Intergroup Dialogue Training Center at the University of Maryland. “That is where we learn some of the ethic around how to be in community with other people, especially people who are different from us.”

Educators help students learn interpersonal skills and how to navigate conflict, the panelists noted, fostering their social and emotional development. Although that work has been part of education for decades, the concept of “social-emotional learning” has recently come under attack by some conservative activists — and parents — who insist that teachers should focus strictly on academic learning.

Kara Pranikoff, an education consultant and coach, pushed back on that idea.

“We have this tendency to say that social-emotional learning is one thing, and academic learning is another thing,” said Pranikoff. “But we cannot separate our social-emotional selves from our academic selves. It’s just not possible, even if people report that it is. It’s not part of being a human. They go hand in hand.”

As microcosms of society, schools experience their own versions of national debates over issues such as religion, LGBTQ rights, and immigration, creating third-rail moments for teachers, the panelists said.

“There are things that you can say that are going to trigger a parent,” Weissbourd said. “Without support from your administration, these conversations become very difficult.”

But those conversations are important, said Weissbourd, who directs the Ed School program Making Caring Common, which provides resources for families and educators to help children develop empathy and other emotional capacities.

“It’s important to be able to mend fractures and for people to get along,” said Weissbourd. “But we want to have these conversations because we really believe in principles of human rights, justice, inclusion, and fairness. Part of the work, too, is how do you have conversations in ways that advance those principles?”

Educators should rise to their daily challenges by communicating with parents and building support from school administrators, Green said.

“I’d say to parents, ‘I think you want me to help your child be a good human, right?’ and if you have questions about me helping your child to be a good human in the context of the other little humans, I’m open to that, but that’s what I’m committed to doing,” said Green. “We are educating good humans here.”


Too much sitting hurts the heart

Even with exercise, sedentary behavior can increase risk of heart failure by up to 60%, according to study


Health

Too much sitting hurts the heart

Even with exercise, sedentary behavior can increase risk of heart failure by up to 60%, according to study

4 min read
Businessman sitting at desk and working with clock in background

A new study shows that being sedentary increases the risk of the most common types of heart disease, even among those who get enough exercise.

Investigators at Mass General Brigham found sedentary behavior was associated with higher risks of all four types of heart disease, with a marked 40-60 percent greater risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death when sedentary behavior exceeded 10.6 hours a day. (Sedentary behavior is defined as waking activity with low energy expenditure while sitting, reclining, or lying down and does not include hours spent sleeping at night.)

Researchers also emphasized that meeting guideline levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be insufficient on its own to reduce cardiovascular risk if one is also sitting too much.

Their results are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Many of us spend the majority of our waking day sitting, and while there’s a lot of research supporting the importance of physical activity, we knew relatively little about the potential consequences of sitting too much beyond a vague awareness that it might be harmful,” said lead author Ezimamaka Ajufo, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“Sedentary risk remained even in people who were physically active, which is important because many of us sit a lot and think that if we can get out at the end of the day and do some exercise we can counterbalance it,” Ajufo says. “However, we found it to be more complex than that.”

Ajufo’s team, which included researchers from across MGB, analyzed one week of activity-tracker data from 89,530 individuals from the U.K. Biobank prospective cohort.

They looked at associations between daily time spent sitting and the future risk of four common cardiovascular diseases: atrial fibrillation, heart attacks, heart failure, and death from cardiovascular causes. The team used a machine learning algorithm to classify sedentary behavior.

Many of the negative effects of sedentary behavior persisted even among those individuals who achieved the guideline-recommended more than 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week.

For example, although the study found that the risk of atrial fibrillation and heart attacks could be mostly eliminated by engaging in physical activity, the excess risk of heart failure and cardiovascular  death could only be partially offset by physical activity.

“Our data supports the idea that it is always better to sit less and move more to reduce heart disease risk, and that avoiding excessive sitting is especially important for lowering risk of heart failure and cardiovascular death,” said co-senior author Shaan Khurshid,  an electrophysiologist and faculty member in the Telemachus And Irene Demoulas Family Foundation Center for Cardiac Arrythmias at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The research team hopes these findings will help inform future guidelines and public health efforts. They would like future prospective studies to test the efficacy of public health interventions that help people reduce the number of hours they spend being sedentary and see how that affects cardiovascular health.

Next, they plan to extend this research to investigate the impacts of sedentary behavior on a range of other diseases and for longer spans of time.

“Exercise is critical, but avoiding excessive sitting appears separately important,” said co-senior author Patrick Ellinor,  a cardiologist and co-director of the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our hope is that this work can empower patients and providers by offering another way to leverage movement behaviors to improve cardiovascular health.”

Authorship: Additional Mass General Brigham authors include Timothy W. Churchill, J. Sawalla Guseh, and Krishna G. Aragam. Additional authors include Shinwan Kany and Joel T. Rämö.

Disclosures: Krishna G. Aragam receives sponsored research support from Sarepta Therapeutics and Bayer AG; he also reports a research collaboration with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Patrick T. Ellinor receives sponsored research support from Bayer AG, IBM Research, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk; he has also served on advisory boards and/or consulted for Bayer AG.

Researchers were supported by the John S. LaDue Memorial Fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine or Vascular Biology grant, the Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (521832260), a research fellowship from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (K23HL159262-01A1, 1K08HL153937, RO1HL092577, R01HL157635, and K23HL169839-01), the American Heart Association (19AMFDP34990046, 862032, 18SFRN34230127, 961045, and 2023CDA1050571), the President and Fellows of Harvard College (5KL2TR002542-04), and the European Union (MAESTRIA 965286).


8 Harvard students named Rhodes Scholars

5 in U.S. class, most for any institution, joined by 3 international recipients


Oxford campus.

Getty Images

Campus & Community

8 Harvard students named Rhodes Scholars

5 in U.S. class, most for any institution, joined by 3 international recipients

4 min read

Five Harvard College students are among the 32 U.S. Rhodes Scholars for 2025, the most awarded to any institution this year. Three international students in the College also received Rhodes Scholarships, bringing Harvard’s total to eight.

The students will attend Oxford University next year to pursue graduate studies in fields ranging from political theory to neuroscience.

Harvard’s 2025 Rhodes Scholars:

Matthew Anzarouth of Quebec, Canada, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for Canada. A former competitive debater, Anzarouth won the World Schools Debating Championship with Team Canada in 2020 and 2021, and competed for the Harvard College Debating Union in his first year at the University. During his time at Harvard, where he concentrated in social studies, he served as senior world editor at the Harvard Political Review, co-founded and co-hosted a podcast exploring political and philosophical issues, and coached debate for high school students. Combining his interests in political theory and Canadian politics, Anzarouth is writing his senior thesis on Canadian federalism and multiculturalism. He plans to study political theory at Oxford.

Lena R. Ashooh of Shelburne, Vermont, designed a major in animal studies, with research in philosophy, psychology, biology, political science, and other disciplines. She has worked with land law examiners as an intern at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and has lobbied legislators as an environmental justice intern at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, a California nonprofit. Ashooh conducted field research on macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico, plays classical harp, and has created a stop-motion animation film about the ethics of eating animals. She plans to study political theory at Oxford.

Shahmir Aziz of Lahore, Pakistan, was named one of two Rhodes Scholars for Pakistan last month. He has conducted research in drug delivery and bio-nanotechnology. Outside the classroom, he is passionate about diplomacy and global governance, serving as a leader of the Harvard International Relations Council and Harvard’s Model UN Team. Aziz plans to continue researching bio-nanotechnology at Oxford while also studying diplomacy with a focus on global health to better understand how to cultivate cross-border ideas in biotech.

Thomas Barone of Little Falls, New Jersey, is a social studies concentrator focused on intellectual history, political rhetoric, and policy. He has interned at the national politics desk of ABC News and serves as editorial chair of The Harvard Crimson, where he won first place for editorial writing in collegiate journalism in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence Awards. Barone intends to study history at Oxford and plans to pursue a career in journalism.

Sofia L. Corona of Delray Beach, Florida, is studying applied mathematics and economics. She designed her course of study to develop a multidisciplinary perspective on issues in transportation policy, including infrastructure development, clean energy governance, and community decision-making. She worked on federal transportation oversight cases as a legal intern at the U.S. Department of Transportation; researched community participation and renewable energy implementation at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation in Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; and analyzed alternative vehicle upgrades for car models at BMW. She has climbed Aconcagua, Denali, and Mount Kilimanjaro. At Oxford, Corona plans to pursue economics and focus on development, sustainability, and enterprise.

Aneesh Muppidi of Schenectady, New York, is a concentrator in computer science and neuroscience. He has conducted research at the Computational Robotics Lab and the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, both at Harvard, and MIT’s Fiete Lab, and has been involved in AI policy discussions for New York State and the federal government. Muppidi served as president of the Harvard Computational Neuroscience Undergraduate Society, co-president of the Hindu Students Association, and president of the Harvard Spikeball Club. At Oxford, he will study advanced computer science and public policy.

Ayush Noori of Bellevue, Washington, is studying computer science and neuroscience. His research uses artificial intelligence to comb large-scale biomedical data for diagnosis and treatment options, and he has developed an AI model that can be deployed to predict treatment outcomes in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and neuropathic conditions. He has co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers and was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for natural sciences. Noori is co-founder and co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate OpenBio Laboratory. At Oxford, he hopes to complete degrees in clinical neurosciences and in physiology, anatomy, and genetics.

Laura Wegner of Walsrode, Germany, was one of two recipients of German Rhodes Scholarships. She studies economics and computer science and founded Mii, a digital healthcare passport that empowers patients to manage and access their health records anywhere in the world. At Oxford, Wegner plans to pursue graduate work focused on digital health care technology.

Read more about this year’s Rhodes Scholars at the Rhodes Trust.


Summers says Trump’s plans could damage economy

Professor and former Treasury secretary discusses why Democrats lost election, need for more patriotism


Journalist John Ellis and Lawrence Summers.

Lawrence Summers (right) talks with journalist John Ellis at Harvard Kennedy School.

Photo by Martha Stewart

Nation & World

Summers says Trump’s plans could damage economy

Professor and former Treasury secretary discusses why Democrats lost election, need for more patriotism

5 min read

Democrats lost the 2024 election because they paid too much attention to positive macroeconomic trendlines and not enough to Americans’  economic reality, according to economist Larry Summers.

“In too many ways, Democrats have lost sight of the common man and woman in favor of the attitudes and philosophies of the faculty common room,” said Summers during a talk Thursday night on why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and the risks President-elect Donald Trump’s policy plans pose for the U.S. economy.

Many voters moved toward the Republican Party and Trump, who hammered Democrats over inflation, because they felt the GOP understood what they were going through better than Democrats, who strayed from their traditional focus on issues like kitchen-table economics, said Summers, who was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the Frank and Denie Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Federal Reserve also contributed to voters’ anger over inflation, he suggested.

In 2021, when $2.5 trillion in stimulus funding was flooding the economy, the Fed was still anticipating interest rates would stay at 0 percent through summer 2024 and buying back long-term Treasury debt by issuing “what was, in effect, floating-rate short-term debt.” This led to significant losses to the government that some estimate — in market value terms — at $500 billion to $1 trillion, before the Fed finally course-corrected, said Summers, who also served as director of National Economic Council during the Obama administration.

“I think that if there had not been hyper-expansionary policy in 2021, it would have been easier for Democrats to escape blame for whatever inflation took place,” he said.

Summers worries the Fed could err once again during the new administration given current economic conditions, and he warned Trump’s economic policy plans, such as raising or adding new tariffs, could worsen inflation.

“If President Trump does what he said he would do during his campaign, the inflation shock administered to the economy is substantially larger than anything that happened at the beginning of the last administration,” Summers said.

“He’s vowed huge deficit increases through continuation of his tax cuts and new tax cuts; he has trashed the idea of the independence of the central bank; he said that we should want to have a less highly valued currency, which means less valuable money [and] higher prices, and that’s just on the demand side,” he said.

More importantly, “He’s talked about a big tariff on every good that we import, which means higher import prices [and] also means higher prices for everything that competes with imports,” Summers said.

Summers criticized Trump’s promise to implement 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods, saying it will not only force American consumers to pay much higher prices, but will further strain U.S.-China relations. The U.S. ought to precisely “calibrate” its trade policies to the nation’s overall strategic objectives, he said.

“At a time when the Chinese economy is struggling, when there are very difficult economic problems, the worst thing we could do would be to make it completely easy for the Chinese government to scapegoat us for their own economic failings. And so, we need to be very careful that we are focused on our own security [and] … not pursue policies that can be interpreted as reflecting a generalized desire to suppress the Chinese economy,” he said, adding “That’s going to require subtle choices about policy and it’s going to require not bluster, but very careful communication.”

In addition, tightening U.S. borders is “clearly something we have to do,” he noted. “But if you’re talking about sending millions of people out of the country who are here now, that’s a prescription for large-scale labor shortages, and we’ve seen in the past what that does to inflation.”

Vice President Kamala Harris made a pitch to voters who “love our country,” a sentiment Summers said he’d like to see the Democratic Party and institutions like Harvard champion.

“I’d frankly like to see it as a value embraced more in our University, where it’s not something we talk about or celebrate or think about,” he said. “There’s plenty that we have done wrong in our history. But there’s something odd about the degree to which the history that is received in our educational system is as negative about our country as it is.”

The University needs to “find a way” to encourage patriotism as a positive principle on campus because the U.S. today faces “real threats” and because it is “an alternative to each subgroup of Americans embracing a particular identity, which leads to a great deal of divisiveness.”


What’s ahead for U.S. foreign policy in ‘Trump 2.0’?

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser predict push to end Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, instability for NATO, possible global realignment


Nation & World

What’s ahead for U.S. foreign policy in ‘Trump 2.0’?

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Photo by Grace DuVal

4 min read

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser predict push to end Ukraine war on Russia’s terms, instability for NATO

President-elect Donald Trump is moving swiftly to announce Cabinet and other appointments for a second term in office, which many observers expect to pick up where he left off in January 2021 on major policy issues like immigration, trade, and foreign relations.

What will be different, say veteran Washington journalists Susan Glasser ’90, and Peter Baker, is the speed at which Trump will move to advance his agenda, with a likely boost from a Republican majority in Congress.

“Trump 2.0 is Trump on steroids,” Baker, senior White House correspondent at The New York Times, told moderator Yevgenia Albats, Ph.D. ’04, a Russian journalist and political scientist. The discussion on Tuesday with Baker and Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker, examined what U.S. policy with Russia, China, and the European Union may look like during a second Trump administration.

The pair, who are married, served in Moscow as co-bureau chiefs for The Washington Post from 2001 to 2004, and have written several books together, including “Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution” in 2005 and “The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021” in 2022.

Unlike in 2016, when he ran as a celebrity businessman who wanted to shake up Washington, Trump will return to the White House in January having run on “an explicit campaign of revenge and retribution,” according to Glasser, and intending to take care of what he sees as “unfinished business,” namely to “fundamentally reorient” U.S. foreign policy to his own more isolationist view of the country’s role in the world.

Trump has more experience now in how to use the levers of presidential power. And his loyalist picks for secretaries of state and defense and national security adviser — Sen. Marco Rubio, Army veteran and Fox TV host Pete Hegseth, M.P.P. ’13, and Rep. Mike Waltz — lack deep experience in foreign policy and will likely do little to restrain Trump’s plans, unlike their counterparts in Trump’s first term, they said.

“If you look [at] who’s in the room making decisions right now, there is no dissent,” Baker noted.

The fate of Ukraine is likely to be among the first matters Trump takes up.

The incoming president, who has reportedly engaged in back-channel talks with Putin, made a campaign promise to end the Ukraine war quickly. He is almost certain to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine and try to broker a deal that will favor Russia, the pair told Albats, editor in chief of The New Times, an independent Russian language news outlet, and a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

NATO’s fate in a second Trump term is unclear. As the president-elect demonstrated in his first term, “He has no interest and no commitment whatsoever to defend, frankly, anybody, but especially the Eastern European countries,” said Baker.

Even without a formal withdrawal by the U.S., as Trump repeatedly threatened during his first term, NATO is already weaker than it was before Nov. 5, he said.

“If you’re an adversary of NATO, Article 5 [which calls for the nations to defend one another if attacked] is meaningless, because if it’s a conditional thing, depending on the mood of the president of the United States as opposed to a solid commitment, it’s a dead letter,” said Baker.

“He has, just by getting elected, undercut NATO in a way that it has not been undercut” since its beginnings after World War II amid concerns over the rise of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power, he said.


The very model of a modern major initiative

A.R.T. and Lavine Learning Lab aim to create a space for intergenerational dialogue, deepen student engagement with theater


Arts & Culture

The very model of a modern major initiative

Lavine Learning Lab students welcome audiences at the Loeb Drama Center on the nights they attend A.R.T. performances.

On the nights they attend A.R.T. performances, Lavine Learning Lab students welcome audiences to the Loeb Drama Center.

Photo by Lauren Miller

5 min read

A.R.T. and Lavine Learning Lab aim to create a space for intergenerational dialogue, deepen student engagement with theater

Supporting student engagement in live theater as it fosters lasting relationships between the two is the idea behind the American Repertory Theater’s Lavine Learning Lab. The new student initiative will, among other exercises, bring participating public high school students to an evening performance of every show in the company’s season.

