Before streaming, before Blu-ray, and before DVDs, the VHS videocassette was the king of video. First launched in Japan in 1976, the format, short for Video Home System, was easy to use, compatible with any television, and affordable. 

After winning the battle for dominance with the Betamax cassette, the VHS ushered in an era of amateur filmmaking, home movie collections, and video store rentals. Recognizing the value of the new format, Harvard curators quickly began amassing materials on VHS. Though no single tally of Harvard’s VHS holdings exists, a 2018 count of audiovisual material says the figure is likely in the tens of thousands. 

But 50 years after its launch, the technology is all but obsolete. The cassettes’ magnetic tape degrades over time, putting curators, archivists, and conservators in a race against the clock to salvage as much as they can before it’s too late. 

In a climate-controlled storage vault, Joanne Donovan recently rifled through stacked cardboard boxes and pulled out a VHS tape titled “Honoring the Wisdom of Experience,” dated Nov. 11, 1995. The tape is part of the papers of Louisa Pinkham Howe, a sociologist and psychotherapist who, among other achievements, testified in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was psychologically damaging to children. 

The tape has not yet been digitized.

“Digitization is very much a priority, considering how ephemeral this format is,” said Donovan, lead archivist for visual materials and recorded sound collections at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. “There’s not as much information available about the history of women, and women of color in particular. There’s a risk of it being lost.” 

The Schlesinger, which collects materials related to the lives of American women, holds about 5,000 VHS tapes. According to Donovan, only about a quarter of the collection is available digitally.

Lately, when videos come back from being digitized, they’re often “snowy,” a sign that the tape was too degraded for a clear capture. 

The VHS era — the mid-1970s through the late ’90s — saw a huge transformation in culture, Donovan explained, and much of it was documented on VHS’ Mylar tape. The Schlesinger’s VHS holdings include materials from the women’s music movement; oral histories; recordings of luminaries such as chef Julia Child, lawyer Florynce Kennedy, and poet June Jordan; and training videos from Lamaze International and the National Organization of Women. 

Elsewhere at Harvard, many items in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s VHS collection come from Joseph Beuys, a German artist and theorist known for embracing new media. 

“Beuys in particular was part of a generation of artists who saw the videocassette as a kind of democratizing medium,” said Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. “It was a way to make art more accessible and less elitist compared with traditional media, like painting, for example.”

But ironically, video art often languished in museum archives.

“You can’t really use the videocassette; you’ll wear it out. So these artworks were underrepresented in our galleries,” Roth said. 

To finally make good on Beuys’ egalitarian vision, Susan Costello, the conservator of objects and sculpture for the Harvard Art Museums, is overseeing a project digitizing analog media, including VHS tapes. 

“You would think it’s pretty easy: You just box everything up and send them over to be digitized. But it’s actually quite a lot of work,” said Costello. “The curatorial department had to put values on all of them, because they’re works of art. We needed detailed condition reports before they left the building so we knew if anything happened to them. Some of the items needed new casing made for them to make it safe to ship them.”

In May of last year, professional art movers loaded about 70 pieces of analog media into a climate-controlled truck and brought them to Harvard Library’s Media Preservation Lab. 

There, head of media preservation Kaylie Ackerman, senior time-based media conservator Melanie Meents, and their teams are racing against the clock to preserve the contents of the fragile plastic cases. 

One problem: sticky shed syndrome. Instead of spooling smoothly off the reel, some poorly preserved tape adheres to the layer below it. 

“If you just play the tape, you start ripping oxide off it, which erases the tape in the most heinous way possible,” Ackerman explained.

The solution is remarkably low-tech: baking. Using special laboratory ovens that are capable of holding a constant steady temperature, Ackerman bakes VHS tapes at 125 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit for up to five days.

“If you can bake the tape at a particular temperature for a particular amount of time, you can temporarily re-cure the material for long enough to get a good preservation transfer,” she said. It’s a high-stakes gamble: There might only be one chance to read the tape before it’s too degraded to try again. 

“The reason we digitize it is that otherwise it would just disappear,” she continued. “These are things that support scholarship, that support research, teaching, and learning throughout the University. It’s important for Harvard to not only have the material, but preserve it, so that in 150 years a new scholar can still work with it as a primary resource.”

During a talk Monday evening at Harvard Kennedy School, a panel of American history scholars and political analysts discussed the forces of the present and the past animating the country’s divisive political climate and whether there remains a path to a more perfect union.

Drew Faust, a Civil War historian and president emerita of Harvard, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a scholar of African American studies and religion at Princeton, said in many respects the schism in today’s U.S., which often feels like a loosening confederation of Red and Blue states, can be traced back to the North/South divide over slavery during the Civil War.

In fact, social scientists and economists have noted the persistence of political and economic differences that remain between former Union and Confederate states.

While there is much ideological and sociological overlap, Glaude cautioned against leaning too heavily on that geographic dichotomy to fully explain the current partisan rift because it “overburden[s] the South” and “feeds the myth that the moral problem resides there, as opposed to in the heart of the nation.”

The discussion was the first in a new series recognizing the country’s 250th anniversary and the need for “straight talk” during “hard times,” said Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard and a New Yorker staff writer, who is moderating the series.

A second event, on April 13, will feature Mitt Romney, who was formerly a U.S. senator of Utah, governor of Massachusetts, and the Republican nominee for president in 2012.

The nation’s history “doesn’t have to be destiny,” said Pete Buttigieg ’04, who served as U.S. secretary of transportation during the Biden administration and mayor of South Bend, Ind., from 2012–2020. He’s currently a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics and a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership.

“We’re actually in one of those rare moments which, for all of the pain and the pathology of being an American right now, could also be an incredibly fertile moment for different patterns, different coalitions, and perhaps a very different electoral map in the near future,” he said.

Whatever comes next, that future has to be truly different, Buttigieg said.

“If there’s one thing I’m preaching right now, it’s that our job as a country and the job of my political party is not to somehow take power, find all the bits and pieces of everything they smashed, remember how it used to look, tape it all back together and serve up the world as it looked in 2022 — because that’s not going to work,” he said.

The panel considered the range of generational, socioeconomic, and educational factors that can improve or worsen divisions and how it’s important to not only think and talk about ways to bridge those gaps, but to take action to make it happen.

“Union doesn’t just come automatically. We’ve had to struggle for union” since the earliest days of the nation’s history, said Faust.

“And so, if we’re going to get to a good place again … it’s going to be because people do something and decide that union matters and that we want to be a nation that is unified,” she said.

Institutions such as universities and the U.S. military still play key roles nurturing union by gathering people from different places, with different values, beliefs, and experiences to live and work together toward a common purpose, Faust and Buttigieg said.

The group was asked whether they thought it was still possible to salvage the term “union” given the divisiveness of our politics and social media’s power to fuel it.

