How do we understand and advance human health?

Alison Hill, Senior Lecturer, Biology

The course will focus on advancements in our understanding of aging and how these insights are changing our perceptions of the inevitability of decline at the end of the human lifespan. Focus on research in cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging in model organisms and applications to human aging. Topics including natural selection and aging, centenarians and longevity genes, calorie restrictions, the epigenome and aging. Ethical questions such as the value of doubling human life span and equal access to innovations will be addressed. Class time will be a mix of lectures, student-led presentations, and writing assignments.

Neil Prose, Professor, Dermatology

'When I go to see my diabetes doctor, I feel that he and I are singing the same song.' This comment from a South African man battling chronic illness underlines the wonderful potential of the patient-provider relationship. We will be using the doctor-patient relationship and the patient experience as a lens to understand the place of illness and empathy in human existence. We will explore concepts of culture and global health. How does culture affect all of us? How might members of marginalized groups in the US and citizens of low and middle income countries experience the processes of illness and healing. Along the way, we will all be learning about ourselves, how it feels to express and receive empathy, and how the simple act of being curious make us better people.

Cross-list: ETHICS 143CNS

Jennifer Hawkins, Associate Research Professor, Philosophy

Examination of ethical issues in the practice of medicine. Course examines the concepts of well-being, autonomy, health, and disease; the ethics of informed consent; problems of capacity assessment; ethics of making decisions for incompetent patients; ethical issues of advance directives; the ethics of legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia. Course also looks at ethical dimensions of decision-making for particular vulnerable groups: elderly dementia patients, permanently unconscious patients, impaired newborns, people with various disabilities. The focus is on clinical medicine, but the course serves also as a foundation for further study in bioethics.

Miranda Welsh, Lecturing Fellow, Thompson Writing Program

In 2015, in the wake of SARS, H1N1, and Ebola, the United Nations and the World Health Organization convened a global team of experts to assess the threat of future epidemics. The team found that outbreaks are becoming more common for a multitude of reasons and we are unprepared to deal with them when they occur. They concluded that without better approaches to prevention and containment, future epidemics are inevitable: a prediction that has come to bear. 

Where are new outbreaks most likely to occur and why? What ecological, sociopolitical, and cultural factors contribute to differences across locales in disease emergence, spread, and the capacity to respond? How have our dominant understandings--or narratives--of disease shaped our preparedness and response efforts to date? In the first third of our course, we will use an interdisciplinary case study of a single epidemic to examine these questions together, via guided readings, writings, and small-group discussions. You will summarize two of the guided readings independently (1 page each) and compose a written analysis of one of them (2 pages). 

In the second two-thirds of the course, you will use your developing interests to form a three-person research team. Throughout the rest of the course, each team will collaborate to research a contemporary epidemic (e.g., cholera, Zika, SARS) and compose a review and synthesis paper about that epidemic (15-20 pages). In the paper, teams will summarize the biology of and public health response to the epidemic and then present three additional narratives of the epidemic, each from a different disciplinary perspective:

1. Ecological: specific environmental conditions and human-environment interactions encourage outbreaks (e.g., El Niño, deforestation, wildlife trade)
2. Cultural/anthropological: specific beliefs, values, norms, or customs (e.g., distrust, stigma, individualism) encourage outbreaks, as do culturally inappropriate interventions
3. Political/economic: specific characteristics of states and sociopolitical systems encourage outbreaks (e.g., by increasing poverty or inequality, by decreasing security or stability)

Each team member will research one of the three disciplinary narratives and present their findings in one of three sub-sections of the review and synthesis paper (3-4 pages per sub-section). Team members will work together to compose: 1) an introduction that summarizes the biology of and public health response to the epidemic; 2) a conclusion that applies the results of all three sub-sections to suggest specific improvements to prevention and/or mitigation efforts (3-4 pages each). 70% of the grade for the review and synthesis paper will be based on the individual sub-section and 30% will be based on the co-written introduction and conclusion; 5% of the overall grade will be based on team member evaluations. 

As you work on the review and synthesis paper, you will be expected to meet with your research team outside of class on a few occasions. Throughout the course, we will use guided workshops and peer review to revise our writing, and you will be expected to consider and incorporate the feedback you receive from your peers and/or professor before submitting a final product.