Rooted in A.R.T.’s core values of inquiry and collaboration, the Lavine Learning Lab uses A.R.T. productions as the foundation for student workshops that bridge the arts, humanities, and social and emotional learning, fostering lasting relationships between the theater and its young audience.

“The theater is where we develop our muscles for inquiry, empathy, and debate,” said Artistic Director Diane Paulus ’88. “The Lavine Learning Lab will be a gymnasium where high school students will come to exercise their humanity so they can become the most impactful citizens and participants in our society.”  

“The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives.”

Dayron J. Miles, A.R.T. associate artistic director

For each production, students participate in an introductory in-school workshop centered around the production’s “Essential Questions”; a pre-show workshop at A.R.T., held alongside a second Learning Lab school, exploring one of the production’s themes or elements, followed by dinner and a performance; and a post-show, in-school student-led workshop for students to unpack their own perspectives and those of others.  

In addition, two educators from each participating school join a Professional Learning Community in which A.R.T. facilitates ongoing collaborative learning and provides professional development.   

An important aspect of the program is Learning Lab students will attend evening performances of every show in A.R.T.’s season — instead of morning matinees traditionally designated for school groups. Students will sit in groups of two to four, alongside the general evening audience. 

“Romeo and Juliet” actor Alex Ross engages with students. Credit A Priori Photography.

Students at a pre-show workshop with “Romeo and Juliet” actor Alex Ross.

Credit: A Priori Photography

“When we attend a performance, we aren’t impacted only by what we see onstage, but also by our fellow audience members,” said A.R.T. Associate Artistic Director Dayron J. Miles. “The lab’s students will diversify A.R.T.’s audience in multiple dimensions, turning our theater into a space for intergenerational dialogue among people with different lived experiences and perspectives. Empathy is a necessary tool for responsible democratic participation, and that’s what we can cultivate with this model.”   

Evening attendance also builds familiarity with theatergoing and sense of belonging at the theater to cultivate a culture of lifelong theatergoing. To increase accessibility by removing common barriers, A.R.T. provides transportation between the schools and the theater and a pre-show dinner onsite.  

 The Lavine Learning Lab is supported by a $5 million gift from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, which was founded by Bain Capital Chair Jonathan Lavine, M.B.A. ’92,  and Jeannie Lavine ’88, M.B.A. ’92, to support nonprofit organizations focused on leveling the playing field for individuals and families.   

“We’ve been struck by A.R.T.’s commitment to expanding access to theater,” said Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine in a statement. “We are delighted to play a part in engaging Boston’s students and teachers in the essential questions sparked by A.R.T.’s world-class programming and in supporting A.R.T., whose work inspires people all throughout our city and this country.”  

The Learning Lab exemplifies the type of community-centered, accessible programming A.R.T. will offer from its new home, the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance. Currently under construction at 175 N. Harvard St. in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, the center is expected to be completed in the fall of 2026.  

A.R.T. facilitated a pilot with six public high schools during the 2023-2024 school year to develop the current model.  

“I feel like a lot of my analytical skills have been reinforced and retaught in the Learning Lab, but I’ve also taken the vulnerability that I feel when I’m in the lab and applied it to other parts of my life,” said Malden High School student and pilot and Learning Lab participant Addison McWayne. “This experience has provided me with opportunities to speak up for myself and to share my opinion, which has made me a stronger and more confident person.”   

 “The lab is one of the ways that A.R.T. shares the resources of Harvard University with our community, but the A.R.T. community gains so much, too,” said Kelvin Dinkins Jr., executive director of the A.R.T. “The students bring their anticipation and excitement, which translates into a galvanizing energy on the sidewalk, in our lobbies, and in the theater itself that enhances the experience for everyone. Thanks to this incredible support from the Crimson Lion / Lavine Family Foundation, A.R.T. is positioned to bring our mission into public high schools across Boston for years to come.”    

  “When the Lavine Learning Lab works in Boston, we hope it will be a model for other cities, because A.R.T. has led the way in so many areas, and A.R.T. can help lead the way in providing this kind of access and inspiration to students all over the country,” said the Lavines.   

  


Is cheese bad for you?

Nutritionist explains why you’re probably eating way too much


Cheese.
Health

Is cheese bad for you?

Nutritionist explains why you’re probably eating way too much

3 min read

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

The average American consumes 41.8 pounds of cheese per year. We asked Harvard Chan School nutritionist Walter C. Willett about the health impact.

Whether cheese is good or bad for health depends on the comparison. It is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from great (nuts and soy foods) to processed red meat. Like other dairy foods, cheese does have nutritional value, including a high calcium content. However, our calcium recommendations are seriously overstated because they are based on studies of several weeks, which is far too short.

Current National Institutes of Health recommendations suggest Americans older than 18 get 1,000 mg of calcium daily. However, as little as 600 mg is probably enough for most people.

Of course, the amount of cheese makes an important difference, and it has become common to put a huge amount in sandwiches and salads. About one serving of dairy foods a day is probably a good target; some evidence suggests that yogurt has some health advantages, and cheese could be part of that mix. But if you are thinking of a cheese sandwich, consider peanut butter on whole grain bread as an alternative, or adding nuts to your salad instead of cheese.

Like other dairy foods, cheese does have nutritional value, including a high calcium content. However, our calcium recommendations are seriously overstated.

Americans consume about 1.5 servings of dairy foods per day, and the majority of this is now in the form of cheese. This is a major shift over the last several decades; the total amount of dairy foods consumed has not changed greatly, but until recently this was mainly milk. The USDA has been strongly supporting consumption of cheese (despite their own guidelines encouraging reduction in saturated fat), which has probably contributed to this trend.

Some of the increases in cheese consumption are probably due to more people reducing red meat for various reasons including health, animal welfare, and climate change, but the strong promotion of cheese by the USDA has very likely been an important factor. Starting with the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983, a small tax on sales of dairy has gone to the USDA to promote sales of dairy foods, creating a massive conflict of interest within the organization. 

In the past, the vast majority of cheese consumed by Americans was cheddar, but we now consume a wider variety. There is no good evidence that one type or another is different for health. 

The differences in nutrient content of cheeses are primarily due to the amount of water. Cottage cheese and other fresh cheeses with high water content have higher percentages of lactose — a carbohydrate that decreases with aging. As cheese ages and becomes hard like parmesan or manchego, the lactose is fermented and lost.

However, volume matters. We usually eat more cottage cheese than an aged cheese, so the amount of calories, calcium, and saturated fat can end up not being very different.  

In addition to the direct effects of cheese on health, it is important to consider the implications for climate change because dairy production has a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and land use. In an analysis conducted as part of the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy and sustainable food systems, we found that if global production of dairy foods increased to 2 servings per day, limiting severe climate change would be difficult.  

As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer


Many in Native communities applaud U.S. apology over boarding schools

Deloria, Gone say action over decadeslong initiative to forcibly assimilate children overdue, necessary


Nation & World

Many in Native communities applaud U.S. apology over boarding schools

President Biden speaking.

President Biden speaking at the Gila River Indian Community reservation in Laveen, Arizona, on Oct. 25.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

5 min read

Deloria, Gone say action over decadeslong initiative to forcibly assimilate children overdue, necessary

Philip Deloria and Joseph P. Gone had family members who were taken from their homes and placed in government- or church-run boarding schools as part of a decadeslong federal initiative aimed at forcibly assimilating thousands of Native children.

Late last month, President Biden made a historic apology to Native Americans on behalf of the U.S. government. “I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said during a visit to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. “But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”

The gesture was applauded by many in the community, and for good reason, said Deloria, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History.

“Apologies have not exactly been forthcoming from the federal and state governments and the churches, and the various entities that have enacted some of these programs on any people over the years. Any time that there’s recognition of those histories, I think it’s really important,” he said. “For many Native people, the moments where the rituals of formal American diplomacy are actually visible is also recognition of Native nationhood and of Native continuities and futurities.”

“A lot of people will be grateful for this apology, irrespective of the motivators for it, and are grateful that he appointed Secretary [Debra] Haaland, because it wouldn’t have happened without her,” added Gone, anthropology professor and faculty director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Gone credited Haaland, the first Native American to serve as U.S. secretary of the interior, for making the “boarding school wound” a priority during Biden’s administration.

Boarding schools, which often kept children away from their families for long periods of time, forced American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students to speak English and prohibited them from speaking their own languages. These children were also banned from learning or practicing their own religions.

“The parts that are worth emphasizing are just the sheer brutality of many of these schools,” Deloria said. The children were subjected to physical and emotional abuse and sometimes served as free labor. Many died after contracting illnesses at the schools, he pointed out.

The federal initiative continued well into the 20th century. A July investigative report by Haaland’s department revealed that 19,000 Native children were forced into these boarding schools, with nearly 1,000 dying while there.

At the age of 5, Gone’s great-grandfather Many-Plumes was taken to a federally run industrial school in Fort Belknap Agency in Montana, where his name was changed to Frederick Peter Gone. There, the young boy was kept away from family and abused, he said.

 “It colored his life and the life of our descendants ever since in part because of these experiences,” Gone noted.

Similar boarding or industrial schools were also run by Christian, Mormon, and Catholic churches. Deloria’s grandfather and great-aunts went to church boarding schools that were just “a little better” than other federal or religious-run institutions.

“There’s an entire theory of historical trauma, which is largely based around the kinds of ways in which boarding-school trauma suffered by these children is passed down to subsequent generations,” he said.

In 1928, the “Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration” highlighted the ineffectiveness of the boarding-school policy. Following reforms, some of the federally run schools transformed into places where Native students could interact with members of different tribes, Gone said.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, going to these schools sometimes could be more interesting than being in your tiny, little rural school on the reservation where you already know everybody,” Gone said. “One of the unintended consequences is you had a lot of intermarriage among Indian people who met at boarding schools.”

Despite reforms, the impact of boarding schools is felt to this day. In addition to calling on the federal government to apologize, Haaland’s report recommended creating a national memorial commemorating of Native children who died in the schools, and an investment in Native communities and their languages.

The Biden administration signed legislation that invested more than $45 billion in Native communities through the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Deloria and Gone suggested some of the funds should be invested in healthcare, particularly in a way in which tribal nations can retain their sovereignty and autonomy. “There’s no domain of Indian life that wouldn’t benefit from additional resources,” Gone said.

Biden’s apology came just days before the recent presidential election, but the two professors said the timing was unimportant to them. “It may be that this is like a capstone for Biden, and it may be a cynical gesture in relation to the election, but it may also be the beginning of something new that goes forward,” Deloria said.


Buttigieg urges focus on local, state projects that can win wide support

Transportation secretary discusses aviation, roadway challenges during his time in office, administration’s frustrations, issues awaiting new president


Setti Warren (left) and Pete Buttigieg.

Setti Warren (left) and Pete Buttigieg.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nation & World

Buttigieg urges focus on local, state projects that can win wide support

Transportation secretary discusses aviation, roadway challenges during his time in office, administration’s frustrations, issues awaiting new president

4 min read

The deeply divided U.S. is like “two people locked in a wrestling match on the edge of a cliff,” said Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at a campus event Monday evening.

“The implicit working theory of our administration has been if we could just deliver on the basics,” such as safe roads and bridges and clean drinking water, “solving some of those basic problems would move our wrestling match a few feet from the edge of the cliff,” he said. “But as everyone has noticed, we don’t seem to be that far from the edge of the cliff.”

He noted that part of the problem for the Biden White House was time. “I would argue that we’ve made enormous progress, basically full employment,” he said. “But so many of the economic benefits that we’ve been working on are things that take years.”

Buttigieg ’04 returned to campus for a Harvard Kennedy School discussion before a capacity crowd with Setti Warren, Institute of Politics director, on his own work at the Department of Transportation, some of the issues awaiting incoming President Donald Trump, and the need for Democrats to focus on advancing priorities through projects on the local and state level that can win wide support.

The transportation secretary said that as he was speaking in his official capacity he would largely avoid talking partisan politics. And he spent much of this time detailing his time in office.

Problems with commercial aviation, he said, loomed large, with issues ranging from a lack of transparency about fees and passenger reimbursements to safety concerns, such as when a section of the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane blew out during a flight in January.

In response, Buttigieg said, his department took a holistic response, from a package of consumer protections to a “dashboard” that tracks consumer complaints and airline compliance.

“First we used transparency to supply change, and now we have the letter of the [recently passed aviation] law” while also stepping up enforcement, he said, citing such regulations as new ones that make refunds automatic when flights are canceled (without alternatives being offered) or unduly delayed (three hours for a domestic flight, six hours for an international flight).

“We’re doing these things not against the airlines, but because we need them to deliver better service,” he said.

Ongoing issues include equal access for those with disabilities, he said, noting how some of those passengers say they dehydrate themselves because they know they will not be able to access airplane restrooms. Road safety, as well, remains a concern.

“We lose more than 100 people a day on our roadways,” he said. Comparing this statistic to the safety of air travel, with all its shortcomings, he concluded: “We should be able to do better with forms of transportation on the surface.”

Such basic concerns were the goals of the Biden administration, he said. Acknowledging issues with inflation even as the economy enjoyed robust employment, he explained that focusing on infrastructure improvements was viewed as a possible way to ease the country’s divisiveness.

Looking back on the past four years, the secretary noted the long-term nature of the majority of the Biden administration’s projects and how those have set up the Trump administration for its next moves.

Trying “not to sound bitter,” he pointed out that the incoming administration “will inherit a lot of groundwork that has been laid, jobs that were always expected to come online in 2026 and ’27.” This could provide the basis for a boom, he said.

“The building trades have a pipeline of work that they haven’t seen since before I was born,” said the 42-year-old, who also cited “interest rates ticking down.”

However, he added, the new administration may also create its own challenges. For example, he said, “if something disrupts our supply chains, such as mass deportations,” Americans may once again have to worry about the economy.

Looking ahead, Buttigieg saw common ground in “local voices.” “We’re doing 63,000 local projects,” he said, citing projects that came to the administration “because a state or a city or a tribe … wanted to get something done.”

He stressed the potential for Democrats to muster bipartisan support for such projects. “Principled conservatism has some regard for the local — if anything more regard than the left,” said the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “I am hopeful that that principle will survive.

“In moments like this our salvation will come from the local and the state level. A lot of the answers are going to come from mayors, from communities, from states.”


12 centuries of Ukrainian literature in 12 weeks? 

Bohdan Tokarskyi, new assistant professor, says he’s up to the challenge


Bohdan Tokarskyi

Bohdan Tokarskyi.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Arts & Culture

12 centuries of Ukrainian literature in 12 weeks? 

Bohdan Tokarskyi, new assistant professor, says he’s up to the challenge

4 min read

At times this fall, Bohdan Tokarskyi has felt split between two contrasting worlds.

On one side is Cambridge, where he works as a new assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures. On the other are the sirens, bomb shelters, blackouts, and flattened universities that flash across his phone each morning when reading about Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships,” said Tokarskyi. “It is really humbling for me what impressive work the educators and students in Ukraine continue to do against all odds and in spite of the horror of the war. This is a gigantic reminder that education is a privilege.”

“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships.”

Tokarskyi started his new role in July. This semester he is teaching “Poetics of Resistance: An Introduction to Ukrainian Literature,” an ambitious “crash course,” by his own telling, covering 12 centuries in 12 weeks.

“I want to provide a bird’s-eye view of Ukraine’s centuries-long literature and culture,” said Tokarskyi, who was a fellow at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in the spring. “Because Ukraine’s lands have been subjected to different imperial powers over the many centuries, there has been a lot of oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture. In my course, I show to my students how time and again in Ukrainian literature we find themes like solidarity, human rights, the pursuit of justice, feminism and, of course, resilience.”

Literature has played a central role in shaping Ukraine’s history, Tokarskyi said, and still does. During the 2013-2014 Euromaidan demonstrations, graffiti portraits, and quotes from Lesya Ukrainka, Taras Shevchenko, and other writers were used as inspiration to protesters. This past January, poet Maksym Kryvtsov read works by the 20th-century poet Vasyl Stus in videos posted to social media. The very next day, Kryvtsov was killed on the frontlines

“This reminds us that even nowadays Ukrainian writers are fighting and being killed defending their country and their culture,” Tokarskyi said. “But it also shows what great importance this cultural tradition has in Ukraine. It connects cultural thought across history, even when the producers of this culture were oppressed and executed.” 

Tokarskyi is currently writing the first-ever English-language book on Stus, a dissident poet who spent more than a decade in Soviet prisons. He is also collaborating with poet and translator Nina Murray on an English-language volume of Stus’ selected works. 

“Picture a poet of the stature of T.S. Eliot or Rainer Maria Rilke, working deep in the mines of a Gulag labor camp with an 80-kilogram-heavy rock bolt, managing nonetheless to produce some of the most exquisite post-war poetry in Europe,” Tokarskyi said. “You would expect that someone with a biography like that would create a work that is overtly political. But in his case, his response to the extreme conditions in which he found himself was instead producing this highly introspective poetry.”

“One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”

The book is a passion project for Tokarskyi, who said Stus’ work helped inspire him to switch fields and pursue literature after completing an international law degree at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2014.

“To me, Stus is a paragon of moral imperative and the pursuit of authenticity that is not only fighting against something but also asking oneself ceaselessly, ‘How can I become my true self?’ — and doing that by creating an absolutely innovative poetic language,” he said. “One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”

Next semester Tokarskyi will teach the graduate-level seminar “Modernisms: Ukrainian, Soviet, European.” Also on the agenda is a first-year seminar titled “Making the Self: Poetics of Authenticity,” which will examine how writers and philosophers seek to answer the question “What does it mean to be authentic?” which Tokarskyi says is all the more urgent in the era of social media and artificial intelligence. 