Glaude said that it can be done, but it will require deep reflection about the obligations we have to each other as Americans and what it will take to renew a commitment to working together toward a greater common good.

“What we’ve witnessed over the last 50-plus years is an evisceration of any robust notion of the public good. We’ve become self-interested persons in pursuit of our own aims and ends, in competition and rivalry with each other,” he said.

“What does it mean for us to imagine ourselves differently? That’s not going to come from politicians. It’s not going to come from prophets who were anointed from on high. It is going to come from us, understanding our role.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell expressed confidence in the “resilience” of the U.S. financial system during a visit to Harvard on Monday and said that the Fed will take a “wait-and-see” approach to the economic impact of the Iran war.

Powell spoke at Sanders Theatre with undergraduates in “Principles of Economics,” a macroeconomics course co-taught by Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at the Kennedy School and in the Department of Economics, and David Laibson, Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics. Laibson moderated the talk.

Powell said that the Fed remains committed to its target inflation rate of 2 percent even against headwinds created by U.S.-imposed tariffs and the conflict in Iran. The Federal Open Market Committee thought the goal was within reach in late 2024 when U.S. growth was at 2.5 percent, 12-month inflation was just above 2 percent, and the labor market was essentially at full employment. These data followed a period of serious recession worries among many economists.

“I would call that a soft landing,” Powell said.

Nominated to serve as Fed chair by President Trump in late 2017, Powell was nominated a second time by President Biden in 2021. His term officially ends in May, but he has said that he will remain as chair until his successor has been approved by the Senate.

Historically, the Fed tends not to react when oil and gas prices rise because energy supply shocks are often short-lived, so the central bank will “wait and see” how Iran-related oil prices affect the broader economy and will monitor inflation expectations “very, very carefully” before making any policy adjustments, Powell said.

He expressed deeper concerns about the nation’s balance sheet. Our $39 trillion debt is not the real problem, he said; it’s that the current path Congress is on — spending more than the U.S. is taking in — is “not sustainable.”

“The country has to get back to ensuring that the economy is growing fast enough to keep pace with spending,” he said.

“It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon,” Powell warned.

On emerging threats, Powell said that the Fed has taken significant measures to fortify the U.S. financial system against outsized risks and credit losses like those that fueled the 2008 global financial crisis.

“We have a hugely resilient financial system,” he said.

With the financial sector constantly evolving, what the country needs from the Fed is “vigilance,” not the elimination of all risk, Powell said. “You just need to always know that there’s another thing coming.”

The Federal Open Market Committee is monitoring private credit markets “super carefully,” he said, but at the moment sees no systemic threat to the nation’s financial stability.

Asked by a student about the Fed’s view of employment, Powell acknowledged a tough labor market for younger people. But given U.S. dynamism and growth since World War II, he urged students to be optimistic about the medium- and longer-term economic outlook and to become comfortable and proficient with AI.

Though Powell did not comment on Trump’s nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, he did make a case for the importance of Fed independence and rejected the idea of partisan motives in the central bank’s policymaking.

“We’re not trying to work against any politician or any administration, but we have to be careful to stick to what we’re doing,” he said, adding: “The Fed is not a perfect institution. What we do is very challenging, highly uncertain, but it’s a great American institution and I’m very proud to work with the people I work with.”

Many observers have warned that any effort to interfere with the Fed’s traditional independence from politics would threaten significant harm to the financial system and to the country. “It’s very hard to build great democratic institutions and much easier to bring them down,” Powell said.

The triumph of Homo sapiens over Neanderthals, a huge step in human evolution, was not the clearcut event that paleontologists have long believed.

More likely, it was the result of continued interactions — and even some interbreeding — with modern humans resulting from just one surviving group.

At a Peabody Museum event March 25, Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin drew on cutting-edge research in archaeology, paleogenetics, and paleoproteonomics to examine that transition in Eurasia, tracing the processes that during the Paleolithic period gradually transformed a world of multiple human forms into one inhabited by a single surviving lineage.

Speaking as part of the Hallam L. Movius, Jr. Lecture Series, Hublin, professor at the Collège de France (Paris) and emeritus professor at the Max Planck Society, began by referring to the work of the series namesake, a groundbreaking archaeologist who focused on the Paleolithic.

It was Movius, Hublin said, who first pointed out that the tools — or “industries” — left behind by the different groups hinted at the distribution of these populations.

“If you look at the evolution of paleolithic industries throughout the Old World, you have very different stories depending on what part of the world you are,” he said.

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were quite distinct species, Hublin explained.

For example, although they were likely only separated 800,000 to a million years ago, the skulls and jawbones of these hominins are more markedly different from each other than those of chimpanzees and bonobos, which separated one and a half million years ago.

The two hominin species also, at least initially, lived in different areas, with Neanderthals primarily living in a moderate climate swath that stretched across Europe into Asia, and Homo sapiens living in Africa, before they migrated north in a series of moves.

They were not the only early hominins.

“More than 40,000 years ago, you had all these different hominins existing,” Hublin said. In Eurasia, for instance, two sister groups, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, apparently coexisted. 

“So we have a divide between an African world where our species evolve and a Eurasian world where the Denisovans and the Neanderthals evolve. And at some point, our species replaced all the others,” said Hublin, calling that event, “the most spectacular event in hominin evolution of the last million years and arguably the most important event of the whole human evolution.”

That event was likely the result of a long history of interactions.

“We know from ancient DNA that there were already contacts probably more than 250,000 or 300,000 years ago,” said Hublin.

The proof, he said, lies in the genome of Neanderthals who came after this period, which contain mitochondrial DNA, a part of the genome of the African people, ancestors of present-day humans. This DNA, he said, is transmitted through maternal lineages, suggesting some interbreeding between species.

 This “hybridizing,” or inter-species mating, is now seen as something that happened several times rather than as a one-time occurrence.

Such genetic evidence has countered older theories that postulated that “you have modern humans coming into Europe, moving as a wave, replacing them.” he said. “Reality is more complex.”

Another way to trace these two groups is through their technology. He said hand-held cutting tools, created by chipping away at stone to form sharp edges, are distinctive to their users, and he illustrated the point with a series of slides.

Digs associated with European Neanderthals, for example, are characterized by “shapeless flakes,” according to Hublin. But in areas populated by Homo sapiens, sharpened stones were increasingly focused on a tip, possibly enabling users to put them on the end of a stick or other projectile, making a spear for hunting.

“This prevalence of points and projectiles is something that we see already in Africa before the spread of these hominins into Western Eurasia,” he said.

Some European sites, however, have turned up similarly sophisticated tools. Originally, archaeologists had theorized that Neanderthals had developed these independently, even simultaneously with Homo sapiens. However, newly found Homo sapiens teeth at these sites link the better tools to incursions by our ancestors earlier than had been previously known.

