Faculty Approves Liberalizing of Biology Requirement

The Faculty yesterday passed unanimously a proposal to liberalize the present requirements for Biology concentrators. The vote permits the department to evade the long-standing Faculty rule that all non-Honors students must take at least four full courses in their field of concentration.

Beginning next fall, the Biology Department offer two concentration programs. "Plan number one" will resemble the present four-course minimum program, while "plan number two" will require non-Honors candidates to take only two courses in Biology out of a total of six and one-half courses. Honors students must take two and one-half Biology courses out of eight.

Under plan two, non-Honors concentrators will for the first time be required to take Math 1 and Chemistry 20, in addition to the present requirement of one year of physics and introductory chemistry. Honors students under both plans will have to take the independent research course, Biology 40, and prepare a senior thesis in connection with it.

Next year's double program is designed to satisfy the needs of both those students interested in the study of whole organisms, and those interested in analytical biology, that branch which "uses the tools of the other sciences," Carroll M. Williams, chairman of the Biology department, explained. An adequate program must recognize these two major divisions of modern Biology, he stressed.

Pusey Comments

President Pusey said last night that the change points out an important fact of academic life. "We have an administrative organization, and we have to work and live in it, but as knowledge advances, we have to change," he pointed out. "The advance of knowledge has created a need for flexibility that our departmental structure did not provide." He noted that much of the recent work in biology has been done by chemists and physicists.

George Wald, professor of Biology, hailed the new program as "a recognition that modern biology has reached a molecular level and demands a basic training in physics, mathematics, and chemistry in addition to biology." He explained that the urgent need to make room for these basic science courses "makes it necessary for us to restrict considerably the biology requirements."

Because the new program leaves so little room for biology courses, the Department is engaged in revising its curriculum to offer "as deep and wide a content as possible," said Wald.

New Courses

As part of this reorganization, the Department is planning three new courses for next year.

Donald R. Griffin '38, professor of Zoology, will return from a sabbatical to teach Biology 120. Vertebrate Biology, which will replace Biology 122. The Comparative Anatomy of the Vertebrates, presently taught by Alfred S. Romer, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology.

Keith Porter, the noted electron microscopist from the Rockefeller Institute, will join the University Faculty next fall as professor of Biology, and give a course called "The Cell," which will use the resources of the natural sciences to penetrate to the molecular level, according to Wald.

Matthew A. Meselson, associate professor of Biology, who came to Harvard on Feb. 1 from the California Institute of Technology, will teach a course in molecular biology.

A further revision, the offering of sophomore seminars next year by interested members of the Biology Department, "is under serious consideration," reported Wald.