Tokarskyi is excited about introducing graduate students to a “treasure trove” of potential Ph.D. projects. “My door is always open for students, and I cannot wait to help them explore and discover Ukrainian literature.”


‘Harnessing evolution’

New tool allows researchers to study gene mutation directly within living human cells


Science & Tech

‘Harnessing evolution’

Blue DNA structure
3 min read

New tool allows researchers to study gene mutation directly within living human cells

Gene mutations have consequences both good and bad — from resistance to conditions like diabetes to susceptibility to certain cancers.

In order to study these mutations, scientists need to introduce them directly into human cells. But changing genetic instructions inside cells is complex. The human genome comprises 3 billion base pairs of DNA divided across tens of thousands of genes.

To that end, Harvard researchers have created a tool that allows them to rapidly create mutations only in particular genes of interest without disturbing the rest of the genome. Described in Science, their tool, called Helicase-Assisted Continuous Editing (HACE), can be deployed to predetermined regions of the genome in intact, living cells.

“The development of tools like this marks a significant leap forward in our ability to harness evolution directly within human cells,” said first author Xi Dawn Chen, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student studying synthetic biology in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. “By allowing targeted mutagenesis in specific parts of the genome, this tool opens the door to creating enzymes and treatments that were previously out of reach.”

“HACE combines CRISPR’s precision with the ability to edit long stretches of DNA, making it a powerful tool for targeted evolution.”

 Fei Chen.
Fei Chen

Unlike current methods for mutagenesis, which involve inserting extra copies of genes or broadly mutating many different genes at once, HACE offers the advantage of being directed to locations — like going to a specific address, rather than a neighborhood. The team’s novel bioengineering involves combining a helicase, which is an enzyme that naturally “unzips” DNA, with a gene-editing enzyme. They then use the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 to guide the protein pair to the gene they want to mutate. As the helicase unzips the DNA, it introduces mutations into only that gene sequence.

“HACE combines CRISPR’s precision with the ability to edit long stretches of DNA, making it a powerful tool for targeted evolution,” explained senior author Fei Chen, assistant professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and member at the Broad Institute.

To demonstrate the tool’s power in the lab, the scientists used it to identify drug resistance mutations in a gene called MEK1, which cancer treatments often target but frequently fail because the diseased cells mutate resistance mechanisms. Using HACE, the team sequenced only those mutated genes and pinpointed several unique changes associated with resistance to cancer drugs like trametinib and selumetinib, offering insights into how mutations affect drug performance.

They also examined how mutations in SF3B1, a gene involved in a biomolecular process called RNA splicing, affects RNA assembly. Mutations in this gene are common in blood cancers, but it’s been unclear which mutations cause the splicing defects; with HACE, the team could easily identify those changes.

And in partnership with Bradley Bernstein’s lab at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the researchers also used the tool to better understand how changes in a regulatory DNA region affect the production of a protein in immune cells recognized as a potential target for cancer immunotherapies.

Bernstein said tools like HACE could someday allow massive edits of gene regulatory sequences that could then be coupled with deep learning computation for deciphering. “One can imagine many new therapeutic opportunities that involve precise edits or tuning of these regulatory sequences to ‘fix’ gene activity and ameliorate disease,” Bernstein said.

This research was supported by multiple sources including the National Institutes of Health, the Broad Institute, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.


How mammals got their stride

Revealing twists, turns of evolution from sprawling to upright posture


Science & Tech

How mammals got their stride

Fossil of the early sail-backed synapsid Dimetrodon from 290 million years ago, investigated during the study.

Fossil of the early sail-backed synapsid Dimetrodon from 290 million years ago was investigated during the study.

Credit: Peter Bishop/Museum of Comparative Zoology, © President and Fellows of Harvard College

5 min read

Revealing twists, turns of evolution from sprawling to upright posture

Mammals, including humans, stand out with their distinctively upright posture, a trait that fueled their evolutionary success. Yet the earliest known ancestors of modern mammals more closely resembled reptiles, with limbs stuck out to their sides in a sprawled posture.

The shift from a sprawled stance like that of lizards to the upright posture of modern mammals, as in humans, dogs, and horses, marked a pivotal moment in evolution. Despite more than a century of study, the exact how, why, and when behind this leap has remained elusive.

A new study published in Science Advances provides fresh insights into this mystery, revealing the shift from a sprawled to upright posture in mammals was anything but straightforward. Using methods that blend fossil data with advanced biomechanical modeling, the researchers found that this transition was surprisingly complex and nonlinear, and occurred much later than previously believed.

Lead author and postdoctoral fellow Peter Bishop, and senior author Professor Stephanie Pierce, both in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, began by examining the biomechanics of five modern species that represent the full spectrum of limb postures, including a tegu lizard (sprawled), an alligator (semi-upright), and a greyhound (upright).

“By first studying these modern species, we greatly improved our understanding of how an animal’s anatomy relates to the way it stands and moves,” said Bishop. “We could then put it into an evolutionary context of how posture and gait actually changed.”

Evolutionary interrelationships of the modern (black) and extinct (gray) species investigated.

Evolutionary interrelationships of the modern (black) and extinct (gray) species investigated. The study revealed a complex history of posture evolution in synapsids, and that a fully “upright” posture typical of modern placentals and marsupials was late to evolve.

Credit: Peter Bishop

The researchers extended their analysis to eight exemplar fossil species from four continents spanning 300 million years of evolution. The species ranged from the 1-ounce proto-mammal Megazostrodon to the Ophiacodon, which weighed hundreds of pounds, and also included animals like the sail-backed Dimetrodon and the saber-toothed predator Lycaenops. Using principles from physics and engineering, Bishop and Pierce built digital biomechanical models of how the muscles and bones attached to each other. These models allowed them to generate simulations that determined how much force the hindlimbs could apply on the ground.

“The amount of force that a limb can apply to the ground is a critical determinant of locomotor performance in animals,” said Bishop. “If you cannot produce sufficient force in a given direction when it’s needed, you won’t be able to run as fast, turn as quickly, or worse still, you could well fall over.”

The computer simulations produced a 3D “feasible force space” that captures a limb’s overall functional performance. “Computing feasible force spaces implicitly accounts for all the interactions that can occur between muscles, joints, and bones throughout a limb,” said Pierce. “This gives us a clearer view of the bigger picture, a more holistic view of limb function and locomotion and how it evolved over hundreds of millions of years.”

While the concept of a feasible force space has been around since the 1990s, this study is the first to apply it to the fossil record to understand how extinct animals once moved. The authors packaged the simulations into new “fossil-friendly” computational tools that can aid other paleontologists in exploring their own questions, as well as help engineers design better bio-inspired robots that can navigate complex or unstable terrain.

The study revealed several important “signals” of locomotion, including that the overall force-generating ability in the modern species was maximal around the postures that each species used in their daily behavior. Bishop and Pierce say this made them confident that the results obtained for the extinct species genuinely reflected how they stood and moved when alive.

After analyzing the extinct species, the researchers discovered that locomotor performance peaked and dipped over millions of years, rather than progressing in a simple, linear fashion from sprawling to upright. Some extinct species also appeared to be more flexible — able to shift back and forth between more sprawled or more upright postures, like modern alligators and crocodiles do. Others showed a strong reversal toward more sprawled postures before mammals evolved. Paired with the study’s other results, this indicated that the traits associated with upright posture in today’s mammals evolved much later than previously thought, most likely close to the common ancestor of therian mammals.

These findings also help reconcile several unresolved problems in the fossil record. For example, it explains the persistence of asymmetric hands, feet, and limb joints in many mammal ancestors, traits typically associated with sprawling postures among modern animals. It can also help explain why fossils of early mammal ancestors are frequently found in a squashed, spread-eagle pose — a pose more likely to be achieved with sprawled limbs, while modern placental and marsupial fossils are typically found lying on their sides.

“It is very gratifying as a scientist, when one set of results can help illuminate other observations, moving us closer to a more comprehensive understanding,” Bishop said.


‘Art and Identity’ in a changing Germany

Filmmaker’s documentaries bring complex history to Busch-Reisinger


A small audience is watching “Die leere Mitte” (“The Empty Centre”), which is presented in its own gallery.

“Die leere Mitte” (“The Empty Centre”) is presented in its own gallery with a custom large-format display designed by Hito Steyerl.

Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

Arts & Culture

‘Art and Identity’ in a changing Germany

Filmmaker’s documentaries bring complex history to Busch-Reisinger

4 min read

Berlin-based filmmaker Hito Steyerl was 23 when she witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Some of her earliest films document this fraught period of Germany’s history, capturing the rise in xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic violence that followed unification. But that was more than 30 years ago, making the specifics a bit difficult to remember, she joked during an event held at the Harvard Art Museums on Oct. 29.

“It almost feels as if … a different person made these films,” she told those gathered. “It’s strange for me to try to talk about it; don’t ask me any details,” she added with a laugh.

Three films by Steyerl — “Deutschland und das Ich” (“Germany and Identity”), “Die leere Mitte” (“The Empty Centre”), and “Normalität 1-X” (“Normality 1-X”) — were recently acquired by the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the sole museum to own the works. These films are featured prominently in a current exhibition titled “Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation.”

Nevin Aladağ’s “Best Friends Dortmund #4,” 2012, color photo with three girls standing together.

Nevin Aladağ’s “Best Friends Dortmund #4,” 2012.

Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Antonia Paepcke DuBrul Fund, 2023.461. © Nevin Aladağ. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

Henrike Naumann’s “Ostalgie” (2019), is 
 a room-sized installation

Henrike Naumann’s “Ostalgie” (2019), a room-sized installation addressing the immediate post-Wall period in Germany’s “new” federal states.

Courtesy of Henrike Naumann. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

“As an exhibition, [it] features artists from different backgrounds and generations and [has work] that complicates notions of German identity, especially the idea of ethnic and cultural homogeneity,” said Lynette Roth, the Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger. “We’ve seen that in recent months incredible conversations and questions around the question of national identity, both here in the United States and abroad.”

Steyerl was invited to speak as part of the annual Busch-Reisinger Museum Lecture series, which started in 2005 and is supported by the German Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. She shared her experience filming her early documentaries, and explained the connection between some of her modern work and Germany’s evolution as a country, historically and technologically.

Steyerl said that one of the films, “The Empty Center” (1998), took eight years to complete. At the time, she was working with Wim Wenders, a filmmaker she met while studying in Tokyo. He was shooting a film called “Until the End of the World” and was “too busy” to capture the fall of the Berlin Wall himself, so he gave Steyerl a camera and told her to go document what she saw. Over the course of eight years, she filmed the wall coming down in an area she called “no man’s land” — what used to be a minefield between the East and the West between the two walls — and its subsequent transition and real estate development. In many ways, she hoped to highlight the transition from going to one border system (a literal wall) to another (the borders of privatization and capitalism).

“That’s basically the organizing principle of that film,” she said. “The superimpositions [are] showing something which had remained the same … but everything else had changed a lot.”

Throughout her lecture, Steyerl showed clips of her older documentaries. She also shared portions of her more contemporary work, such as her 2015 film “Factory of the Sun,” which uses different forms of imagery — video games, drone surveillance, dance — to explore financial power, control, and the spread of information in our increasingly technology-driven world.

After the event, attendees were invited to explore the “Made in Germany?” exhibit, which includes three of Steyerl’s films. Other works on display include Katharina Sieverding’s monumental pigment-on-metal print “Deutschland wird deutscher XLI/92” (“Germany Becomes More German XLI/92”) from 1992; Ulrich Wüst’s hand-crafted leporello (accordion book) “Hausbuch” (“House Book”) (1989–2010); and a loan of East Germany-born Henrike Naumann’s “Ostalgie” (2019), a room-sized installation addressing the immediate post-Wall period in Germany’s “new” federal states. Additionally, a special “Made in Germany?” playlist featuring music from the 1980s to today is available on Spotify, as well as a print catalog accompanying the exhibit.

The exhibition is on view through Jan. 5, 2025, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery and adjacent University Research Gallery on Level 3 of the Harvard Art Museums.


Former Saudi intelligence chief urges greater international role in Gaza war

Al Faisal calls for Israel to reduce civilian casualties, lays out plan for U.N.-brokered, two-state solution


Professor Tarek Masoud and His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal.

His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal (left) and Professor Tarek Masoud.

Photo by Benn Craig

Nation & World

Former Saudi intelligence chief urges greater international role in Gaza war

Al Faisal calls for Israel to reduce civilian casualties, lays out plan for U.N.-brokered two-state solution

5 min read

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the death toll in Gaza. The territory’s health ministry reports that more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, but it does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants.

A former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief called international inaction in Gaza “criminal” and called on Israel’s sophisticated military to employ more targeted methods to reduce civilian deaths in its conflict with Hamas.

“What we need there is for both sides — not just the Israelis but also the Arabs — to say enough is enough and to turn to wiser heads and more capable leadership around the world to bring an end to the cycle of tit for tat and death for death and destruction for destruction,” said His Royal Highness Prince Turki Al Faisal, who served for 24 years as head of the Saudi Arabian Intelligence Presidency before stepping down in 2001.

Al Faisal, current chair of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, also proposed a U.N.-brokered process for a two-state solution during the Middle East Initiative’s “Middle East Dialogues” last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School. Hosted by Tarek Masoud, the initiative’s faculty chair, the series brings prominent actors from across the Middle East to discuss the war in Gaza and broader regional issues.

“This is something we began at Harvard last year to bring to this University genuine, candid, open conversations with people who hold wildly varied but widely shared views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the causes of that conflict and how it might be brought to an end,” said Masoud, who is also the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance, as he introduced the event, the first of this school year.

Al Faisal, a member of the Saudi royal family and former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K., said that Hamas — whose Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sparked the war — is a terrorist group, but argued that if Hamas mingles with civilians and digs tunnels under hospitals and mosques, Israeli soldiers should fight in the tunnels, not bomb indiscriminately.

Al Faisal called for establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem to resolve the conflict as part of the creation of a two-state solution, with talks guided by the United Nations and participation of global powers.

“Part of the U.N. setup would be an article to come out in the United Nations Security Council resolution barring anybody on the side of the Palestinians and Israelis who does not accept a two-state solution from being in negotiations for a two-state solution,” Al Faisal said, adding that that would include even major players like Hamas and Hezbollah. “A mechanism should be put in place to get only those committed to the principle of peace between Arabs and Israelis to be party to the negotiations.”

Masoud described Al Faisal as “one of the broadest minds in our region, if not our planet” and as “not just a witness to history, but a shaper of it.”

Despite repeated calls for peace, the war has killed thousands of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands. It has expanded in recent months into southern Lebanon after Iran-backed Hezbollah repeatedly fired rockets into Israel. Concerns about the war widening further have risen as Israel and Iran exchanged rocket fire.

In response to Masoud’s questions, Al Faisal said the ongoing fighting is planting seeds of anguish and anger among today’s children in Gaza. Those seeds will fuel the continuation of the long-running cycle of violence that has plagued the region.

“My view is even one death on both sides is not worth the destruction that is taking place,” Al Faisal said. “There is a verse in the Quran which says, ‘The killing of an innocent person is like killing all mankind.’ That is the attitude I think a state with the recognition that Israel has in the world should take into consideration.”  

Al Faisal also addressed Saudi Arabia’s approach to relations with Israel, saying normalization by other nations like Egypt and Jordan has had no impact on the fighting, so Saudi Arabia shouldn’t pursue it until the fighting has concluded, and a Palestinian state is assured.

Asked why Saudi Arabia hasn’t responded as it did to U.S. support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when it imposed a painful oil embargo, Al Faisal said that times have changed. Such an approach today would be ineffective, he said, largely because the U.S. has become a major oil-producing nation.  

Prior speakers in the Dialogues series included Jared Kushner, former senior adviser to former President Donald Trump; Matt Duss, executive director of the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority; and Einat Wilf, a political scientist and former member of the Knesset.

Al Faisal also addressed broader issues outside the conflict and praised the recent loosening of cultural rules in the kingdom and its more welcoming approach to outsiders. He also said there are opportunities for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to cooperate more. Saudi Arabia is a significant provider of international aid, he said, and together the two could make a difference on international poverty.

“We are an evolving country, like all countries are,” Al Faisal said. “It’s not going to be a matter of a top-down decree on what to do, but rather an integration of the sense of what people want and what leadership can provide them.”


Study pinpoints optimal timing for RSV vaccine during pregnancy

Five weeks before giving birth best transfers maternal antibodies to the fetus, say researchers


Health

Study pinpoints optimal timing for RSV vaccine during pregnancy

Five weeks before giving birth best transfers maternal antibodies to the fetus, say researchers

4 min read
Pregnant woman getting a RSV vaccine.

To better protect newborns from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the leading cause of hospitalization in U.S. infants, pregnant women should receive a vaccine five weeks before delivery, according to new research led by investigators at Mass General Brigham.

RSV typically causes mild, cold-like symptoms in most adults but can be deadly for infants. While current guidelines recommend a vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy, new findings suggest that vaccination closer to 32 weeks could provide the best protection. Results of the study are published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

To assess whether maternal vaccine timing is an important consideration for RSV vaccination, the investigators measured RSV antibodies in the umbilical cord at the time of delivery among 124 women who received the RSV vaccine during weeks 32–36 of pregnancy and in the blood of 29 2-month-old infants of these mothers.