This work was enabled by a new technology developed at the University of York in the United Kingdom. The technology extracts collagen from bone fragments, from which a protein fragment known as a peptide is extracted.

Using a mass spectrometer, which “basically measures the size of this fragment,” said Hublin, researchers can identify differences that are specific to each species.

These findings show that populations of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, perhaps as early as 55,000 to 53,000 years ago, probably separated by topical barriers — mountains, for example.

And while some groups intermingled, given the DNA evidence, other groups likely had more hostile interactions, as indicated by the presence of Homo sapiens bone fragments in the piles of refuse.

The result is a much more complex picture of our origins than had been believed.

“We have exchanges between the two groups at the gate of Africa. We have this integration of mitochondrial DNA microsomes that existed in the past. More recently, we had an integration of Neanderthal DNA into the genome of present-day humans outside of Africa,” he said. “So most people in this room have about 2 percent DNA of Neanderthal origin.”

Most people find disagreeing unpleasant and try to avoid it. But sometimes it’s necessary and can lead to better solutions, or at least a more productive exchange of ideas. The question is: how to remain receptive and avoid the pitfalls of anger and defensiveness?

Faculty, staff, students, and administrators explored this predicament over three days of virtual and in-person lectures and workshops at a March 23-25 Community and Campus Life forum, “Leading With Community.”

“I want each of us to leave with at least one concrete practice that you will try to do differently in your corner of Harvard, in your own lives, or in the world,” said Sherri Ann Charleston, chief community and campus life officer, on the forum’s second day. “You’re going to have a chance to lean in, to hear from your colleagues, to engage in conversation, to try new approaches to building connection across differences.”

President Alan Garber said building skills to work through disagreement is about more than self-improvement. It also speaks to the University’s central mission, noting that “sustaining our academic excellence and nurturing our campus culture are not separate goals.”

“Truth is rarely found in echo chambers,” he said. “Many of the most profound breakthroughs in our understanding of the world and of humanity did not come from consensus. It came from individuals who dared to challenge orthodoxy … If we hope to continue making profound breakthroughs, we must have a community culture that genuinely welcomes the expression of a wide range of views, rooted in different backgrounds, interests, and beliefs.”

Helping the audience develop practical strategies for dealing with diverse views was Julia Minson, professor of policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a behavioral scientist whose first book, “How to Disagree Better,” was released on March 24, the day she spoke.

Minson began her talk by pointing out an inherent tension.

“There is a huge behavioral science literature that says disagreement is good for us, right? When we are really thoughtfully engaged with opposing perspectives, we make better decisions,” she said. When multiple perspectives are taken into account at once, companies are better at forecasting future events and retaining employees. Conflicts are less likely to spiral out of control.

“On the other hand, we hate it, and we try hard to avoid it,” Minson said. “Most regular people tend to not want to engage with views that are dramatically different from their own.”

Throughout her talk, Minson debunked common ideas about disagreement.

For example, when we talk to someone who belongs to a group whose views are in opposition to our own, we tend to believe that person’s views are much more extreme than they actually are. We also believe their views are more simplistic, and we overestimate that person’s level of animosity towards us.

Minson provided some strategies for having more productive disagreements based on her research.

People tend to put a lot of emphasis on their mindset or body language when entering a difficult conversation, but the person on the other side often fails to register — or misinterprets — those cues, she said.

Instead, her research found specific tactics that make the other person feel more respected and heard. A good way to remember them, she said, is to think of the acronym H.E.A.R.: hedge your claims, emphasize agreement, acknowledge other perspectives, and reframe to the positive.

When it came to having better conversations, Minson encouraged attendees to pay less attention to projecting the correct feelings or cues and more to implementing these concrete behaviors.

“It’s relatively easy to train, because we’re not talking about years of therapy,” she said. “We’re talking about: ‘Memorize these words.’”

She broke the audience into groups of three, each with one person assigned to be difficult, another asked to be unfailingly accommodating, and a third to keep track of how many H.E.A.R. phrases the accommodating people used in response to their disagreeable interlocutors.

At the end of the exercise, one attendee said that as hard as she tried to instigate, her partner’s unflinching receptivity and search for common ground made it difficult to remain contentious.

It’s not a rare outcome, Minson said. With some practice, anyone can defuse acrimonious conversations and create reasonable ones instead.

The history of the Earth is written on the great tablets of tectonic plates.

The motions of plates shaped land masses, formed oceans, and created the varied climates and habitats that set the stage for evolution and the diversity of life.

But this grand drama begins with a deep mystery: Just when did the continental and oceanic plates begin to drift? Did the lithosphere begin to move soon after the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago or only in the last billion years?

A new study by Harvard geoscientists shows the oldest-yet direct evidence of plate movement about 3.5 billion years ago. In a study published recently in Science, the team showed that plate movements — though not necessarily the modern type — shaped the early history of our planet.

“There has been a huge range of ages suggested for timing,” said lead author Alec Brenner, Ph.D. ’24, who conducted the research in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “With this study, we’re able to say 3.5 billion years ago, we can see plates moving around on the Earth surface.”

The new revelations came from some of the oldest well-preserved rocks in the world, the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which contains formations from the Archean Eon, a period from 4 to 2.5 billion years ago when the Earth was hosting early microbial life and under bombardment by astronomical objects. The Pilbara area contains evidence of some of the earliest known life, stromatolites and microbialite rocks deposited by single-celled organisms such as cyanobacteria.

A team led by Professor of Earth and Planetary Science Roger Fu has been conducting research in East Pilbara since 2017. Fu specializes in paleomagnetism, a branch of geophysics that examines changes in the Earth’s magnetic fields to reconstruct the early history of the planet. Last year, the team published a paper about an ancient meteor impact at the same site.

In addition to revealing the properties of the Earth’s magnetic field, paleomagnetism can also be used to track the motions of plates. By analyzing the magnetic signals of ancient mineral grains, the researchers can infer the orientation and latitude of the rocks at the time of formation — thus using the ancient samples like paleo GPS units.

“Almost everything unique about the Earth has something to do with plate tectonics at some level,” said Fu. “At some point, the Earth went from something not that special, just another planet in the solar system with similar materials, to something very special. A very strong suspicion is that plate tectonics started Earth down this divergent track.”

In the new study, the researchers analyzed more than 900 rock samples collected from more than 100 sites scattered across an area called the North Pole Dome.

They extracted cylindrical samples, or “cores,” using an electric drill with a hollow bit and diamond teeth, kept cool by a hand-pump garden sprayer. Afterward the position of the sample was precisely recorded with an instrument inserted into the hole containing a compass and goniometer (a device for measuring angles).

