AIDS and Interdisciplinary Study

When asked what could possibly be large enough to break down the academic wall between the biological and social sciences, no one would have expected that it would be a predator so small that it is invisible to the naked eye. But, in fact, the global and intellectual effects of one microscopic murderer are beyond the scope of anything we can see. For all of its horror, AIDS is beginning to do what few other problems have been able to accomplish: serving as a catalyst to bring the study of humans as people and humans as organisms closer together than ever before. And one introductory lecture course at Harvard is using the study of AIDS to bridge that gap, too.

The Life Sciences 1 curriculum has taken on the ambitious task of providing curious and over-confident freshmen with a comprehensive survey of elementary biology and chemistry in a mere eight months. Comparable to space food, the material is condensed and not inherently enjoyable, but then again, we’re not eating it for the taste; we consume it for the intellectual calories.

Thankfully though, the curriculum is not dry in the least. This is because the architects and professors of the course have taken on an even greater task than inseminating a lecture hall full of students with a basic knowledge of biochemical sciences. By basing the understanding of scientific concepts in real-world issues, specifically HIV and AIDS, students of the course cannot close their eyes to neither the scientific nor humanitarian side of the public health crisis that faces our world today.

AIDS is the problem that everyone knows exists but no one knows how to solve. Perhaps this is because AIDS is a global issue that defies categorization: it has become so much a social issue that touches development, poverty, and public health, though it is still nothing but a virus. It is at its simplest a microscopic retrovirus and at its most complex an indicator of societal patterns ranging from prostitution to the unequal distribution of wealth and pharmaceuticals.

What was once ignorantly considered solely a gay disease now has now been shown to be biologically nondiscriminatory with regard to gender, race, or socioeconomic status. And while this serves the benefit of breaking down the stereotype surrounding homosexual males, it also opens the door to public ignorance of who is the most at risk today. For instance, the Chicago Department of Public Health reported that African-American women accounted for almost 80 percent of newly diagnosed cases of HIV between 2002 and 2003, even though they made up only 37 percent of the female population. When asked how they would respond to the rise in African-American women contracting HIV during a 2004 Presidential debate, both George W. Bush and John Kerry were at a loss for words. Even the people who have built their public lives on the notion of understanding the American people are growing out of touch with the social spread of this disease.

This lack of understanding of AIDS is what makes it so unsolvable. Its dual nature as both a scientific and societal problem makes it difficult to comprehend on all of its fronts. Those who deal with the proteins and reverse transcriptase are at a loss for how to manage the societal problems that make places such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia veritable breeding grounds for HIV. At the same time, the people who manage the economics, politics, and sociology behind the spread of HIV lack the scientific experience to understand the medicine that serves as the treatment for HIV and will hopefully produce a cure. It is only when these two worlds have overlapped enough to where they can work as one socio-medical unit that HIV/AIDS will have a chance at being vanquished at the hands of humans.

Courses such as Life Sciences 1 are crucial to developing the necessary rapport between the sociological and scientific academic spheres. Harvard’s pre-medical students are inarguably some of the brightest young scientists in the world, but there is also a population of dedicated and innovative students in the social sciences who strive to help alleviate HIV’s reign of terror. By bringing these two groups of students together in a class that interests them both, Harvard is creating a pool of interdisciplinary scholars that will prove invaluable to the pursuit of medical progress.

And that, Harvard, is real intellectual sustenance.



Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.