All study participants were receiving care at MGH or Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. Levels of RSV antibodies can predict protection against RSV infection in infants too young to yet receive their own vaccines.

The investigators found that maternal RSV vaccination at least five weeks before delivery led to the most efficient transfer of maternal antibodies across the placenta to the newborn, compared with maternal vaccination at two to three or three to four weeks prior to delivery.

In an additional analysis, RSV antibody levels in maternal and cord blood after RSV vaccination were compared with RSV antibody levels in 20 unvaccinated mothers. Maternal RSV vaccination resulted in significantly higher and longer-lasting maternal and cord RSV antibody levels.

“Our findings suggest that being vaccinated earlier within the approved timeframe allows for the most efficient placental transfer of antibody to the newborn,” said senior author Andrea Edlow, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Massachusetts General Hospital. “They also may have implications for when the RSV monoclonal antibody, Nirsevimab, should be administered to newborns. Similar research should be conducted for other vaccines administered during pregnancy.

“This work provides much-needed data to guide physicians in counseling patients about RSV vaccine timing during pregnancy,” Edlow added.

The investigators noted that additional studies are needed to determine the minimum amount of antibody transfer and/or infant blood antibody levels to adequately protect infants against RSV. It will also be important to understand the potential additive protection for infants provided by breastmilk from RSV-vaccinated mothers. This study was designed to measure antibody transfer, but larger studies of infants 2 to 6 months of age will be needed to determine the extent to which this leads to enhanced protection.

Disclosures: Outside of this work, Edlow serves as a consultant for Mirvie, Inc. and is a consultant for and has received research funding from Merck Pharmaceuticals. Additional disclosures can be found in the paper.

Authorship: In addition to Edlow, Mass General Brigham authors include Olyvia J. Jasset, Paola Andrea Lopez Zapana, Lydia Shook, Emily Gilbert, Zhaojing Ariel Liu, Rachel V. Yinger, Caroline Bald, Caroline G. Bradford, Alexa H. Silfen, and Lael M. Yonker.

This work was funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (1U19AI167899, R01AI171980), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5K12HD103096 to L.L.S; NIH/NHLBI: R01HL173059 to L.Y.; MGH ECOR: MGH Research Scholar Award to A.G.E., Claflin Award to L.L.S.; Binational Science Foundation Award number 2019075 to L.K.) None of the funders had any role in the design of the study; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.


Did Trump election signal start of new political era?

Analysts weigh issues, strategies, media decisions at work in contest, suggest class may become dominant factor


Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump waves as he walks with former first lady Melania Trump at an election night watch party.

President-elect Donald Trump waves at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Nation & World

Did Trump election signal start of new political era?

5 min read

Analysts weigh issues, strategies, media decisions at work in contest, suggest class may become dominant factor

President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was made possible partly by a significantly expanded coalition of multi-ethnic, working-class voters, signaling a potentially seismic shift in the American political landscape, according to a political analyst.

“I believe that we are in a new political era in which class will be the dominant factor in political divisions,” said William Galston, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, during a panel discussion Thursday hosted by the Center for American Political Studies.

Analysts at the election post-mortem, moderated by Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus, noted Trump made gains with voters in every age group, across racial and ethnic demographics, particularly Hispanic and Black men, and even improved over 2020 with women.

Class and gender were more determinative than race and ethnicity this year, Galston noted, with class, as defined by educational level rather than income, being the most important. The split between people with higher and lower levels of education is a development the country “will be wrestling with for the next generation with consequences that I can’t begin to predict,” he said.

Moderator Harvey Mansfield (from left) and panelists Bill Kristol, William Galston, and Ross Douthat
Moderator Harvey Mansfield (from left) and panelists Bill Kristol, William Galston, and Ross Douthat.

The group noted the Trump campaign correctly predicted wide-ranging voter discontent over the economy and immigration would override any misgivings about their candidate’s personality or behavior. And Trump’s recent pledge to veto a national abortion ban appeared to allay concerns with many voters over an issue Democrats had expected would drive turnout their way.

They also noted the campaign’s media strategy proved very effective. TV ads attacking Harris as being too liberal did some damage. And the unconventional decision to put less emphasis on mainstream news outlets in favor of more friendly, less overtly political settings, like “The Joe Rogan Podcast,” along with aggressive use of social media influencers, crypto and gambling events, and internet memes, helped the campaign reach likely supporters, the panelists said.

The Harris campaign had much to overcome, tied as it was to the coattails of a deeply unpopular administration that was blamed for the nation’s high inflation and problems with border security and immigration, the analysts said.

President Biden ran on restoring normalcy to the pandemic-battered U.S. economy and using his considerable foreign policy chops to cool global hotspots and repair international relations damaged by Trump, said Ross Douthat ’02, opinion columnist at The New York Times, who anticipated that Trump would prevail.

Instead, he said, voters faced much higher prices on essentials like gas and food and witnessed a botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and two wars erupt in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Trump “said a lot of wild and deplorable things over the course of the 2024 election but having lived through the first Trump administration in which there was a huge disconnect between Trumpian rhetoric and the actual realities of governance, I don’t think it was that surprising that the voting public [told themselves] if we went through this for four years and things were OK, and Donald Trump did not become a fascist dictator, we can go through it for four more years’” because he offers better prospects than the alternative, Douthat said.  

In addition, Biden’s seeming retreat from his 2020 pledge to be a one-term “transitional president,” waiting until July to step aside, gave Harris no time to introduce herself to voters and to lay out and sharpen the substance and presentation of her agenda in just three months put her at a great disadvantage from the outset, said Galston.

Without a primary, Harris also had no real chance to establish an identity independent of Biden, making it easier to tie her to everything voters disliked about his administration. And arguments that Harris and Democrats thought would be key, such as reproductive rights and Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack, proved less powerful than hoped.

“There is a mountain of political science evidence to the effect that for people who feel hard-pressed economically or insecure physically, democracy is a luxury good,” said Galston.

Then there was the appeal of Trump himself. The president-elect has had 50 years as a celebrity, skillful marketer, and TV performer, so it’s not surprising that he excels at creating effective political images and viral content, like pretending to serve McDonald’s french fries, that cut through today’s fragmented media landscape and deliver his intended messages, said Bill Kristol ’73, Ph.D. ’79, a longtime conservative intellectual and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, who became a critic of the Republican Party under Trump.

He said Trump returns to office with a more supportive Republican majority in the Senate and possibly the House, expanded presidential protections conferred by the Supreme Court, and a plan to purge the federal government of those who would try to block his initiatives. And so, he appears much more powerful than he was in 2016.

Referencing Karl Marx’s famous quip about history repeating itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Kristol said about a second Trump term: “What makes me most worried about the next four years is that it could end up being ‘first time farce, second time tragedy.’”


Cutting through the fog of long COVID

Researchers say new AI tool sharpens diagnostic process, may help identify more people needing care


Health

Cutting through the fog of long COVID

AI and medical records illustration.
5 min read

Researchers say new AI tool sharpens diagnostic process, may help identify more people needing care

While earlier diagnostic studies have suggested that 7 percent of the population suffers from long COVID, a new AI tool developed by  Mass General Brigham revealed a much higher 22.8 percent, according to the study. 

The AI-based tool can sift through electronic health records to help clinicians identify cases of long COVID. The often-mysterious condition can encompass a litany of enduring symptoms, including fatigue, chronic cough, and brain fog after infection from SARS-CoV-2. 

The algorithm used was developed by drawing de-identified patient data from the clinical records of nearly 300,000 patients across 14 hospitals and 20 community health centers in the Mass General Brigham system. The results, published in the journal Med, could identify more people who should be receiving care for this potentially debilitating condition.

“Our AI tool could turn a foggy diagnostic process into something sharp and focused, giving clinicians the power to make sense of a challenging condition,” said senior author Hossein Estiri, head of AI Research at the Center for AI and Biomedical Informatics of the Learning Healthcare System (CAIBILS) at MGB and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”

“With this work, we may finally be able to see long COVID for what it truly is — and more importantly, how to treat it.”

Hossein Estiri

For the purposes of their study, Estiri and colleagues defined long COVID as a diagnosis of exclusion that is also infection-associated. That means the diagnosis could not be explained in the patient’s unique medical record but was associated with a COVID infection. In addition, the diagnosis needed to have persisted for two months or longer in a 12-month follow up window. 

The novel method developed by Estiri and colleagues, called “precision phenotyping,” sifts through individual records to identify symptoms and conditions linked to COVID-19 to track symptoms over time in order to differentiate them from other illnesses. For example, the algorithm can detect if shortness of breath results from pre-existing conditions like heart failure or asthma rather than long COVID. Only when every other possibility was exhausted would the tool flag the patient as having long COVID. 

“Physicians are often faced with having to wade through a tangled web of symptoms and medical histories, unsure of which threads to pull, while balancing busy caseloads. Having a tool powered by AI that can methodically do it for them could be a game-changer,” said Alaleh Azhir, co-lead author and an internal medicine resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

The new tool’s patient-centered diagnoses may also help alleviate biases built into current diagnostics for long COVID, said researchers, who noted diagnoses with the official ICD-10 diagnostic code for long COVID trend toward those with easier access to healthcare.

The researchers said their tool is about 3 percent more accurate than the data ICD-10 codes capture, while being less biased. Specifically, their study demonstrated that the individuals they identified as having long COVID mirror the broader demographic makeup of Massachusetts, unlike long COVID algorithms that rely on a single diagnostic code or individual clinical encounters, skewing results toward certain populations such as those with more access to care.

“This broader scope ensures that marginalized communities, often sidelined in clinical studies, are no longer invisible,” said Estiri.

Limitations of the study and AI tool include that health record data the algorithm uses to account for long COVID symptoms may be less complete than the data physicians capture in post-visit clinical notes. Another limitation was the algorithm did not capture possible worsening of a prior condition that may have been a long COVID symptom. For example, if a patient had COPD that worsened before they developed COVID-19, the algorithm might have removed the episodes even if they were long COVID indicators. Declines in COVID-19 testing in recent years also makes it difficult to identify when a patient may have first gotten COVID-19.

The study was limited to patients in Massachusetts.

Future studies may explore the algorithm in cohorts of patients with specific conditions, like COPD or diabetes. The researchers also plan to release this algorithm publicly on open access so physicians and healthcare systems globally can use it in their patient populations. 

In addition to opening the door to better clinical care, this work may lay the foundation for future research into the genetic and biochemical factors behind long COVID’s various subtypes. “Questions about the true burden of long COVID — questions that have thus far remained elusive — now seem more within reach,” said Estiri.

Support was given by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) R01AI165535, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) OT2HL161847, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) UL1 TR003167, UL1 TR001881, and U24TR004111. J. Hügel’s work was partially funded by a fellowship within the IFI program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well by the German Research Foundation (426671079).


So, here’s the thing about women comedians that isn’t funny

Veteran stand-up headliner Iliza Shlesinger details self-censorship, social media, and double standards in Mahindra talk


Bess Kalb (left) and Iliza Shlesinger.

Bess Kalb (left) and Iliza Shlesinger.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Arts & Culture

So, here’s the thing about women comedians that isn’t funny

Veteran stand-up headliner Iliza Shlesinger details self-censorship, social media, and double standards in Mahindra talk

4 min read

Comedian Iliza Shlesinger doesn’t jot down her jokes — she stores them in her head until showtime. Even her setlists are just single-word prompts, like “giraffe” (for her baby giraffe impression) or “armpit” (she has joked that no man has ever dumped a woman over armpit stubble).

But that doesn’t mean her routine is mostly impromptu, or “unfiltered,” a label Shlesinger told a Paine Hall audience last Wednesday is overused for female comedians. In reality, she said, most audiences don’t realize how much stand-up material is edited and refined before it’s delivered.

“When you do stand-up, it’s a polished piece of art,” said Shlesinger, a national headliner who has starred in six of her own stand-up comedy specials on Netflix (considered a top-notch venue for comedians) and has toured internationally to sold-out theaters. “Every laugh that is elicited is purposefully placed. I know where the tension is. It’s a symphony.”

“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend.’”

Iliza Shlesinger

At the Hauser Forum for the Arts talk hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center, Shlesinger spoke with comedy writer Bess Kalb about self-censoring, comedy in the age of social media, and double standards for female comedians.

Shlesinger said that when it comes to the balancing act between not offending and not allowing public opinion to ruin a good joke, female comedians are always judged more harshly for their choices. She believes this could discourage them from wanting to make art.

“As women we are constantly having to justify everything and make sure that you know that ‘I don’t mean to offend,’” Shlesinger said. “We love to pick apart people and women. We do it deliciously. We love the schadenfreude of ‘I know that all she said was she loves fluffy clouds, but she didn’t say she loved rain clouds also, which means you hate the rain, which means you love climate change.’”

Kalb, an Emmy-nominated comedy writer who has written for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and The New Yorker, said she’s witnessed this double standard firsthand while writing for an all-female comedy special.

“It was at the same network where there were men who had their own specials, and the notes that we got about what all these women could and couldn’t say were astounding,” Kalb said.

Part of the reason behind the nitpicking, Shlesinger believes, is that social media algorithms have normalized content tailored to individual tastes.

“We all have our own personalized channels on Netflix, and we all have our own personalized comedians because we have so much to pick from on social media,” Schlesinger said. “That’s just not the way the human brain works. How could I tailor something that 100 percent speaks to you?”

Female comedians are often disproportionately expected to pull out anecdotes about trauma onstage to be relatable, said Shlesinger, who added that she speaks about her own experience with miscarriage during stand-ups. Kalb dubbed these moments “trauma gems.” Still, Shlesinger said, vulnerability onstage is important for engaging an audience.

“I always think if I’m feeling this, particularly when it comes to the experiences of being a woman, everybody else is feeling this,” Shlesinger said.

Though she knows her jokes won’t land with everyone, Shlesinger said she works to find the common denominator for her audience in whatever venue she’s in.

“At the end of the day, we are all people, and we do all go through the same things,” Shlesinger said. “When you can tap into that, which I always strive to do, that’s how you’re able to play Kuala Lumpur and also Ireland and also Tokyo. You’re reaching a very human thing.”


Making art as process of reclamation

Singer Davóne Tines ’09 and violinist Jennifer Koh discuss ‘Everything Rises,’ their work about race, complex ties to white world of classical music


Arts & Culture

Making art as process of reclamation

Opera singer Davóne Tines, and violinist Jennifer Koh.

Davóne Tines and Jennifer Koh.

Photos by Jodi Hilton

5 min read

Singer Davóne Tines ’09 and violinist Jennifer Koh discuss ‘Everything Rises,’ their work about race, complex ties to white world of classical music

Jennifer Koh stood onstage in Paine Concert Hall and lifted her bow to her violin, drawing out the first haunting notes of a Bach sonata. 

The back door of the hall then opened, and Davóne Tines ’09 entered singing a Handel aria, his rich bass-baritone interrupting Koh’s performance as he walked down the aisle. They traded notes in call-and-response until Tines joined Koh onstage, and the two performed a duet from Holst’s Songs for Voice and Violin, Op. 35.

The performance was the artists’ re-enactment of the real-life moment Tines and Koh met and began collaborating on “Everything Rises,” a staged performance that premiered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2022. Tines and Koh told the audience at a recent evening talk hosted by the Department of Music how they created their show, which traces their family histories of racialized trauma and their own experiences navigating racism in the majority-white, tradition-bound world of classical music.

“Oftentimes things that are traditional or a part of the core of what institutions uphold go unexcavated, which is really detrimental,” Tines said, pausing to note the names of white European composers like Haydn, Schubert, and Wagner written on the walls in Paine Hall. “We say, ‘Oh, this Beethoven symphony is nonpareil, the best thing that you could be listening to’ so the institution doesn’t go to the lengths of actually self-reflecting to tell the audience why.”

“Oftentimes things that are traditional or a part of the core of what institutions uphold go unexcavated, which is really detrimental.”

Davóne Tines

Tines, who concentrated in sociology, was a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and sang his first opera, Stravinsky’s “Rake’s Progress,” his senior year with the Dunster House Opera Society. Currently he combines opera with gospel and spirituals, and often uses art to highlight and confront societal issues.

The award-winning Tines recalled meeting the violin virtuoso Koh backstage at the Paris Opera several years ago, and when they spotted each other, the only two people of color in the room, each felt an immediate connection. 

“We banded together and went to dinner, and continued to get to know each other,” Tines said. “As we compared and contrasted our life experiences, we found that we had a lot of similarities in our journeys as artists of color within classical music.” 

Soon after, they began working on “Everything Rises” and slowly assembled a team of collaborators, including composer Ken Ueno, Ph.D. ’05. They approached the show through a lens of lineage, telling the stories of Koh’s mother, a refugee from North Korea during the Korean War, and Tines’ grandmother, who holds vivid memories of anti-Black discrimination and violence in the U.S. Recorded interviews with the two women are included in the show.

“[Famed cellist] Yo-Yo Ma often says that it takes three generations to make an artist: the first generation to pull the family out of poverty, the second generation to become educated, and then the third generation then has the freedom and foundation to have creative pursuits,” Tines said. 

The lyrics of one song by Ueno, “Story of the Moth,” comes directly from frustrations Tines expressed about feeling objectified as a performer.