Back at Harvard, the cores were sliced into sections like cookies, lined up on trays, and placed in a magnetometer, a machine that can measure magnetic signals 100,000 times fainter than a compass needle. The samples were repeatedly measured while being heated to progressively hotter temperatures up to 590 degrees Celsius until the magnetite minerals lost their magnetization. The step-by-step heating allows researchers to isolate magnetic signals from different periods in the rock’s history. All told, the analysis took about two years.

“We took a really big gamble,” said Brenner, now a postdoc at Yale. “Demagnetizing thousands of cores takes years. And boy, did it pay off! These results were beyond our wildest dreams.”

In ferromagnetic minerals, the orientation of the electrons serves like a compass needle pointing toward the magnetic pole. The electron orientation also provides hints about the position on the 3D globe relative to the magnetic pole when the rock formed, providing an indication of latitude.

By analyzing a series of rocks spanning 30 million years just after 3.5 billion years ago, they found that part of the East Pilbara formation shifted in latitude from 53 degrees to 77 degrees — a drift of tens of centimeters annually over several million years — and rotated clockwise by more than 90 degrees. Within about 10 million years, the motion slowed, followed by a period of little motion.

To compare this movement with Archaean sites elsewhere, the researchers examined a contemporary site in South Africa, the Barberton Greenstone Belt. Previous paleomagnetic studies showed that the latter was located near the equator and nearly stationary during the same time interval. Apparently the two distant regions had different patterns of drift.

In the modern world, the North American and Eurasian plates are moving away from each other by about 2.5 centimeters, or 1 inch, per year.

Lids, ‘dynamo action,’ and more

It remains an open question when and how the Earth took on its current form of plate tectonics, which geophysicists call an “active lid.” Various theories posit that the early Earth had a “stagnant lid” (a single unbroken global plate), a “sluggish lid” (slowly moving plates), or “episodic lid” (plates moving sporadically). The new study rules out a stagnant lid but cannot distinguish which model of plate movement was most likely; the Fu team is pursuing additional studies to answer this question.

“We’re seeing motion of tectonic plates, which requires that there were boundaries between those plates and that the lithosphere wasn’t some big, unbroken shell across the globe, as a lot of people have argued before,” said Brenner. “Instead, it was segmented into different pieces that could move with respect to each other.”

The team also discovered the oldest-known case of a geomagnetic reversal — a phenomenon in which the magnetic field of the planet occasionally flipped. After a reversal, a compass needle would point south instead of north.

This phenomenon is believed to be governed by the “dynamo action” involving the convection of molten iron in the Earth core that produces electrical currents and magnetic fields. The last reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago.

Fu said the new evidence suggests that 3.5 billion years ago, reversals occurred less frequently than in more recent history. “It’s not by itself conclusive, but it suggests that maybe the dynamo was in a slightly different regime than today.”

For Dmitry Yakushkin, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a confrontation that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, remains an ideal case study of conflict resolution.

Yakushkin, who worked as press secretary for Russian President Boris Yeltsin from 1998 to 2000, spoke Wednesday at the Davis Center about the lessons of the crisis, sharing highlights from his upcoming book based on negotiations between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

The two leaders exchanged 10 letters during the 13-day confrontation, from Oct. 16 to 28, including a six-page dispatch from Khrushchev to Kennedy. The crisis ended when the Soviets agreed to remove missiles from Cuba in exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade the island and a secret pledge from Washington to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. 

“We’re talking about political leaders who were moved by an enormous sense of responsibility and fear for the world,” said Yakushkin, whose book was born out of a course on conflict resolution that he now teaches at the University of Tel Aviv. “Their interaction proves that you can talk yourself out of everything if you put in the effort … It’s better to start talking than firing because after firing, it will be much more difficult, in some cases, maybe even impossible, to talk.”

In the moment, Khrushchev sought to maintain the image of a strongman, said Yakushkin, but the Soviet leader would later share his worries for the fate of humanity in books written by his son Sergei. For his part, Kennedy had been vocal about his hope to prevent a nuclear war.

“Mankind must put an end to war — or war will put an end to mankind,” he said in a 1961 speech before the United Nations.

It would be months before the U.S. and the Soviets would sign a hotline agreement, in June 1963; as the crisis unfolded, no direct line of communication existed between the two countries.

“It sounds crazy for a modern audience, right?” Yakushkin said. “Time was precious, and yet they couldn’t call each other.”

To further complicate matters, Kennedy and Khrushchev had to deal with the seven-hour time difference between Moscow and Washington, as well as the delay created by the need to translate their correspondence. Yakushkin noted a possible silver lining: The circumstances of the negotiations may have prevented a quick reaction from either superpower, which could have escalated the crisis to a point of no return.

In studying the letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, Yakushkin found parallels between the two leaders despite their different backgrounds and ideologies. Both had war experience — Khrushchev served as a political commissar during World War II, while Kennedy fought in it — and both lost loved ones to the conflict. And both leaders were curious about the world beyond the demands of their offices, Yakushkin said. The letters contain comments about family and vacations and are marked by a common humanity, which might have played a role in the resolution of the crisis.

“Both Kennedy and Khrushchev were the products of different societies, and yet they shared a lot of things in common,” said Yakushkin. “In their letters, they revealed themselves as human beings.”

He added: “Everything pushed them … not to resolve the crisis and somehow, they managed to do it … In terms of world politics, that may seem simplistic, naïve, or sentimental, but in today’s atmosphere, for me, the human factor is important. Even in decisions like starting a war or sending troops, the human factor in each person is very important, and that’s what, for me, was precious in this story.”

On any other day, junior Hugh Mackay’s blasting bagpipes would have been less than welcome outside Hollis dorm so early in the morning.

On any other day, Economics Professor David Laibson might have raised eyebrows prancing in front of University Hall with smurf-blue hair and Mardi Gras beads.

And on any other day, Xavier Ayala-Vermont ’27, attired in an inflatable lion suit, would have been doomed had he summited the statue of John Harvard in the Yard waving a Winthrop House flag — right in front of the Harvard University Police.

But this was no ordinary morning.

Friday was Housing Day, the joyful annual tradition in which students from the 12 College Houses stream into the Yard in a raucous show of pride before splitting up to storm the adjacent first-year dorms and welcome those students with the housing assignments that will shape their residential life over the next three years.

So Mackay’s bagpipes barely registered over the din — bullhorns and Bluetooth speakers, cowbells and clapping — emanating from the west side of University Hall.

Ayala-Vermont got a steadying hand and even a fist bump from the HUPD.

And Laibson, co-faculty dean of Lowell House, whooped it up with his arms in the air, basking in the sort of cheers — “DAV-ID! LAIB-SON!” — that might otherwise greet a Celtics power forward.

