Med School Announces New Program

The latest Medical School annual report, soon to be released, contains the outline for a joint Harvard M. I. T. program in Health Sciences and Technology which will drastically revise current medical education systems.

Dr. Irving M. London, director of Planning for the Health Sciences and Technology Program, is drawing up the program. It will fill critical needs left unanswered by current medical education and health care administration systems, he said.

The most important of these is the need for medicine to become integrated with the social and technological sciences, London said.

"If one is to address the needs of medical education, it must be meshed with bio-engineering, mathematics, advanced biochemical study, politics, law management and other topics in those two fields," he commented.

The plan will link the Harvard-M. I. T. facilities in engineering and social sciences with medical education.

The program will also eliminate the gaps between undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate medical work.

Finally, the program will cover large areas of basic human biology which, London said, are currently ignored.

The program will teach basic human biology to undergraduates, taking students through predoctoral education and into the postdoctoral period. Dif-ferent curricular programs will provide training for a variety of health care professions.

Studies in mathematics, physics, engineering, social science and management as they apply to health care will be undertaken in the post-graduate levels.

The program, which will encompass 300 to 400 students, was initiated following the report of a joint committee. The committee was set up in 1967 by President Pusey and M. I. T. President Howard Johnson, with Dr. Robert H. Ebert, dean of the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Jerome B. Weisner, provost of M. I. T., as co-chairmen.

The annual report also discusses the Harvard Community Health Plan, which has been criticized as too expensive and poorly located. The plan now encompasses two centers serving more than 6000 people. The centers are located in the Mission Hill-Parker Hill neighborhood, and near Kenmore Square.

Staffed by 29 physicians, the plan offers recently developed services in X-ray and lab tests, and child care.

In another project, the Med School is continuing plans for a $7.8 million Laboratory of Human Reproduction and Reproductive Biology. The report describes the new Laboratory as "a continuing large-scale attack on an area of ignorance that is contributing to one of mankind's most threatening problems."

Student involvement in administration has increased, and voting student representatives now sit on all but five of the Med School's 41 administrative boards.

The report's section on students states, "Both in the area of academic affairs and administrative policy, the students have reportedly proven themselves to be a creative and progressive force in developing the destiny of this school."

Ebert closes the report with an accolade to President Pusey. "Finally, as we move into an uncertain future, may I say that we could do no better than to accept as our guides, the ideals you have so sensitively espoused and gracefully exemplified: abiding loyalty to the high purposes of the University, and a sense of joy in the eternal striving for excellence and enlightenment," Ebert wrote.