“Those words, which might seem affronting or surprising — ‘dear white people,’ ‘money, access and fame’ ‘I yearn for your validation’ — these were all things I’ve actually felt,” Tines said.

Tines and Koh adapted a setting of the 1930s anti-racism protest song “Strange Fruit” — which they also performed in their show — into a film for Carnegie Hall’s “Voices of Hope” series. That project came together shortly after the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings. In it, their music accompanies a gallery of racist political cartoons and CCTV footage of anti-Asian violence.

Jennifer Koh.
Jennifer Koh.

Koh said she’s noticed a clear difference in audience enthusiasm when she performs, say, a work by Tchaikovsky as opposed to a socially and politically charged piece like “Embers,” which was inspired by her years of anger and frustration over anti-Asian hate in the U.S.

“As performers, of course [we hope] you guys will clap at the end,” Koh said. “But to a certain degree, art is not about entertainment. It’s about confrontation of oneself. It’s not only an excavation of our own experience, but something, I think, for the audience to experience as well.”

One of their biggest challenges was finding the perfect way to end their show. At first, Tines said, he had suggested ending with the triumphantly hopeful “Ode to Joy” — both the Beethoven and the gospel hymn version — to suggest a move toward unity. 

But Koh disagreed, saying that type of resolution would be letting the audience “off the hook.” 

Tines turned to her. “Another thing you said was, ‘Davóne, you don’t have to give that to them. That can be for you,’” herecalled. “’You can find resolution and hope for yourself, but the audience will continue to contend with what was presented.’”

Ultimately, they went with an original composition by Ueno titled “Better Angels” (a reference to Lincoln’s first inaugural address), which they perform directly to each other, a choice Tines felt struck the appropriate chord.

“You want people to go to places that are doubtful,” Tines said. “You hope that those things sit with them, but you don’t want to let them off the hook. You don’t want them to eviscerate what actually has been built in the performance.”


U.S. fertility rates are tumbling, but some families still go big. Why?

It’s partly matter of faith. Economist examines choice to have large families in new book.


Catherine Pakaluk

Catherine Pakaluk.

Nation & World

U.S. fertility rates are tumbling, but some couples still go big. Why?

Economist's ‘Hannah's Children’ is an up-close look at large families

long read

Birth rates are falling globally. In fact, the fertility rate in the U.S. hit a record low of 1.64 expected births per a woman’s lifetime in 2020.

At the same time, about 5 percent of women in the nation currently have five or more children. Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D ’10, a Catholic University economist and mother of eight (and stepmother of six), wanted to find out why, both academically and personally. Her new book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” offers an intimate view into the lives of families around the country who have decided to pursue large families.

Pakaluk spoke with the Gazette about what she learned. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


What drew you to this topic, and why do you think it’s an important one to talk about in the current moment?

As an economist I’ve been interested in questions related to population growth as it relates to labor market and human development for a long time. But in the last 10 years, especially since the Great Recession, it’s become increasingly a puzzle: Why have birth rates been declining so rapidly and why aren’t they responding to some of the [policy] things that we would assume they would respond to? I thought this was really interesting.

I’m also interested in women’s choices and labor market choices. I was noticing that around the world, countries are about to get kind of bossy about women having children. They’re applying bigger and bigger incentives to try to get people to have kids. It’s becoming a mounting policy concern, with nations wanting people to have kids. That always sounded a little alarming to me, so I wanted to see what we could learn. Falling birth rates represent one of the main concerns for the contemporary political economy, mainly because the social welfare programs [like Social Security] are creaking and straining under these decreasing birth rates.

In your book, you talk to women who are defying the birth rates by having five or more children. You found that they faced misperceptions by those around them about why they had so many children. What were they?

The main misperception would be that the kind of women who decide to have a lot of children — whether they have careers or not — must be part of religious cults or are people who lack full human agency. That’s concerning that the assumption is that other people are making decisions for these women, be it their religious leaders or husbands. That’s not the case.

The other main misperception that I heard commonly is that women who have a lot of children probably reject modern forms of birth control, either because they don’t know how to access it or don’t believe in it. I knew that wasn’t true in my life, but I thought it was worth exploring.

Book cover: "Hannah's Children".

Nobody I talked to said that not using birth control was the reason for their family size. Some women did prefer to use fertility awareness methods for spacing their children, but I found that whether they did or didn’t use birth control they truly and intentionally chose to have their children.

Did you find any connection between religion and family size?

What I found (and this will sound very economist-y of me) is that the choice process followed a cost-benefit, rational choice model. In that framework, when people make a decision they weigh the expected joys or benefits with the expected costs.

In the case of women making purposeful decisions to have large families, they definitely described the costs in their choice. What I heard was an acute description of the costs, which didn’t seem to be expense-driven, but were more about waking up every two hours for a long time, the effects on their bodies, the trade-offs made in regard to their personal identities.

But when it comes to faith and religion, what I heard was a uniting around the idea that children are a great blessing. That provided a huge benefit to the women in my study that outweighed the significant personal costs. Faith played a role of tipping the scales toward having more children.

I will say, I didn’t talk to people who had smaller family sizes. That wasn’t the purpose of this project. But this group was a group of people who really felt that they began their families intentionally, experienced great joy, felt the blessings were tangible in their lives, so they decided to keep going.

Studies have shown many women want more children than they eventually have — you call this the fertility gap. What’s causing this?

If I could easily answer what’s causing the gap, I’d probably be a candidate for the next Nobel Prize. But in all seriousness, I think of recent Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin’s work, which helps us see what’s going on. I would point back to her work on the “Power of the Pill” and what the pill does in shaping the lives of American women. It opens the choice set, right? And, of course, I think her more recent work on women’s labor is so insightful and helps us see that when you change the choice set for people, who are rational agents making decisions, you create a new comparison class for the goods that you can choose.

What hormonal contraception did in the 20th century is it provided women with more choices. If you wanted to pursue a career, you didn’t have to give up marriage. In the past, if you wanted to go to college or have a profession, you had to give up marriage and partnership. What ends up happening when you broaden the choice set is that a lot of people want both. And so they end up choosing a little bit less of each. So if, objectively speaking, you might have chosen three kids, you might be okay with the trade-off of fewer children to also have a profession.

What we’re seeing is the outcome of a constrained optimization. People are choosing the bundle career and family, and in this constrained world there’s only so much time. One of the women in my study said, “Look, there’s some things that are best done young.” She says, of her medical training, “I would never want to go through that later in life.” But it’s also the easiest time to build the family size that you might want to have. So you have these two things that are in tension. I don’t think that’s an enormous mystery.

Most of the families that you talk to in the book describe themselves as happy and healthy. Did you speak to any who are struggling — economically, emotionally, physically — with dealing with a larger family?

My sample is not representative, and people volunteered to talk to me. So I’m sure, in that sense, there’s a bit of a bias in favor of people who are pretty happy with how things were going. But within that sample, I intentionally looked for families who are at all ends of the wealth distribution. I talked to families who were either on food stamps or eligible for food stamps or other forms of income supplements.

I also spoke to people who were going through postpartum depression, women who were struggling to manage ongoing mental illness, depression, or anxiety. But I would say that everybody that I talked to, mostly due to the study design, felt that whatever troubles they experienced were worth it. I certainly don’t believe having a large family is any guarantee that everything will work out well. However, the purpose of the book was to examine motive: What could lead people to have more children than normal?

The women you spoke to were fully on board with their decisions to devote so much of their lives to their families, even while acknowledging that it took incredible sacrifice. Is there anything policymakers can glean from their experiences that can help make things better for parents and families overall?

I don’t think women have children thoughtlessly. I think a lot of blood, sweat, and tears goes into the decision. And I would say that the same thing must be true for people who choose not to have children.

The sometimes flippant nature of political discourse on women’s family and fertility decisions doesn’t take the issue as seriously as it should. The idea that we could influence a couple with $1,000 more of a tax break or a baby bonus is almost offensive. Or even to say you can influence people with a lot of money, like $200,000 to $400,000 per baby, that it would move the needle. I think this is a really sacred and private decision.

So if we know that, what could make things easier? One thing that came out of this work was the story of faith, but I think that story has just as much to do with community and social support. Where can we put our dollars (in a fiscally responsible way) that helps people in this way?

What I took away from my study was that whatever we can do from a policy perspective to protect and enlarge spaces — religious or not — for people to grow and develop, those are the kinds of things people should think about.

I also think about role modeling. Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice” is so interesting. They look at these deep-seated fears that people have about making the choice to have children. But if you can see others who have gotten over the hurdles, you might be more open to it. I think policymakers could think harder about how we treat faith institutions and think about them as a favored means to provide support to families.

What do you hope readers take away from the experiences of the women in your book?

I wanted to leave people with a message of hope. These are serious topics. But if there’s some people out there defying the odds and not undershooting their own fertility desires, here’s a model of people who are pulling this off.

A lot of times you read the news and see how nobody’s having the families they want to or it’s getting harder and harder. It’s helpful to realize that trends in society are measured in averages. But in fact, many people live lives that are very different from the average.

If we’re interested in building a family, I think there are some concrete lessons from people who have done it. It shows that what’s happening with family size isn’t deterministic. I hope people feel hopeful and optimistic about it, and not like these falling birth rates have to be the whole story of the future.


Dale Weldeau Jorgenson, 89

Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences


The tower of Memorial Hall

The tower of Memorial Hall.

Photo by Grace DuVal

Campus & Community

Dale Weldeau Jorgenson, 89

6 min read

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 5, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Dale W. Jorgenson was an economist of prodigious energy and creativity, remarkable discipline, and extraordinary productivity and impact. He pioneered combining rigorous theoretical modeling with careful empirical work to develop economic models that both enhance our understanding of the economy and provide directly applicable quantitative guidance to economic policy. He led the way in developing rich, theory-informed data sets that can be used to answer important empirical questions in economics, inspiring a movement to improve national economic measurement. He was also a bulwark of the Harvard Department of Economics and helped to transform it — and the field itself — into one in which empirical research is careful, relevant, and grounded in economic theory.

Jorgenson, an only child, was born in Bozeman, Montana, on May 7, 1933. A former Ph.D. student John Fernald recalls Jorgenson saying that “Montana was a pleasant place, especially if you like winters,” to which he added, “I don’t.” Jorgenson was nominated for a scholarship to the Naval Academy but was refused admission because of his poor eyesight; instead, he attended Reed College, where he became fascinated by economics. At the advice of his undergraduate thesis advisor, Jorgenson entered the Ph.D. program at Harvard, where, after three and a half years, he received his Ph.D. in 1959 under the supervision of Wassily Leontief.

Jorgenson’s first academic appointment was at the University of California, Berkeley, where, after four years, he was promoted to full professor at age 30. In 1969, Jorgenson was recruited back to Harvard as a key part of Henry Rosovsky’s plan to modernize the Department, which included recruiting Zvi Griliches and Kenneth Arrow and promoting Martin Feldstein. In 1971, Jorgenson received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded (then biennially) to the most intellectually significant American economist under age 40, for marrying economic theory and econometric analysis. One of us had the honor of promoting Jorgenson to University Professor in 2002 to recognize his lifelong research program that changed the discipline.

A scholar of prodigious energy and generosity, Jorgenson held multiple important service positions in the economics profession, including President of the Econometric Society in 1987, President of the American Economic Association in 2000, and Chair of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis from 2004 to 2011.

Of Jorgenson’s many intellectual contributions, he will be remembered particularly for three. First, in a 1963 article, he developed the modern framework for analyzing firms’ investment decisions. This paper transformed the then-murky topic into one guided by a precise, implementable formula for a key determinant of investment, the user cost of capital.

Second, Jorgenson is a founder of modern growth accounting. He provided a framework — the so-called KLEMS system of capital, labor, energy, materials, and services — for measuring the determinants of economic growth. Jorgenson’s vision, combined with his passion for getting the details right, created a global society dedicated to measuring, comparing, and using these determinants of growth.

Third, Jorgenson was a pioneer in econometric modeling, especially of producer and consumer behavior. Starting with the oil crisis of the 1970s, he developed economy-wide models that linked energy prices and production to overall economic growth. He and coauthors used a descendant of this model in a pioneering 2013 book, which analyzed how the revenue from a carbon tax might best be used to foster economic growth, and the lessons from that research remain relevant today.

Altogether, Jorgenson authored 300 articles in economics and authored or edited 37 books, undertaken with more than 70 collaborators. His final edited volume appeared in 2016, when he was 83.

Connecting all this work was an abiding commitment to developing rich data sets, grounded in economic principles, that could be used to estimate econometric models. In so doing, Jorgenson moved economic measurement from the dull work of government statisticians to be a central part of modern economic research.

Jorgenson and his inseparable wife, Linda, were dedicated to the welfare and betterment of the Department of Economics. He chaired the Department from 1994 to 1997. Linda, in turn, was its social glue, as outgoing and ebullient as was Jorgenson reserved. Linda and Dale hosted countless events at their apartment for students and colleagues. Linda reached across the lingering barriers of seniority and status to ensure that all members of the Department knew they were valued personally as well as professionally. Jorgenson’s mentorship, combining high standards with personal support, and Linda’s warm embrace were deeply helpful to many junior colleagues.

Jorgenson’s work at Harvard extended beyond the Department. He directed the Program on Technology and Economic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School from 1984 to 2007. He helped lead the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from its founding in 1993, advising a stream of economics students from China and working with economist colleague Mun Ho until spring 2022. Jorgenson was also a Faculty Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Harvard Environmental Economics Program, in which he was also active until shortly before his death.

One of Jorgenson’s greatest legacies is his legion of students, both undergraduate and graduate. Jorgenson had a formal and dispassionate public demeanor: graduate students regularly presented him as Mr. Spock of Star Trek at the Department’s annual holiday skit party. In reality, however, Jorgenson was warm and supportive of his students and junior colleagues, with a wry sense of humor. His former students include Robert Hall and Ben Bernanke, two of the leading economists in the profession, and two consecutive Harvard senior classes voted him to be one of their favorite professors.

Economics is a different and better discipline, and Harvard is a better place, because of Jorgenson Jorgenson. Economic measurement is now recognized as an important part of the work of the profession and as something that can be, and indeed must be, infused with theory. From the cost of capital, to the KLEMS approach to production, to his many other contributions, the Jorgenson approach to economics lives on.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael McElroy
Lawrence H. Summers
James Stock, Chair


Otto Thomas Solbrig, 92

Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences


Flowers seen on Harvard Campus.

Fall flowers on campus.

Photo by Jon Ratner

Campus & Community

Otto Thomas Solbrig, 92

Memorial Minute — Faculty of Arts and Sciences

4 min read

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Nov. 4, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Otto Thomas Solbrig was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Otto Thomas Solbrig was born in Buenos Aires in 1930 and died in Massachusetts in 2023. He was trilingual as a child, speaking English with his mother, German with his father, and Spanish with his siblings. From 1950 to 1954, he studied for an undergraduate degree in agronomy at the National University of La Plata, where he was active in student politics. By order of the government of Juan Péron, Solbrig was expelled from the university and was imprisoned for three months without trial in 1955. After his release, but before the fall of Péron, and without completing the formal requirements for his undergraduate degree, Solbrig emigrated to the United States to study botany at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral thesis in plant systematics was advised by Lincoln Constance, Herbert G. Baker, and George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. Solbrig then served as a curator in Harvard’s Gray Herbarium for seven years (1959–1966) before accepting a faculty position at the University of Michigan. Three years later, he returned to Harvard as a tenured professor of biology, where he remained until his retirement in 2002.

Solbrig’s research focused on the lives of plants in ecological communities. He is best known for his work on dandelions, in which he used isozyme patterns to show that multiple genotypes existed within local populations. In seemingly simple habitats like lawns, he found that there was not one “general purpose genotype” superior to all others but rather multiple genotypes that were better suited to different microenvironments. One factor that helped maintain the genetic diversity of dandelions was the pattern of human perturbation. Some genotypes were better adapted than others to frequent disturbance. Solbrig thus placed earlier theoretical work on “life-history strategies” on a firm genetic basis.

Throughout his career, Solbrig was prominent in the organization of international collaborative research, both on biodiversity and on tropical agriculture. During the 1970s, he was an administrator of the International Biological Program’s Convergence and Divergence of Ecosystems project, which compared the desert floras of Arizona and Sonora with those of northern Argentina and influenced a similar comparison of the Mediterranean floras of Chile and California. During the 1980s, Solbrig served as president of the International Union of Biological Sciences and directed its Decade of the Tropics program. He also served on the International Coordination Council and on the General Scientific Advisory Group for UNESCO’s Program on Man and the Biosphere. In the 1990s, he was the chair of the first Internationally Commissioned External Panel of the Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical, with headquarters in Colombia.

Solbrig’s international activities took him to many countries, including the Soviet Union and China, but he always maintained a special love for Latin America. He taught courses on tropical ecology in Costa Rica and Venezuela for North American students, and he taught many courses for Argentinian students in his beloved Argentina. After returning to Harvard in 1969, Solbrig was active in the community of Harvard faculty interested in Latin America. He taught regular courses on the geography and environment of Latin America and was a member of the first Executive Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He organized the Rockefeller Center’s first international conference, Towards a Sustainable and Productive Agriculture in the Pampas.

In 1998, Solbrig received the International Prize for Biology, bestowed by the Emperor of Japan, for his work on the biology of biodiversity, with his work on dandelions singled out for special mention. Among other honors, Solbrig was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, La Plata, Mar del Plata, and Lomas de Zamora.