“This is a wonderful day for the students to show their spirit and kind of shed the super-academic, super-intense [persona] and just really be fun College students enjoying a little healthy competition,” said Nina Zipser, Laibson’s wife and fellow Lowell House faculty dean, straining over the reggaeton classic “Gasolina” and the bang of a chalk-bomb party popper, which released a plume of yellow dust over the crowd.

Zipser, who also serves as dean for faculty affairs and planning in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, applied the dye to Laibson before they marched over at 7 a.m. in “a big blue mass” with the Lowell crowd, finding Kirklandians — typically first to the statue — and Winthrop House residents, having pulled overnight statue-side shifts.

Lowell claimed the southwest stairs of nearby University Hall, with some students wielding swords and wearing chain-mail suits with the “Blue Man” House crest, others attired in flannel Lowell pajama pants.

“This is what spirit in your University and your House is all about,” said Danoff Dean of Harvard College David Deming, ostensibly dispassionate (though he betrayed his roots as a former Kirkland faculty dean by bringing bagels to the Kirkland students by the statue at 7:15).

“It’s not really about the House itself. It’s the sense of community that it builds, the things you do together with your friends,” Deming said. “You don’t get this from having some big corporate dorm where everybody lives or from living off-campus.”

When Adams House arrived, sophomore Tess Straw blitzed the yard in her own crimson-and-gold scarf and a long military dress coat loaned by the House.

The braided-gold epaulets and brass buttons of the outerwear, however, suggested that Straw’s version of John Adams had left the Continental Congress to lead a marching band or perhaps invade Prussia.

“This is fun itself, but it’s a totally different experience to be inside all these housing buildings around us right now, listening to this, knowing your House is going to come get you,” she said, drawing festive Adams-insignia acorns on the ground using a condiment bottle of dyed chalk dust.

As her fellow students hurled slogans back and forth, Straw’s friend Arthur Tao bounded over in a green bodysuit, Leverett House T-shirt, and light-up bunny ears — the rabbit mascot inspired by the hares on the Leverett House shield. The two greeted one another with smiles and goodwill.

Just then, the Mather crew stormed the Yard.

Tao raised a green vuvuzela and blasted the plastic horn in their direction with take-that might, before shrugging it off. “I know Leverett’s the best,” he said.

Regardless of the House, he added, “It’s really cool to see the School come together as a community, because that’s not always common.”

To foster more of that spirit, Housing Day was moved from the Thursday before spring break to the Friday after to relieve the stress of conflicting with midterms and to scaffold more events into a “Spirit Week” without having everyone immediately depart.

That meant not just the late-night food trucks on Thursday and the customary new-House welcome dinner Friday night, but also a dodgeball tournament followed by the second annual “Johnnies” on Saturday. The Oscars-style ceremony honors the best student-made Housing Day music videos, with winners taking home coveted John Harvard statuettes.

In this case the University founder eschews his traditional seated pose to celebrate, as the tagline notes, “videos so good John Harvard stands up for them,” said Harvard College Dean of Students Thomas Dunne, a veteran of several institutions, deeming Housing Day “the best college tradition anywhere.”

Shortly before 8:20 a.m., students started storming the dorms, and soon first-years were converging on the grass to compare notes, hugging and shouting things like, “You got Adams too?! Yeah, baby!”

First-year Olukayode Ekundare wore a big smile.

He had watched the scene from up high in Hollis with friends since 6 a.m. and was thrilled when the upperclassmen finally burst in — “jumping up and down, playing music, bang-bang-bang on the door.”

He was happy to get Currier — but had to dash. It was just past 9, and he was late for a lecture.

The Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of human equality, is akin to America’s “vision statement,” said Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History. He sees the Constitution, threaded with compromises on individual rights, as more like the country’s “operating manual.”

“The disjunction between the vision statement and the operating manual is part of the dilemma of the United States and its history,” he said.

Deloria was one of three faculty from Harvard’s History Department to join filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein for a conversation that mined the nation’s founding for lasting lessons. The March 25 event, co-presented with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was offered as part of the History Department’s “Harvard in 1776” series. It showcased Harvard experts who appear in Burns and Botstein’s new PBS documentary, “The American Revolution.”

“It’s only fitting that we’re doing this with these people on stage,” said moderator Bruce H. Mann, Carl F. Schipper Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who quipped that the 12-hour series is “largely told by the Harvard History Department,” including six of its current and former faculty (with interviews featuring the late Bernard Bailyn).

The audience at the Knafel Center was treated to clips from each of the film’s six episodes. Panelist Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and a professor of African and African American studies, was seen talking about how Britain’s 18th-century colonies in the Caribbean, with their vast numbers of enslaved laborers, were far more profitable and powerful than those on the Atlantic seaboard. Panelist Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of history, covered Thomas Jefferson, primary drafter of the Declaration, and his lifelong relationship to slavery, an institution he knew was wrong. Deloria recalled that Continental Army recruits were promised Native American land.

The documentary foregrounds community impacts — including those felt by women, enslaved Black Americans, and the poor who came to dominate Gen. George Washington’s army — in uncovering the Revolution’s complex military and political history.

“We want the film to be somewhat inspirational, a little bit patriotic, and for audiences to care about American history — to care about where we’ve been, so they can understand where we are now and how to fight for a better future,” Botstein said.

Mann asked how that telling differs from what panelists grew up with.

“One of the things you get from the documentary is that this has always been a multiracial, multicultural country,” said Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (2008). “Growing up in Texas, the vision I got was that it was a story from when the country was white.”

“For me, one of the things that’s been so lovely is that Ken and Sarah have been so committed to surfacing Native American stories,” said Deloria, whose research focuses on the history of relations between Indigenous peoples and the U.S.

The conversation kept returning to the aspirational language found in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It was a “time-bomb of possibility,” observed Burns, noting its immediate resonance with those on the margins of late-18th-century society.

The filmmaker credited President Abraham Lincoln, among others, with later elevating the Declaration and its ideas to the lofty status they now enjoy in the popular imagination. “It’s very interesting that the Gettysburg Address, which we argue is one of the great speeches, begins with a nod to the Declaration — not to the Constitution,” he said.

Drawing further on the disharmony between these documents, Deloria articulated a “mission” standing before Americans today. “How do you take the utopian content of ‘all men are created equal, all people are created equal’ and reconcile that with all the compromises found in the Constitution and all the history that has ensued since?”

To that point, Mann closed by asking what the Revolution can teach the nation on its 250th birthday.

“This is probably the first time that I thought more about the grievances of the Declaration than the Preamble,” answered Gordon-Reed, referring to the document’s lengthy list of charges against King George III. “You start thinking, ‘What does tyranny mean? What were these people rebelling against?’ The lesson is that the experiment is ongoing. The people have to be vigilant; they have to be involved.”