Solbrig is survived by his children from his first marriage, Hans and Heide, and by Dorothy, his wife of more than 50 years.

Respectfully submitted,

Peter Ashton
Noel Michele Holbrook
Naomi E. Pierce
David Haig, Chair


When your goal is literally sky-high — and you reach it

Third-generation military, Faith Schmidt ’25 is set to soar


Campus & Community

When your goal is literally sky-high — and you reach it

Faith Schmidt.

Faith Schmidt ’25 inside St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square.

Photo by Grace DuVal

4 min read

Third-generation military, Faith Schmidt ’25 is set to soar

When field hockey midfielder Faith Schmidt ’25 graduates in the spring, she will carry on a storied family legacy, one that takes place 45,000 feet in the air.

The Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadet recently received her pilot slot from the Air Force. Soon after Commencement, she will find out her base assignment, or where she will spend roughly the next two years in flight school and training.

“I applied for the pilot slot my junior year, one of the most competitive slots to get,” the St. Louis, Missouri, native said. “I knew I had a competitive package and there were some good signs coming in. When it was signed, sealed, and delivered, I was so happy, celebrating with my fellow cadets.

“I FaceTimed with my dad, and he just hopped out of a fighter jet at Boeing. He flipped the camera around to the fighter jet and told me, ‘You’ll be in there one day!’”

Faith Schmidt with an old plane.
Schmidt standing next to an aircraft known as a French fighter trainer.

The engineering sciences concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences comes from a family of veterans. Her father spent more than 20 years as a fighter pilot for the Navy, and now works as a test pilot for Boeing. Both her grandfathers and her godfather also served in the military.

“When my dad was growing up, my grandpa would tell him about the aircraft carriers he worked on during the Korean War,” Schmidt said. “My dad was fascinated by that experience, and he joined Navy ROTC halfway through his college experience. There is a long line of military history in my family, but just looking at their passion for service, the dedication for the people around them, all that really pushed me to go the military aviation route.”

Her earliest impressions of life in the clouds began in early elementary school when she watched her dad and her uncles, also pilots, fly together. When her father would ask his children who wanted to go up in the air, her hand immediately shot up. “I knew I wanted to go, and those little moments throughout my life pushed me to fly,” Schmidt said.

Fatih Schmidt and Kate Oliver.
Schmidt with childhood friend Kate Oliver, a junior on the team. “We are both from St. Louis, and grew up playing club field hockey together since we were in middle school,” said Schmidt.

“Faith has been climbing high and jumping off those heights since she was a toddler, ranging from gymnastics, competitive diving, and pole vaulting,” said her mother, Cathy Schmidt.

During her senior year of high school, Schmidt applied for ROTC scholarships as she found another reason to be drawn to the Air Force: the design of fighter jets. At Harvard, she balanced her engineering course load with commitments as a cadet, field hockey player, and member of the Catholic Center.

“Harvard is one of the only places I could have gone where everything works all together,” she said, expressing gratitude for her coaches and teammates.

“They have been such a backbone for me, I don’t think I could’ve done ROTC and engineering without them,” Schmidt said. “Just having two hours of practice every day, with some of the most amazing women I know, is such a great reset. I’ve been grateful for all the smiles in the locker room and having the opportunity to chase that common goal. Whenever they see me on campus in uniform, they hype me up.”

“We know some of the sacrifices that lie ahead for her,” Schmidt’s mother said. “We respect her decision to face those challenges with courage and commitment. We could not be more proud that she has chosen to serve in this honorable profession.”


The long Crimson line

Number of armed services veterans at Harvard on the rise as University ramps up outreach, support


Campus & Community

The long Crimson line

Ed Somuk ’27 (from left), Alexandria Durrant ’28, and Shane Rice ’25.

Ed Somuk ’27 (from left), Alexandria Durrant ’28, and Shane Rice ’25.

Courtesy photos

7 min read

Number of armed services veterans at Harvard on the rise as University ramps up outreach, support

Shane Rice ’25 was visiting his parents in Virginia and preparing for his first combat deployment. Alexandria Durrant ’28 was recovering after a 12-hour medical shift at a military base in Hawaii. And Ed Somuk ’27, a retired Marine, was busy potty-training the youngest of his three children.

“I looked at my phone, and all I could register was: ‘Congratulations. Harvard. Welcome Class of 2027,’” recalled Somuk, 49, a history concentrator who recently retired as a master sergeant after 26 years of service. “I had about six seconds to immerse myself in it. And then I had to get into that bathroom because I had a kid in there.”

The number of U.S. military veterans at the College has climbed in the last half-dozen years, thanks to stepped-up outreach and word of mouth. In 2018, a total of eight veterans were enrolled at the College. This fall, 21 started as first-year or transfer students, with a total of 78 current students having completed service in the armed forces.

Ed Somuk ’27 (pictured) sits on the steps of Memorial Church.

Ed Somuk.

Photo by Grace DuVal

“Our veterans bring a diversity of perspective to Harvard College and make deeply valued contributions here,” said Joy St. John, director of admissions. “Additionally, public service is core to our mission, and time in the armed forces constitutes one of the most meaningful acts of service. Our commitment to recruiting and admitting more veterans is motivated by this.”

There is a thread of military service running through Harvard’s long history. That legacy is written all over Memorial Hall, its walls etched with the names of 136 Harvard associates lost during the Civil War. Likewise, the walls of Memorial Church bear hundreds of names representing faculty and alumni killed during World War I and World War II.

The presence of U.S. service members on campus began fading around the Vietnam era, but the trend started to reverse early in the 21st century. In 2005, Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, started bringing veterans to campus for summer opportunities via the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

“We found these veterans brought an uncommon skill set in terms of maturity and work ethic,” remembered Parker, who is also a colonel with more than 30 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve. “You’ve got to stay past midnight to get an experiment working? It’s no problem if you’ve been in the military. Night ops is what we do!”

Parker went on to join efforts by 2022 Harvard Medal winner Tom Reardon ’68 to improve support for veterans campuswide while easing obstacles for those applying. “Maybe they were late bloomers academically, but something about their military records revealed a potential, a talent, a desire, and certainly a focus,” Parker said.

Additional efforts were made to support soldiers returning from the American-led global war on terror launched after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2006, Reardon, who served in the Army during Vietnam, established the Harvard Veterans Alumni Association, which seeks to strengthen connections between veterans on campus and in the alumni community. President Drew Faust announced in 2009 that the University would participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program, helping veterans to pay tuition costs exceeding what is covered under the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

Alexandria Durrant '28 iin the Memorial Room of Memorial Church that honors Harvard veterans.

Alexandria Durrant stands among the names of Harvard veterans in the Memorial Church.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“At one point in the 2000s — between Harvard College students, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, and staff members I had hired — there was more combat experience in my laboratory than most infantry platoons in the Army,” Parker said.

The 2010s saw the University deepening its commitment. In 2014, Harvard started partnering with the Warrior-Scholar Project, a nonprofit offering free academic boot camps at top U.S. universities.

Attending a week-long session at Columbia University last summer gave Durrant, 24, the confidence to apply to Harvard. “It taught me to challenge myself and to understand that being an active-duty veteran is not a weakness; it’s actually a strength,” said the first-year who grew up in North Carolina and fell in love with healthcare while serving as a Navy hospital corpsman. “Right now I’m leaning toward a concentration in government with a secondary in global health and health policy. However, I still want to be ambitious and get the prerequisites for medical school.”

In 2017, Harvard College joined Service to School’s VetLink program, which provides free counseling for veterans applying to college. Somuk had mentally bookmarked its resources after seeing ads on social media. In 2021, he was freshly retired and living with his family near Fairbanks, Alaska, when his wife, an attorney with the Air Force JAG Corps, received orders to head to Hanscom Air Force Base about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Somuk, who grew up in Connecticut, gave Service to School a call.

“Have you ever thought about Harvard?” asked the first counselor he reached.

“I think of Harvard all the time,” Somuk remembered joking. “I think it’s a great institution that will never, ever let me inside their gates.” Today, the Dudley Co-op affiliate commutes to campus from Hanscom, often making the 40-minute trip multiple times per day while juggling courses and study halls with family obligations.

Veterans of militaries worldwide eventually organized a Harvard College student group, which was officially recognized in 2018. Rice, 25, was still stationed in Okinawa, Japan, when he stumbled upon the undergraduate-run organization five years ago. The anthropology concentrator and Cabot House resident remembered sitting in his barracks one day when he grabbed his phone and typed: “good schools USA.”

Harvard anthropology concentrator Shane Rice ’25 walking across Weeks Bridge.

Shane Rice.

Photo by Jon Ratner

Harvard popped up. Rice, who was at the time a mortarman on his second deployment, did a bit more searching on the application process. “But never did I take it that seriously until I found Harvard Undergraduate Veteran Organization,” recalled Rice, who is studying abroad this semester at Trinity College in Dublin.

A former HUVO president even took the time to offer a bit of counsel over Zoom. “He was also a Marine, so we clicked over that,” Rice said. “That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just a pipe dream. People have done it!”

Another support arrived in 2020 with the appointment of the College’s first program manager for military student services. Craig Rodgers, Ed.M. ’96, a former reservist who matriculated in the Army ROTC program at MIT, works to counsel and connect veterans and ROTC cadets on campus.

“He does a really good job of letting us know what’s going on in the veterans’ community,” said Durrant, who underscored the comfort she finds in gathering with this group. “Sometimes it’s nice to just be able to talk in military jargon with people who understand.”

The College isn’t the only Harvard School with strong U.S. military representation. At the Kennedy School this fall, 76 students are on active duty or veterans. The Law School has 70, and the Extension School counts 423 veterans or active-duty U.S. military members taking courses this semester.

Parker emphasized that more can be done to support this growing population. Adding accessible family housing options near campus would make admission possible for a greater number of veterans with physical disabilities. Bolstering mental health supports would serve those dealing with post-combat stress. He called for a greater awareness of how the Americans With Disabilities Act uniquely impacts war veterans.

But most will find the campus welcoming, with military training increasingly understood as an academic asset, he said. “It’s a great time to be a veteran at Harvard.”


Are optimists the realists?

Humanity is doing better than ever yet it often doesn’t seem that way. In podcast, experts make the case for fact-based hope.


Illustration of optimist and pessimist on a see-saw.

Illustration by Andrew Baker/Ikon Images

Nation & World

‘Harvard Thinking’: Are optimists the realists?

Humanity is doing better than ever yet it often doesn’t seem that way. In podcast, experts make the case for fact-based hope.

long read

It may feel like the world is slowly devolving into one big dumpster fire. But that’s hardly the case.

“For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse,” said Steven Pinker, Ph.D. ’79, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. “Things really have gotten better [and] not by themselves; it’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment.”

In many measurable ways, global progress has far exceeded failure. Jane Nelson, the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School, points out that of the United Nation’s 24 indicators of their Sustainable Development Goals, 18 have improved since 2015. During her career she’s seen enormous changes for the better, and that gives her hope when she looks to the future.

“We know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives?” she said. “It’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.”

Tal Ben-Shahar ’96, Ph.D. ’04, who directs the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University and formerly taught at Harvard, said embracing “evidence-based optimism” grounds us in reality. Alternatively, when we experience “detached optimism,” it can lead to toxic positivity. This “just be happy” attitude pervades our culture and can ironically lead to hopelessness and despair.

“Two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism,” he said. “[We can] believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time … see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.”

In this episode of “Harvard Thinking,” host Samantha Laine Perfas speaks with Ben-Shahar, Nelson, and Pinker about choosing optimism.

Transcript

Steven Pinker: When you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse.

Laine Perfas: Things aren’t what they used to be: They’re actually better. Yet even though many measures show how much progress we’ve made, many people feel like things are worse than ever. It’s led to a cycle of pessimism that leads to further despair and anxiety.

How do we break this cycle and intentionally choose optimism?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by:

Jane Nelson: Jane Nelson, and over the past 20 years I’ve served as the founding director of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School.

Laine Perfas: She’s spent her career figuring out how companies, communities, nonprofits, and governments can work together to create a more equitable and sustainable world. Then:

Tal Ben-Shahar: Tal Ben-Shahar. I spent 15 years at Harvard as an undergraduate and graduate student and then taught two classes on positive psychology and the psychology of leadership.

Laine Perfas: He’s currently the director of the master’s degree program in happiness studies at Centenary University. And finally:

Pinker: Steve Pinker. I am a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard.

Laine Perfas: Pinker’s books include the bestsellers, “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” His work shows that progress isn’t just a mindset, but a statistical reality.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the value of optimism and how to embrace it when it feels like things are falling apart.

I thought it would be good to talk about how each of you think about optimism. Is it simply trying to be positive all the time or is it something more?

Steven Pinker: I’ve often been called an optimist because of the hundred or so graphs in the two books showing that when you plot measures of human well-being over time, like safety, health, longevity, maternal mortality, child mortality, human rights, they get better. For all the problems we have today, the problems of yesterday usually were worse. And I prefer to talk about progress because optimism, for some people, can be depressing. If the best you can tell me is, “Put a smile on your face and have a happier attitude and see the glass is half full” … I think those can’t be helpful. But the point is that objectively speaking, as best we can determine, things really have gotten better. Not by themselves. It’s taken human effort and human ingenuity and human commitment. But it is easy looking on the undeniable problems today to assume that things were better in the past, whereas I think objectively the conclusion we have to come to is it’s the other way around.

Jane Nelson: From my perspective, I see two causes for sort of evidence-based optimism despite challenging times we face. And I think first, as Steve says, there’s very compelling evidence that things have got better and that we’ve made enormous progress, certainly in my career in the last 30 to 40 years in improving quality of people’s lives, livelihoods, their rights, their opportunities. If we look at the Sustainable Development Goals, colleagues of mine at Brookings recently did some research showing that of 24 indicators, 18 of them have improved even since 2015, which has been a more challenging period. So I think that the fact that we know it’s possible, we know what is possible and what can be achieved is cause for optimism. And then to me, I think the second cause for optimism is that we know what is needed to move forward and make progress. What are the policies that need to be changed? What are the new business models and market incentives? We know many of the technologies, whether it’s food systems or health systems or energy systems that can make a difference; it’s a question then of building the political will and public narrative to get there.

Tal Ben-Shahar: Now, what both Jane and Steve are talking about is “evidence-based optimism” or “grounded optimism,” and it is important. Why? Because what we see around us is a great deal of “detached optimism,” which leads to what has become known as toxic positivity. So once we detach optimism from reality, we have a problem. Because we know that if we’re just told to, “Oh, smile, everything will be just great; if you think positive, things will be positive.” And many of those self-help mantras, we know that they’re actually harmful, that they hurt us more than they help us. And therefore, we need essentially the synthesis that leads to realism. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And these two seemingly opposing ideas are optimism and pessimism: to believe that things are going well and will continue to go well and at the same time to also keep our eyes wide open and identify and see and recognize the things that are not going well and that need to be improved.

Laine Perfas: I think that gets at something that I’ve struggled with. I often joke with my friends that I’m not really an optimist, I’m a depressive realist and that it is hard to embrace the “be happy all the time” attitude that I think is very pervasive in our culture, but the reality is that things are objectively, statistically speaking better now than they have been maybe ever, and yet it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like we’re living in a dumpster fire all the time. What do we do with that disconnect?

Pinker: We have to be aware of why it often feels like we’re in a dumpster fire, where it feels like things are getting worse. And there are both psychological biases, such as the fact that we are more attuned to negative events than positive ones, particularly recent negative events. We often remember things that went wrong in the past, but we don’t remember how bad they were at the time. As in the quotation from Franklin Pierce Adams, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. It has a lot of psychological truth to it. But, and while also realizing that a rich diet of media stories is, in some ways, not the best way to have an accurate appreciation of the world, because there are some built-in distorters. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen, and it’s about things that happen suddenly and that are unexpected, and so there will be a natural pessimistic bias built into the news, even if none of the editors or journalists themselves are pessimistic. Simply because if you’re reporting something that happened yesterday, it’s more likely to be bad than good. Because bad things can happen quickly. A building can collapse, a war can be declared, a terrorist can attack, a school shooter can attack. But good things often consist either of things that don’t happen, like there are no wars going on in the Western Hemisphere or in Southeast Asia: historically unusual. Or things that build up a few percentage points a year and compound, such as the decline in extreme poverty that Jane alluded to. Max Roser, an economist who set up the invaluable website Our World in Data, once said that the papers could have had the headline, “137,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday, every day, for the last 30 years.” But they never ran the headline, and so a billion people escaped from extreme poverty and no one knows about it.

Nelson: I very much agree with that. There’s that drumbeat of negative news and a sort of an element of unease that comes with that. There’s also the challenge, in many cases, of unrealistic expectations because of social media, celebrity lifestyles, that sort of sense that other people’s lives might be better or progress is being made and one’s own isn’t. And if you combine that with concern about change and the speed of change that is happening, I think, in a lot of communities around the world, it sort of layers on to each other in terms of a sense of unease. And then if one has leaders and in any sphere who are exerting a sort of negative narrative that compounds it further.

Pinker: Yes, and I’m an avid consumer of the positive news sites, but although there is a danger there, if positive news is perceived as human-interest fluff: a puppy defends orangutan, a cop buys groceries for a single mother, then people read it and say, “Oh, geez, is that the best you can do? Is that the best that’s happening on Earth? Now I’m really depressed.” But there are some sites that actually concentrate on truly consequential positive developments.

Ben-Shahar: And I think the first thing is that we need to be aware of the fact that the media does not provide us with a looking glass. Rather, it provides us with a magnifying glass and what it magnifies is the negative. And that’s a problem because when we assume a negative mindset, that actually can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, today we see it, you know, what we focus on are the negative elements of politics and the politicians. As a result of that, good people don’t want to enter politics.

So the question is, what do we do it about it? On the individual level, it’s what has become probably the best known, by now cliched, intervention in positive psychology, which is writing a gratitude journal. Appreciating. I love the word appreciate because it has two meanings. The first meaning, of course, is to say thank you for something. The second is to grow in value. And the two meanings of the word appreciate are intimately related because what happens is that when I appreciate, the good appreciates. Unfortunately, the opposite is also the case. When I do not appreciate the good, when I take it for granted, it depreciates. So before I go to bed, I write three things at least for which I’m grateful and I do it regularly. That can be a sort of an antidote against the negative bias, or if we do it as a family or if schools introduce it or even in organizations, if employees write, “What progress have we made today?” That can go a long way in rectifying the bias.

Laine Perfas: There was something you said, Tal, that stuck out to me when you were talking about politics and this idea that pessimism, there can actually be negative consequences. For example, politicians fighting all the time. If you are then a citizen who cares about the world, you’re a little less likely to be involved because, what’s the point? Politics are a mess anyway. Are there other negative consequences or dangers to pessimism?

Pinker: There are two big ones. One of them is fatalism. Why bother trying to make the world a better place if, despite decades of effort, things are worse than ever? And the other could be radicalism. If we’re living in a, as one commentator put it, a late capitalist hellscape, or as from the other end of the spectrum, we’re living in a disaster like very few people have ever seen before, then let’s smash the machine, drain the swamp, burn everything to the ground in the hopes that anything that rises out of the ashes will be better than what we have now. But, if you have enough, I don’t want to call it pessimism, but I’ll call it realism, that things by themselves don’t get better, that the universe has no benevolent interest in our well-being, things fall apart, disorder increases, there are more ways for things to go wrong than to go right, we’re living in a hostile ecosystem where itty bitty little parasites and pathogens are constantly evolving to attack us from the inside and they have the advantage that they can evolve faster than we can … if you start off with what I think of as realistic expectations, namely, we’re in a hostile universe, we’re flawed humans. If we achieve any progress at all, that is something to be grateful for and that we should calibrate our expectations. That, especially if, as we have been emphasizing, there actually has been progress then, let’s not dismantle the system. Let’s constantly improve it, because nothing is optimal, and even if it were, the world changes, so we constantly need to reform things. But let’s build on the successes that we’ve had, and not be so fatalistic and cynical that we give up, or hope that things just naturally get better, which they do not.

Nelson: Both toxic optimism and to a large degree pessimism prevents us from asking the difficult questions that we need to ask of ourselves and our colleagues and families. I think it prevents us from making the changes that often need to be made. And it also often prevents us from taking the precautions that need to be made in terms of navigating challenging environments. So I feel where evidence-based optimism can play a critical role is in being solutions-oriented and having the confidence to try things even if we’re not sure that they’re going to work out and to be looking the whole time whether it’s at a micro community level or a new policy level or even a global governance level, what are new solutions we can try and building a sense of shared purpose and common goals around those potential solutions?

Ben-Shahar: A concept that for me has been very helpful in understanding optimism has been hope. Rick Snyder, who is one of the founders of the field of positive psychology, identifies two separate elements that make up hope. The first element is willpower. So hope is about saying, yes I can, it’s possible, I’m going to do it, or things are going to turn out well, which is more or less what we associate with an optimistic mindset. But there is a second element to hope, according to Rick Snyder, and that is way power. Way power is how I’m going to do it. I was watching an interview with Serena Williams. This was years ago and it was one of her great comebacks. And the interviewer asked her, “How’d you do it? So often you come from the brink of defeat, and you win.” And she said, “Every time I go on court, I have a Plan A and I try it, and if that doesn’t work, I always have a Plan B. And if that doesn’t work, I have a C, a D, and an E.” That’s way power. So it’s not just, yes, I can win this game. There are also alternative pathways that will help me succeed.

Nelson: And I think that the power then of what one could call collective willpower and collective way power is remarkable. I was in Tanzania over the summer visiting some of the hospitals there and 10 years ago the central hospital in Tanzania didn’t have an emergency department. And a small group of four or five doctors and a couple of nurses got together, got some support from a U.S. based company, the Ministry of Health, some American medical schools, and they built an emergency care residency program. They built the department. They’ve now built an emergency care professional association to cover the entire country, and they’re building out hospitals now all over the country. And it was a group of four or five people who started it. And over the period of less than 10 years, it’s now a nationwide program. And I think we see examples of that again and again. And I think to Tal’s point, some things didn’t go right and they reoriented and tried different pathways, but that sense of purpose and willpower, and then collectively developing those sort of shared pathways and vision, I think, can be very powerful.

Laine Perfas: Jane, a lot of the work that you’ve done over the last few decades has been basically based on the idea of cooperation. I’m thinking about another aspect of humanity, which is competition, and I’m wondering if there are times where it can lead to this sense of one-upmanship and everyone just looking out for themselves. Do you see a tension between those things, between cooperation and competition?

Nelson: I mean, certainly in my case, there are tensions. But I think even in the most competitive industry sectors, I’ve seen industry competitors coming together around issues like safety, human rights, living wage, decent work. And then, equally, you’ll see other companies and other industries where competition is the absolute driving force, and then they’re not willing to cooperate even on a sort of precompetitive basis to make the broader human rights environment, operating environment, and environmental issues better for everyone. So I think a lot of it comes down to the leadership. I think if you’ve got a set of leaders who recognize that there’s always going to be competition, but that there are certain fundamental values and goals for human well-being and safety and welfare that are more important than the competition.

Pinker: An understanding of where competition is inherently zero-sum and it’s actually positive sum and there’s overlaps of interest. So in professional sports, for example, it’s set up to be zero-sum in terms of winning a championship. If one team wins the World Series, that means another team doesn’t. On the other hand, there are also common interests in keeping the sport entertaining for everyone, and so all of the team owners can get together and decide baseball games are taking too long and they’re too boring, and we’re all losing as people are sick of watching players adjust their gloves before a pitch is thrown, so how can we change the game in a way that benefits all of us, even as we compete against each other?

Jane mentioned the sustainable development goals, which is easy to neglect, but it’s an astonishing achievement that I think it’s, was it 191 of 193 U.N. members voted for it? In an era in which there seems to be rampant nationalism and polarization and mistrust, everyone agrees it’s better if fewer babies die. It’s better if fewer mothers die. It’s better if more people have access to electricity. And against the cynicism that the world is falling apart, it is astonishing that the Sustainable Development Goals really were things that all of humanity agreed on. And that’s essential to not mistakenly see every competition as zero-sum.

Ben-Shahar: What’s very important here also is how we frame our goals. There’s fascinating research by the late psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues on framing. So they basically divided a large group into two subgroups. One group, they told them, “You’re going to be playing a game now. It’s called The Wall Street Game.” And they interacted. And then they took the second subgroup and they said to them, “You’re going to play a game now. It’s called The Community Game.” Now, even though they played the exact same game, there was much more competition among the participants in the first group, The Wall Street Game versus the second group that were much more likely to cooperate, to help each other, to work together. So merely framing our goals, our objectives, our projects in a different way can sometimes make all the difference between cut-throat competition and benevolent cooperation.

Laine Perfas: Even though things globally are a lot better now than they’ve been, there’s still a lot of suffering in the world. It made me wonder if optimism is a privilege, if it’s a privilege to be able to feel optimistic even to the point where maybe you take progress for granted?

Pinker: I think it’s the other way around. In fact, if you look at measures of optimism across countries, it’s the rich countries that are pessimistic. That’s the luxury. In fact, I think the most pessimistic country in the world is France. That’s a pretty nice place to live. And the most optimistic, for a while it was, I think it was China. And I think Kenya was pretty optimistic. Partly it’s the slope. It’s the trajectory. The improvement that people see in their lives. But, and this goes back to Tal’s point on the salubrious effects of gratitude and appreciation. I hate to say, this is a national stereotype and a cliche to say that the French are spoiled. But by human standards, they have it pretty good. But in many ways it’s pessimism that’s the luxury, at least if it comes in the form of blowing off the good fortune that your ancestors worked very hard to attain. Because again, good things don’t happen by themselves. It’s easy to pocket the gains and forget that they’re not the natural state of affairs, but they themselves are the hard-won achievements of our predecessors.

Nelson: And I think Tal’s framing of toxic optimism, I think if you have toxic optimism amongst elites, there is a danger of lack of empathy and compassion. And, the infamous, the poor can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and total lack of understanding that they don’t have bootstraps and probably not boots. And that so many communities do need support and help.

Ben-Shahar: The key to my mind here, the emphasis needs to be on effort. So when you have a country emerging from poverty, there’s a great deal of effort that millions and sometimes billions of people have to invest. And why is effort so important? Steve, we were talking earlier about, how you can have a national character that is spoiled. Why? Because in some ways, not in all ways, but in some ways, things have been too easy. Now, if we go to the gym and all the weights are on zero, and we lift those, we’re not going to get stronger. In fact, our muscles over time are going to atrophy. In other words, we need resistance in order to grow stronger. We need hardships and difficulties in our lives to a point.

Laine Perfas: How do we break out of this pessimistic cycle that we have found ourselves in?

Pinker: I would like to see the news media have a bit more of a historical perspective. And by that I don’t mean going back to the writings of de Tocqueville in the 19th century or ostentatiously erudite allusions to the Romans but just in presenting an event, you put it in statistical context, put it in the context of the last five years, 25 years, 50 years. I would like to see the news section of the paper take some lessons out of the business section and the sports sections, where they present everything in statistical context. The sports page is not optimistic in the sense of only reporting when your team wins or pessimistic in only reporting when it loses. Either way, it gets reported and you read the standings every day. Likewise, the stock prices and commodity prices and so on. I think there should be realism in terms of opinion journalism and the opinion industry in general of what we can reasonably expect. That is, can a politician really solve the problems of unemployment and inflation and energy and national well-being? It’s a recent idea that that is part of the job description of a president, to control the economy and the national mood. But just to remember, our politicians themselves are humans, with all their flaws, with many constraints, and not to lead to a situation where trust in all institutions is plummeting, in part because our expectations are that they have near magical powers, which they can never live up to, leading to this cycle of cynicism and fatalism.

Ben-Shahar: Steve, I love the fact that you essentially recommended reading the sports section of the newspaper, which I must admit is my favorite. And then on top of that, what I would add is, the approach of the field of positive psychology and what’s unique about it is that it changes the questions that we ask. Traditional psychologists or psychotherapists would begin perhaps the session by asking, “What’s not working in your life?” Or, “What’s wrong?” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s not working in your relationship? What do you want to fix?” Positive psychology takes these questions and changes them. And a therapist, positive psychologist, would first ask, “What’s going well in your life? What’s working? We’ll of course get to the problem. We’re not ignoring them. But let’s begin with what is going well.” Or a couple’s counselor would ask, “What’s working in your relationship? You wouldn’t be here if nothing was working.” And what the evidence shows is that when we start with these questions, we energize the individual, the relationship, the team, we’re in a much better place from which we can deal then with the difficulties, hardships, and failures.

Nelson: My former boss, the late Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the U.N., used to talk about coalitions for change. And I think coalitions, whether they be within a community or they’re within an industry sector or at a national level, if one can build coalitions with initially a small group of people who have that sense of purpose, I think that’s another way to overcome cycles of pessimism and to build larger groups around a common agenda.

Laine Perfas: For my last question, I wanted to get a little bit personal, not too personal, but as you all navigate the world, I’m sure you’ve got your rough days. I’m sure you’ve got your days where you’re like, this is a mess. How do you stay hopeful?

Pinker: I try to compartmentalize. Ignoring worries won’t make the problems go away. They have to be dealt with, but not to let them invade your consciousness 24/7, as much as possible, to decide when you’re going to be in problem-solving mode. I try not to deny myself simple pleasures. There’s some things in life that are just guaranteed to make you happy: good food and good company, and you deserve those too. Put things in perspective: What’s the worst that can happen if I don’t solve this problem or if this fear comes to pass, will I fall apart? Prioritize what’s important in life: human relationships, being a person that I can respect, accomplishing my longer-term goals, and try not to get sidetracked by distractions that ultimately won’t count for much. A set of tricks like that, but not least, not depriving yourself of sources of guaranteed pleasure because the world has no shortage of stressors and toxic stimuli.

Nelson: To me, it’s family and friends and trying to be very intentional every day. And I travel a lot and being very conscious of checking in with people I love and who I know love me. I, like Tal, journal and have a gratitude journal. And I think, doing that very consciously every day, one realizes just how blessed we are and how much joy we often have in our lives, even when things are challenging and difficult. I meditate and I love getting out in nature. And then I think just the constant reminders of encounters with people who have demonstrated amazing resilience or courage in overcoming challenges. And in my work, I am incredibly blessed and privileged to meet a lot of people like that. And just a reminder of just how many amazing, remarkable, inspiring people are there in the world. And those numbers definitely outweigh the people who are bad and, being constantly aware of that is what keeps me very positive and hopeful for the future.

Ben-Shahar: So I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal since the 19th of September, 1999. Not because I read the research then. The research didn’t come out until 2003. But because Oprah told me to do so, actually on one of her shows she mentioned the gratitude journal. And I thought, wow, what a lovely idea. And I tried it and again, I didn’t need the research that came much later to convince me how helpful it is, but there is another thing that I do. And I credit one of my other teachers with that, and that is the late Daniel Wagner. His research on ironic processing points to a very important point within the field of positive psychology, and that is that the first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness. The paradox is that when we experience sadness or anxiety, and our response to that is, “I shouldn’t be sad or I don’t want to be, or I shouldn’t be anxious,” the sadness and anxiety only intensify. The paradox is that when we accept and embrace them, when we give ourselves the permission to be human, that is when they do not overstay their welcome. Simply observe. Simply accept. Simply be with the emotion. The first step to happiness is allowing in unhappiness.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this really great conversation.

Nelson: Thank you.

Pinker: Thanks, Jane, Tal, and Sam.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to see all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.



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What happens next in Ukraine?

Russian policy expert examines recent deployment of North Korean troops, possible fallout of U.S. elections


Alexandra Vacroux.

File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Nation & World

What happens next in Ukraine?

Russian policy expert examines recent deployment of North Korean troops, possible fallout of U.S. elections

5 min read

The recent deployment of North Korean troops to aid Russia against Ukraine and the weak response from the international community could lead to a potential escalation of the conflict, warned Russian policy expert Alexandra Vacroux.

“The deployment of North Koreans to fight in the war is an escalation of exactly the kind Russia has been warning NATO not to consider, which is to say, ‘Don’t put foreign troops on the ground,’” said Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Vacroux spoke from Kyiv, where she is spending her academic leave as vice president for strategic engagement at the Kyiv School of Economics.

“And what has been the U.S. response?” she asked. “Well, pretty much so far, the geopolitical equivalent of thoughts and prayers. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had said that this was very, very serious. Apart from that, there has been no reaction.”

During a Monday webinar, Vacroux spoke about the current state of the war in Ukraine as it nears the third anniversary of the Russian invasion and the future of the conflict in the aftermath of the U.S. elections. She called on the U.S. and the international community to help end the war with security guarantees that can deter future Russian aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine’s long-term security is not only in that nation’s interest but also in ours, she said.

“It is in the interest of the United States to defend democratic values and stand up to dictators,” said Vacroux. “You might not care about Ukraine all that much, but if you care about a stable world order, American trade and influence abroad, and about reducing Russia’s influence in American politics, you should be wondering what we can do to help Ukraine negotiate a just and secure conclusion to the war, and be grateful that the Ukrainians are fighting and dying so that we don’t have to.”

The webinar was sponsored by the Davis Center, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

The conflict is largely taking place in the southern part of Ukraine, where Russia has seized 18 percent of Ukrainian territory and subjugated around 5 million people, she said.

U.S. officials estimate as many as 115,000 Russians have been killed and 500,000 wounded so far. And they put Ukrainian casualties at more than 57,500 killed and 250,000 wounded.

The situation may get worse as Russia has intensified drone and missile attacks against Ukraine. Citing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Vacroux said that Russia this past week launched 900 guided aerial bombs, 500 drones, and 30 missiles against Ukraine.

“Apartment buildings are being hit regularly, and particularly in the East, in Kharkiv, for example, and civilians in Kherson, which is in the south, report that they’re being chased in the street by armed drones,” said Vacroux, who spent part of this past Sunday in her closet during a five-hour Russian air raid and drone attack.

Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August managed to bring the war to Russia, and even though the territory taken was small, the offensive had an important symbolic value, said Vacroux.

It is unknown what effect the North Korean deployment ultimately may have. That nation has been providing artillery shells to Russia since 2022, noted Vacroux.

Vacroux also discussed the potential impact of the U.S. elections on Ukraine’s support. American funding is critical for Ukraine to keep fighting against Russia. Congress appropriated more than $113 billion to support the country’s response efforts, and so far, the U.S. has sent more than $60 billion in military and humanitarian aid to help the embattled country.