Deloria underscored Gordon-Reed’s point with a story from rural Michigan, where he proposed a community reading of the Declaration last summer. “Many people said, ‘No, it’s too political,’” he recalled. “I think what that tells us is we must fight. Not only for the principles in the Declaration, but for the right to speak the Declaration itself.”

On April Fool’s Day 1976, two college dropouts, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and a friend, Ronald G. Wayne, formed a company from the garage of Jobs’ parent’s house in Los Altos, a small city in Silicon Valley then in its infancy.

For the cheeky price of $666.66 (Wozniak liked repeating digits), buyers could get what they called the Apple-1, a “Woz”-engineered, personal computer consisting of a bare circuit board with an 8-bit microprocessor and 4K of RAM — monitor, keyboard, and power supply sold separately.

The Apple-1 was only capable of running elementary programs and games. Two hundred were made.

It may have seemed foolhardy then to push a product few Americans were even aware existed. But 50 years later, Apple is among the most popular and iconic consumer brands and, with a $3.8 trillion valuation, one of the world’s most successful companies.

In these edited reflections, Harvard analysts explain how Apple has transformed the personal computing, music, and communications industries. It has also revolutionized marketing and advertising, industrial and product design, and retail, and helped shift our relationship to tech — and, arguably, to one another.

Our experts include David B. Yoffie, Baker Foundation Professor, Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration, Emeritus; Marc Aidinoff, assistant professor of the history of science; and Jill Avery, senior lecturer of business administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator.

Invented three industries

Yoffie: I would put Apple alongside of IBM, Ford, and General Electric — one of the most important American companies to emerge during its period of explosive growth because they impacted so much of American life and the way American business has operated.

When I think about Apple’s contribution, I start by thinking that they fundamentally invented three new industries, all of which have had a huge impact on mankind. The first one being the personal computer. Apple II was really the first real personal computer.

Second is what they did with the iPod, which was essentially a redesign of the entire music industry.

And the third is the iPhone, which has become the single most successful consumer electronic product in history of the world by almost any definition. It revolutionized personal communications.

So, at a very fundamental level, Apple has revolutionized the way in which we live our lives, in addition to becoming one of the most successful companies in the history of the world.

A user story

Aidinoff: As a historian of technology, I would flip that around to say they created the users for those things.

They taught people that they wanted and could use things in this way, that we could take a computer, which is a tool for doing advanced mathematics, and they taught us we can carry it around on our phone in our pockets, do music recommendations.

So, I think of that as a user story as much as a they-created-the-category story.

The secret sauce

Yoffie: This was part of Steve Jobs’ genius — his ability to figure out products that people wanted, even though they didn’t know they needed it.

It was not obvious at any point along the history of computers that you were going to have a graphical user interface and a mouse. It was not obvious to people that they wanted to keep all of their music on a small, single device.

Similarly with the iPhone, no one really believed that you could do this multitouch, internet-access device and make it so broadly functional until Steve was able to demonstrate the power of what it could deliver. That’s been their secret sauce.  

Changed what a computer is

Aidinoff: What Apple does is it fundamentally changes what a computer is. The idea that a computer is something that I’m going to carry around in my pocket with hundreds of thousands of times more computer than the Apollo Project, that’s something Apple does through a whole bunch of technical innovation along the way, but also through changing cultural expectations of what a computer would be, teaching users how to use computers in different ways.

There are distinct technological pieces that people will credit Apple for, things that are really exciting in terms of chip design or in terms of operationalizing the graphical user interface, but it’s the way they package it all together that matters.

Products as heroes

Avery: Apple is one of the pre-eminent examples of a company that does branding, brand storytelling, and marketing incredibly well.

They started with an underdog brand biography. They positioned themselves against everybody else, as the little guy, as the different guy, coming into the market to take on the behemoths that had ruled for a long time.

They talk about their products as heroes. They talk about the functionality and the usability of their products, but they’re not just selling functional value. They’re selling the emotional value of consumers interacting with their products. They’re selling what we call “ego-expressive” or “identity value” — that Apple products are for people who are different, who are more creative, who think differently.

What that means is when someone uses an Apple product, it makes them feel different than if they were using a PC or another brand’s products. It makes them feel more creative, different than others and able to think differently. Users believe the Apple story. They buy into it.

Sticking it to the Man

Aidinoff: There’s a historian at Stanford who tracks the way Apple, in particular, took leftist hippie counterculture and commercialized it and made a computer resonant with those cultural impulses and “Stick it to the Man” individualism.

It’s hard to overstate from our present how much computers were seen as calculating machines for the military. You literally had people in the ’60s bombing computer centers as an act of protest against The Man. And so, the idea that a computer would be a cool, fun thing to listen to Nirvana on — that’s really changing what it means.

Not like George Orwell’s ‘1984’

Avery: That Macintosh launch ad in 1984 goes down as one of the best ads ever shown on the Super Bowl, if not one of the best ads overall.

It crashed into the market, positioning Apple against the big guys, against the corporate mainstream, and against what was expected of professionals and showed people that there was a new choice, an innovative choice, a different choice. That was one of the big starting points for the brand’s trajectory.

The “Think Different” ad campaign featuring images of Gandhi and Einstein and other creative thinkers throughout history was another classic ad campaign that really cemented the image of the brand in people’s minds.

Trust the product

Aidinoff: Apple has taken privacy really seriously in the era of Facebook and where other companies are selling your data. They’ve decided it’s in their best interest to make you really trust the product. Who knows how that’ll change with their partnership with OpenAI — I’m quite worried it will.

But you think of the fights they had with Facebook about five years ago, where all the Apple ads were about “Unlike, Facebook, we’ll keep your data private.” That is another thing that really helps them in what could have been a turbulent time.

Look good, feel good

Avery: Steve Jobs never saw design as a gimmick. He saw aesthetics as an essential part of creating value.

In the product categories he was going into, the products all looked the same. They were boxy, they were black or gray, they just didn’t have a lot of aesthetic value.

He felt that a desktop computer, and eventually, a phone, was something that you were going to interact with all day long and so it was really important for it to have aesthetic value and to create an aesthetic connection.

He invested heavily in design. This is a brand that realized that function alone is not enough, but function plus aesthetic design can create an incredible connection with the consumer and an incredible sense of value for the product.

It’s been a key, central feature of the product from the beginning.

Not stores, communities

Avery: The Genius Bars were genius.

If you think about who Apple was trying to sell to in the early days, it was not corporate accounts. Corporate accounts were locked up by IBM, by Dell, and that type of selling relationship was moving online. Gateway computers was another brand doing a lot of online ordering. Apple was trying to sell to individuals, and individuals don’t have IT departments at their disposal.

So, the fact that they established the Genius Bars and staffed them incredibly well allowed people to walk in and have their own IT department to help take away the friction of switching from a PC to a Mac or from non-Apple product to an Apple product.

The stores were visually beautiful spaces. They were more for display and aesthetics than for selling, particularly in the early days, and they created a community aspect to the stores themselves.

People would line up for three days before a new launch. That was all part of creating that brand value. The stores created event marketing and branding experiences for the brand, as well. The stores still feel like that.

Their own heroic comeback story

Yoffie: They almost went bankrupt midway through their journey.

In 1997, they were somewhere between three and six months away from bankruptcy, so it’s not as though it’s a picture of continuous success for its entire 50-year history, and they had to reinvent themselves between 1997 and 2007. That was really fundamental to their success.

In addition, it’s not just the products, but the complementary products and services that they built around their core products that have made them so successful.

So, it’s not just the iPhone; it’s the App Store. It’s not just having a phone in your pocket, but it’s the ability to connect it to your computer and to your AirPods and to the cloud and do it all in a seamless fashion. It’s been the ability to build out an extended set of complementary services and products that has made Apple such a powerful player.

A walled garden

Avery: The Apple ecosystem is the key to their business model — the hardware, the App Store, and everything else working together to create value for its customers, but also to extract value back to the company.

This is why Apple is so strict about app development and what gets included in the Apple store. Because it’s all building its ecosystem and keeping people in this walled garden of ecosystem. That’s a really important part of its monetization strategy.

Big challenges ahead

Yoffie: Cellphones are largely a replacement product. There aren’t that many people in the world buying new phones. What we’ve seen over, let’s say, the last 10 years, there’s been relatively little growth in its core business.

That’s a big challenge for Apple going forward. They’re trying to drive growth by creating services that complement the iPhone business, but it’s still fundamentally dependent on the iPhone.

The good news for Apple is that it does have only in the neighborhood of 20 percent to 22 percent world market share for cellular phones, so it does have an opportunity to take more share away from Android and from other products assuming they find a way to address markets around the world that are a little bit more price-sensitive than in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

But Apple needs to make some adjustments in order to do that.

Anyone who has tuned into an American radio station in the past year has likely been treated to the upbeat anthem “Golden” — a track from the animated phenomenon “KPop Demon Hunters” that became the most watched title on Netflix last summer. And while K-pop — Korean popular music — has been creeping into the consciousness of American audiences for the past decade through one-off hits like Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” and idol groups like BTS and BLACKPINK, the genre has an even longer history of amassing enormous and dedicated fan bases overseas.

To chronicle the increasingly global world of K-pop, Harvard’s Yenching Library is in the process of curating a collection of commercial goods produced for fans of Korean musical groups and entertainers from the 1990s through now. The collection is partly inspired, and informed, by the “Korean Stars” course led by Professor Chan Yong Bu, who has used the objects to help his students better understand the dynamics behind K-pop fandom.

“The idea came from Professor Bu,” said Mikyung Kang, librarian for the Korean collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library. “We identified idol groups from the first generation until contemporary. And then with a vendor, we identified what’s available out there.”

Bu stressed that the merchandising and manufacturing of Korean stars, and later the K-pop stars audiences are familiar with today, have roots that date back to the stardom of silent-film narrators through the 1910s to the 1930s, who were idolized in Korean popular culture.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Bu said, Korean television stars were plastered on fan merch sold to teens across the country. And in the early ’90s, the first K-pop groups like Seo Taiji and Boys and H.O.T. graced magazine covers and posters marketed to the country’s youth.

“I’m very interested in star images in general,” said Bu, an assistant professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. “I don’t want my students to just appreciate the design, but how these actually come into being and how they concretize into the tangible objects.”

The collection, which Kang said is contained in 17 storage boxes so far, covers at least 26 groups spanning more than three decades. It includes concert paraphernalia and recordings, photo albums, posters, and anything else marketed to fans.

The items most familiar to students from Bu’s class, who pored over the materials in preparation for creating their own fan merch for a class project, were the light sticks — Bluetooth-enabled tokens that fans bring to concerts. Each one has unique imagery tied to a different K-pop group.

“Fan merch is really a very important medium in its own way, where you are truly connected to your beloved star on physiological and psychological levels, to the very extreme level,” Bu said.

Bu noted that the light sticks mark a point of evolution in K-pop fandom. Early on, he said, fans used different colored balloons to signify the fandoms to which they belonged. But as technology has advanced, so has the merch. The light sticks of today connect to performers’ sets and change color in sync.

“You are literally incorporated into this visual spectacle. So you’re really part of this performance as a whole,” Bu said.

Jenny Ng, a sophomore economics concentrator, said the hands-on experience of the “Korean Stars” class fuels her passion for learning. “I think that should be the point of a liberal arts education,” she said, “to learn these niche topics and enjoy them.”

For others who are interested in seeing the materials included in the collection, a small portion are on display in the Yenching Library’s Chinn Ho Reading Room. The students in Bu’s class will also display their own fan merch — created with 3D printing — later in the semester.

And according to Yuzhou Bai, the special collections librarian and archivist at the Yenching Library, the full collection is available through Hollis. However, viewing is restricted to the reading room by appointment.

“What looks like a book or a DVD actually carries with them a lot of smaller items, what we librarians would call ephemera, so smaller stickers or cards and that kind of stuff,” he said. “So it’s very difficult to control them if we just put them on the regular shelf and let everybody browse through and open them.”

What do corn relish, Banbury tarts, and grape pies have in common? 

They’re all dishes featured in community cookbooks — recipe collections compiled by civic or religious groups, often as fundraising efforts — the subject of the Schlesinger Library’s new exhibit, “Cooking Up Change: Women’s Agency and Community Building Through Cookbooks,” on display in the Lia and William Poorvu Gallery at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Drawing from the Schlesinger’s collection of more than 4,300 community cookbooks, the exhibit explores the publications’ cultural significance from the 19th to the 21st century. 

“Published materials can be primary sources that hold a wealth of cultural and social information,” said Erin LaBove, who is the cataloger of printed and published materials at the Schlesinger Library and has been working with community cookbooks for more than a decade.  

The collection showcases the efforts of women’s groups to raise funds for religious, educational, and civic causes, while also documenting the social and cultural history of their communities and culinary traditions. 

Suffrage and later feminist movements earned women greater access to life outside the home. But sharing recipes remained a common way that women connected with one another and preserved cultural heritage. The introduction of specialty publishers in the 1930s and ’40s made it easier for groups to create their own fundraising cookbooks.

“These are pieces of social and cultural history that can tell us what kinds of organizations existed, who was in them, what they thought was important, what local business existed through advertisements they had in them, which ingredients were available and popular, and of course, what recipes people were excited to share,” LaBove said. 