Former President Donald Trump has said that he views Ukraine as mainly Europe’s problem, which could affect future U.S. funding if he becomes president. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the situation may look more promising for Ukraine, but there are no guarantees if Congress ends up being divided after the election.

In her final remarks, Vacroux praised the resilience of Ukrainian society, and asked for more international pressure on Russia and renewed military and diplomatic efforts to ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.

“Ukraine will only stop fighting if it can be sure that Russia will stop fighting and not use a ceasefire to rearm and reattack where the world has moved on,” said Vacroux. “Ukrainians are resilient but exhausted, and many people have been displaced more than once … They’re very strong … they’re very motivated, but the stress and the trauma of the past three years are so deep. More than 80 percent of Ukrainians have lost someone that they loved in the war … It’s amazing that they continue getting up, going to work, and fighting for their country in whatever way they can.”


A three-way player: Offense, defense, and design

Economics concentrator, Crimson guard also sells custom sneakers to college, pro athletes


Gabby Anderson painting a pair of shoes.

Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Arts & Culture

A three-way player: Offense, defense, and design

5 min read

Economics concentrator, Crimson guard also sells custom sneakers to college, pro athletes

Gabby Anderson’s dorm room desk does double duty: homework central for microeconomics and statistics during the week, art studio on the weekends.

Her principal medium? The same sneaker models she wears playing guard on the women’s basketball team — along with those she custom designs for clients, including some high-profile professional athletes.

On a recent afternoon Anderson ’26, who lives in Kirkland House, unpacked her brushes and acrylic leather paints from their plastic crate and unboxed a pair of fresh white Nike Air Force 1s. Dipping her flat paintbrush into the red pigment, Anderson began applying the first layer of her planned design: floral patterns and song lyrics set against a background of fiery red and yellow hues. 

“My favorite part is learning peoples’ stories behind why they want their design,” Anderson said. “As I’ve continued to create for people, presenting them with their shoe that expresses exactly what they want brings me so much joy because you see people light up when you do something for them like that.”

Anderson is an economics concentrator with a studio art secondary, balancing academics and athletics with her creative financial endeavor. Her work is recognizable for its bright colors, bold lines, and playful animated style.

Graffiti by Gabby started in 2020 as a pandemic hobby when Anderson was taking high school classes from home in Ohio. Inspired by a design she saw on social media, Anderson decided to paint a pair of her own sneakers.

A pair of wedges painted by Anderson and one wedge says dream with the statue of liberty balancing a basketball.

“Then I had a friend ask me to make them a pair of shoes,” she said. “After that, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of fun, maybe I’ll do it some more.’”

After starting an Instagram page to showcase her work, her designs began getting attention. Her first request for a custom pair of sneakers came during the summer of 2020 nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. Nicki Collen, then head coach for the Atlanta Dream, asked Anderson to design her a pair of sneakers to commemorate Breonna Taylor. 

“I was so excited. I remember she was on ESPN, and they mentioned my name while I was watching,” Anderson recalled. “I freaked out in the car. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my shoes are on ESPN. They just mentioned me,’ And that’s when it hit that I’m doing an actual thing, and this is probably an actual business, and I need to take it seriously.”

While still in high school, she was commissioned to paint sneakers for then-Seattle Storm star Sue Bird, Golden State Warriors’ Moses Moody (who was then at Arkansas), and Delaware Blue Coats’ R.J. Hampton Jr. She designed shoes for a Nike campaign with Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving, and did a series of commissioned paintings for Walmart’s “Beauty in Color” campaign. 

In 2020, she also painted sneakers for all 15 members of Texas A&M University women’s basketball team, designs that reflected a range of messages the players wanted to promote, from heart disease awareness to Indigenous pride and female empowerment.

“Each girl gave me a list of things that they were very passionate about, something that they wanted on their shoe, and I followed up with each of them and was like, ‘Can you tell me more about this?’” Anderson recalled. “I got to learn not only their stories and where they came from, but what makes them who they are, what drives them to play basketball.”

Gabby Anderson playing basketball.

Harvard women’s basketball vs. UMass on Nov. 4, 2024.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

At Harvard, Anderson has been learning more about business through her economics concentration and courses in the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship. In addition to the basketball team, Anderson is involved in the Black Arts Collective and Office for the Arts programming.

She has branched out from sneakers. As a first-year, she painted cleats for New England Patriots player Deatrich Wise Jr., as part of the NFL’s “My Cause, My Cleats” project. Last year she designed 10 pairs of skates for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

She also last year launched her own line of kids’ school supplies — backpacks, lunch boxes, and pencil pouches — tailored toward African American children and emblazoned with the slogan “Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.” The line was inspired by a pencil pouch Anderson had as a child, which had a picture of a little girl who looked like her.

“I want kids to walk into a store and not just see one backpack with a Doc McStuffins or a Princess Tiana on it, but someone who represents them in their youthfulness,” Anderson explained. “I also wanted it to inspire them to be more than just what they see on that bag, which is where I came up with ‘Brilliant, Authentic, AND Black.’ I really wanted kids to understand that you can be all three, and being all three is what’s going to help you thrive in whatever space you’re in.”

Anderson said that school, athletics, and Grafitti by Gabby actually mesh more easily than one might expect.

“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes.”

“In my classes I am learning about different things to do with my business, and my art classes are teaching me new techniques that I can use when I’m making shoes,” she said. “Working with athletes ties directly back into basketball, and my own experiences from that can help me relate to these professional athletes I’m working with.”


The problem with knowing everything

‘Rigor of Angels’ author explains how a Borges character with perfect memory illuminates work of Heisenberg, Kant


Arts & Culture

The problem with knowing everything

Homi Bhabha (left) and William Egginton.

Homi Bhabha (left) and William Egginton.

Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

3 min read

‘Rigor of Angels’ author explains how a Borges character with perfect memory illuminates work of Heisenberg, Kant

The title character of “Funes the Memorious,” a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, suffers a head injury that renders him incapable of forgetting even the smallest detail. Forced to perceive everything at every moment in sharp relief, Funes grieves the ability to experience the world, as others do, in abstractions.

This story of the “perfect observer” helped author William Egginton better understand German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s principles that helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics. It also inspired Egginton to write a book exploring the nature of reality and the different ways humans grasp it through the lenses of three great thinkers: Borges, Heisenberg, and Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant.

At a Harvard Science Book Talk on “The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality,” Egginton was joined by Homi K. Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities. Their conversation kicked off with Egginton reflecting on the book’s themes, including metaphysics, ethics, and cosmopolitanism.

Egginton, the Decker Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and author of several books that cross philosophy and science, called attention to the key theme of epistemic humility, or the idea that there is a fundamental limit to how much we know.

“But we have a tendency to override those limits,” Egginton offered. This is a central idea in Kant’s body of work, known as critical philosophy, and arguably in the literature of Borges and the science of Heisenberg, he said.

The mysteries of quantum mechanics can be summarized, Egginton continued, by the double-slit thought experiment (which later became an actual experiment), in which particles like electrons and photons become wave-like when not being observed, only to revert back to particles when measured. Heisenberg declared that “a particle has no path until we observe it.” Albert Einstein was famously uncomfortable with the notion.

Being perfect in knowledge meant Funes the Memorious could not generalize ideas and experiences, which he experienced as imprisonment — even torture. Egginton likened Funes’ fate to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in which observation of a physical phenomenon automatically constrains our view, putting natural limits on what we can call “reality.”

“We need to remind ourselves that what we’re studying is not nature itself,” Egginton said. “We’re studying nature as it reveals itself to our instruments of knowledge … and this is exactly what Kant was ultimately saying about science, too. It’s not that the world out there doesn’t exist in some kind of radical, solipsistic sense at all. We’re accepting that when you’re trying to do science, you’re doing science about the world as it exists for beings like us.”

The next Harvard Science Book Talk on Nov. 18 features Nobel Prize winner P.J.E. Peebles on “The Whole Truth: A Cosmologist’s Reflections on the Search for Objective Reality


Lesson about election night for media? Winner should be American democracy.

News outlets taking greater care in close, fraught contest, experts say, but moving away from horse-race coverage is healthy idea anyway


Collage of scenes from 2020 presidential election from TV news and Associated Press coverage of the dayslong vote count to workers tallying ballots in Pennsylvania.

Scenes from the week of the 2020 presidential vote, clockwise from top left: CNN covers the ongoing race two days after Election Day; workers tally ballots in Pennsylvania; media organizations gather outside the White House; and an Associated Press editor calls Florida’s results.

Images from AP Getty Images; photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Nation & World

Lesson about election night for media? Winner should be American democracy.

News outlets taking greater care in close, fraught contest, experts say, but moving away from horse-race coverage is healthy idea anyway

7 min read

Every four years, major news organizations spend millions to create a dazzling spectacle out of what broadcast news pioneer Reuven Frank once called “a TV show about adding.” At the center of election night coverage is the race to be first to correctly call who will be the next president.

This year, in particular, news outlets are treading carefully. Polls are showing a virtual toss-up in the combative race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Early voting across the U.S. has been heavy. Rules differ from state to state and have shifted considerably since the 2020 election. Add to that the likelihood of post-election legal challenges and even unrest, television and print news organizations are preparing for a dramatic finale that likely won’t conclude Tuesday night.

“The theater of election night coverage” makes it look as if declaring winners and losers that night is the norm and if that doesn’t happen, “something must have gone wrong,” said Nancy Gibbs, former editor in chief of Time magazine and now the Lombard Director of the Shorenstein Center and Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

“It is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations.”

Nancy Gibbs

So there’s “an enormous obligation on journalists” to inform and remind people again and again that all 50 states have their own distinct rules about when and how votes are counted “and therefore, it is perfectly normal in a close race that it will take longer for some states to report than others, and that is not a sign of voter fraud or vote rigging or any of the other accusations,” she said.

To guard against that, organizations such as The New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press, and ABC News are taking steps to be more aggressive in explaining the variable state regulations to prepare voters for why there may be delays and to be vigilant on election night for signs of misinformation.

“That’s a major worry, that the period between when people vote and when there’s a decision is a very, very troublesome time for misinformation and for manipulation, and I think news organizations are super focused on that,” said Sally Buzbee, formerly a top editor at the Associated Press and until June, executive editor of The Washington Post.

Since 2000, U.S. elections have been “improbably close” Electoral College contests compared to prior elections, which makes tabulating delays “much more likely,” said Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS.

“I think the important thing is for there not to be an information vacuum” that bad actors can fill with confusion and disinformation. While it may not be as splashy or entertaining, news outlets can do a lot of civic good while votes are being counted to minimize predictions based on things like exit polls and instead, get “in the weeds” about state election rules and how that affects the vote counting and validating, he said.

The 2020 election between former Vice President Joe Biden and Trump serves as a kind of cautionary tale for news organizations. It took four days to call the election for Biden.

The tally was slowed by a record number of mail and absentee ballots cast due to the pandemic and ended in a close finish with a margin of victory of just 113,000 votes combined in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

While votes were still being counted election night, the Trump campaign prematurely declared victory. Even after Biden was declared the winner, the campaign, along with some supporters, pushed false accusations about widespread voter fraud, which were later disproved by investigations and recounts and rejected by courts but nonetheless persist to this day.

“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency.”

Sally Buzbee

The very notion of an election night where the results are known hours after the polls close is relatively new. For most of the nation’s history, voting results always took time to come in.

“This is literally how AP started. The results from the West had to come in by Pony Express and then telegraph, and so, it definitely took many days to figure out who had won the presidency,” said Buzbee, currently a Nieman visiting fellow.

The expectation that voters would learn who won sometime after 9 p.m. election night began with the emergence of television in the 1950s.

The industry is now going through a “sea change.” Most major news organizations know “there is still demand for election night and for some spectacle around election night, but … are [also] now keenly aware that there isn’t an Election Day, there’s an election couple days or weeks,” said Buzbee.

Outlets are hoping to head off a repeat of the last election but face some challenges. Newsrooms have seen significant layoffs over the last two years. Some, like NBC, ABC, and the BBC, cut hundreds of jobs in the last two months. Election coverage is expensive, takes many months of careful planning, and isn’t necessarily a money-maker. Still, news organizations think it’s worth the investment and effort.  

“You’re building credibility if you do a good job on election night. If you are accurate, if you are compelling … on election night, then you are doing a good job with a big audience and what you hope is that translates into credibility long term,” Buzbee said.

Gibbs agrees.

“At the most basic level, what is a bigger news story than who is going to be the next president of the United States, who’s going to control the Senate, who’s going to control the Congress, who’s going to be confirming the next Supreme Court justices? Those outcomes have enormous impact on people’s lives and prosperity and health,” so it’s not surprising that news outlets devote so much time and resources to election coverage, she said.

Even if news outlets, especially TV networks, suddenly changed their approach, “even if somehow we dismantled the entire machinery of election night and made it ‘election week,’ I don’t think that that would change the fact that more and more people, especially people who are under 30 or even under 50, have many, many other sources where they’re going to be getting their information,” she said.

Many election officials learned from 2020 and are doing significant public outreach to provide greater clarity around their state’s rules and procedures, hoping to tamp down misinformation and reassure voters that their election is secure and fair, said Fung.

But the responsibility should not be shouldered solely by officials and journalists.

“I think every organization in society, whether it’s a business, or colleges and universities, or high schools, or nonprofits, should do their part to make our democratic institutions work. Obviously, a big part of that is encouraging people to participate in the democracy. But now, more and more, a bigger part [is] keeping people informed and updated” about what’s going on and why, said Fung.

“But I think we all have an individual responsibility as citizens, and then an organizational responsibility, to try to turn down the temperature and keep people informed in this moment of high anxiety on almost all sides.”

On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Gibbs and Fung will join other HKS panelists for “Democracy 2024: The Day After” in the JFK Jr. Forum at 1pm.


WOLF lab is working to document, preserve Native languages

At Harvard, the Linguistics Department wants to revitalize Alabama in Texas


Tanya Bondarenko,.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Tanya Bondarenko.

Photo by Dylan Goodman

Arts & Culture

WOLF lab is working to document, preserve Native languages

At Harvard, the Linguistics Department wants to revitalize Alabama in Texas

4 min read

It’s one thing to be immersed in a language. It’s another to speak it. And Ava Silva ’27, who grew up in the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe’s, wasn’t fluent in Alabama.

“My áapo’s first language is Alabama,” said Silva, using the Alabama word for grandmother. “I could never fully understand it, but … I loved sitting beside her and just hearing her talk.” 

At Harvard, Silva quickly connected with Assistant Professor of Linguistics Tanya Bondarenko. Within months, Bondarenko’s WOLF Lab (Working on Language in the Field) began studying the innerworkings of Alabama. Over the summer, Bondarenko and five linguistics students traveled to the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in East Texas to document, preserve, and revitalize the endangered language.

Alabama is no longer naturally transmitted to Alabama-Coushatta children, Bondarenko explained. “In my community, language is such a beautiful thing, but it’s also a point of pain,” Silva said.

“To know the language is to know the culture, and the culture feeds from the language.”

Ava Silva ’27

For those in her grandmother’s generation, enrolling in primary school brought their first encounters with English. “They were hit with rulers and dealt with some stuff trying to adapt into this English-speaking society,” Silva said. “So there’s a lot of people who didn’t teach their kids [Alabama] because they have that pain with them.”

The pattern sounded familiar to Bondarenko, who specializes in syntax, semantics, and linguistic fieldwork. “These are the stories we encounter all the time,” she said. “Other people come and take their land, try to take everything else from them, try to prohibit people from speaking their language and from doing their cultural practices. It’s heartbreaking, and an important factor in why languages cease to be spoken.

“A lot of languages in the world are endangered, around 44 percent,” she continued. “If the work is not done, we will just lose the languages and even information about those languages completely.”

WOLF Lab provides opportunities for linguists interested in field work and understudied languages. During their visit with the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe this summer, the team worked on elicitations with 19 native speakers to learn how Alabama is spoken today and gather recordings of the language in use. The team collected more than 140 hours of recordings that were already shared with the community and are now being analyzed in Cambridge.

As a community coordinator, Silva helped WOLF Lab identify native speakers. She also partnered with the morphology team to research the verb conjugations.

“To be able to do this project and say, ‘This language is so beautiful and I’m sorry that anyone ever made you feel like it wasn’t,’ has been something I love,” Silva said. “You see them light up and have this moment of healing.”

Jacob Kodner, a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics and member of the lab, noted that many linguistic theories are based on English or other Indo-European languages. “For me, as a linguist, it is particularly important to look at languages that are not Indo-European,” he said. “If we want to have a theory of how language works well, we have to have a better sample size.”

He underscored how many Indigenous languages spoken in North America are “critically endangered,” with low numbers of native speakers. While many North American linguists opt to pursue their studies abroad, he argued they can make a greater impact working with Indigenous communities on this continent.  

“That’s the beautiful thing about the study of linguistics, to learn more about what these languages have in common and how they differ,” Kodner said.

Findings and future plans were presented to the tribal council. The linguists plan to return to the reservation for further field work over the winter and next summer.

As an Indigenous person and a linguist, Silva also believes it’s crucial to document, preserve, and revitalize Indigenous languages such as Alabama. She argued that revitalization work, in particular, helps Native communities come together. But the work carries deep cultural value as well.

“To know the language is to know the culture,” she said, “and the culture feeds from the language.”