LaBove is particularly fond of cookbooks that have marks of previous owners, such as handwritten marginalia or the spills and stains of a busy kitchen. 

Even in the age of readily available online recipes, community cookbooks remain popular as collector items, points of pride for the communities that produced them, and a way to connect over something that continues to bring us all together: food. 

“The people who contribute to these collections are often people who don’t have their voice heard elsewhere,” LaBove explained. “They’re regular people sharing a recipe that was handed down in their family, or just one that they’re proud of. These kinds of social histories are often lost, but they’re here in these cookbooks.” 

“Cooking Up Change” is on display through Jan. 8. 

A new cohort of young scientists is pursuing high-risk, high-reward research across the life and physical sciences, engineering, and medicine. Their projects include studying dogs to identify brain biomarkers that can shed light on human health, probing wastewater to detect cancer risk across communities, revealing the hidden immune targets that viruses work hardest to conceal, and converting carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals using renewable electricity. These scholars are among those supported by the Aramont Fellowship Fund for Emerging Science Research, which is key to catalyzing discoveries that occur when researchers have the freedom to pursue unconventional paths.

The fund provides vital support for early-career faculty and postdoctoral scholars across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Medical School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Established in 2017, the program has supported 30 early-career scientists to date. Responding to the urgent need for research support after federal funding cuts, a generous new gift doubles the size of this year’s cohort from the previous year. The 10 awardees are pursuing urgent research priorities across all four Schools.

“Early-career support is so enabling for faculty and researchers,” said Senior Vice Provost for Research John Shaw. “Coupled with the strong network of Aramont alumni, this program provides an invaluable opportunity for the University’s most promising scientists.”

This year’s new fellows and their supported projects are:

“The Physics of Intelligence: Linking Neural Representations and AI Safety and Alignment”

AI systems increasingly influence decisions that shape human lives and societies, from medicine and science to education, law, and warfare. It is critical to align these systems’ objectives with human values to ensure that they serve human flourishing. This alignment demands a deep understanding of how AI systems represent, process, and act on information, and parallels a longstanding question in computational neuroscience: How does intelligent behavior emerge from patterns of neural activity? By identifying the principles that govern how neural systems organize and transform information, Chung aims to establish a theoretical foundation for intelligent systems that are interpretable, robust, and aligned with human intent.

“Enabling Heterogeneous Quantum Computing via Molecular-Beam Epitaxial Device Engineering of a Quantum Transducer”

Quantum computers have the potential to solve urgent problems in drug discovery, optimization, and simulation; however, a limiting factor is that the best quantum computers operate on a single species of qubits — the fundamental units of information in quantum computing. As a potential solution, Day envisions an architecture where distinct qubit species can work together on a single platform to collectively operate better than any could alone. In this system, there would need to be a way to exchange quantum information between qubit species. To address this challenge, Day will build a quantum transducer capable of serving as a cryogenic link between quantum computers.

“Wastewater Surveillance of Cancer-Related Targets for Community-Level Risk Assessment and Evidence-Based Interventions”

A community’s wastewater contains a wealth of information. Certain viruses, bacteria, and environmental carcinogens — many of which end up in wastewater — are known drivers of cancer risk but are rarely monitored at the population level. Healy endeavors to develop methods to detect cancer-related signals in wastewater, piloting her novel approach in communities with different cancer burdens to evaluate wastewater’s ability to reveal hotspots of elevated risk. If successful, wastewater surveillance could offer a low-cost and equitable approach to assess cancer trends over time and best allocate public health resources.

“Targeting Neuro-Genetic Resilience: Using a Canine Model to Identify Brain Biomarkers that Protect Against Early Life Trauma”

Understanding how genes interact with the environment to produce behavior is key to deciphering why people who experience the same trauma can have different mental health outcomes. However, translational research has been limited to human studies, which are difficult to control, and rodent studies, which cannot fully replicate human complexity. Hecht is leveraging domestic dogs as a new model because they have relatively simple genetics yet share human stressors. Having already established a dog neuroimaging pipeline, Hecht will add 100 scans to connect genetic, brain, and behavioral data in previously trauma-exposed dogs. With these methods, her lab is positioned to develop a new framework for human mental health.

“Leveraging a Viral Infection Model to Identify Treatments for Inflammatory Pancreatic Diseases”

Coxsackievirus infection can cause severe damage to the pancreas, a vital organ that regulates blood glucose. Dysregulation of these functions contributes to diseases such as pancreatitis and Type 1 diabetes. Hoagland’s project will leverage unique approaches to improve our understanding and treatment of pancreatic diseases and determine whether coxsackievirus infection has long-term effects on pancreatic function even after viral clearance. She will develop a novel tracking system to follow previously infected survivor cells over time and assess the impact on pancreatic functions. This work will enable the identification of targeted pathways that could improve outcomes and inform new strategies for identifying risk factors and treating disease.

“Decoding the Biology of Longevity and Cognitive Resilience Over Four Decades: Integrating Geroscience and Population Science”

A small group of people live to age 100 and beyond while maintaining good cognitive function. Despite growing research and sustained interest, key gaps in understanding this exceptional longevity remain. Ma’s project offers an unprecedented opportunity to overcome key limitations of past studies by applying advances in biomarker-discovery technology to a 40‑year Harvard cohort with extensive data on lifestyles, medical histories, and repeatedly collected blood samples from midlife onward. By focusing on biomarkers tied to fundamental aging processes and Alzheimer’s disease, Ma aims to identify early biological signatures and lifestyle factors that predict exceptional longevity and cognitive resilience.

“Mapping the Microbiome–Immune Interface Through Scalable Single-Cell Antigen Discovery”

T cells help coordinate immune responses by recognizing specific threats, or antigens, through receptors on their surface called TCRs. Scientists need to know which antigens individual TCRs recognize to improve immunotherapies for cancer, autoimmunity, and infectious diseases. However, existing technologies for identifying TCR–antigen pairs do not scale well and struggle in complex tissue environments like the gut or tumors. Nagashima’s project proposes a new approach designed to identify thousands of TCR–antigen pairs in a single experiment, providing proof of concept that antigen discovery can guide rational engineering of microbial communities in the gut to suppress inflammation. This approach could also be applicable to tumors, autoimmune diseases, and vaccines, enabling more precise control of antigen-specific immunity.

“Advancing Experimental Approaches to Uncover Atomic Chemistry Driving Complex Molecule Formation in Space”

Interstellar ices are active chemical laboratories where simple atoms and molecules assemble into increasingly complex organic molecules that seed the formation of stars, planets, and comets. But scientists do not entirely understand how these reactions work. Piacentino will study the reactions by integrating a microwave atom source into an existing cryogenic ultra-high-vacuum (UHV) chamber, and then use infrared spectroscopy to monitor reactivity. The research could reveal pathways to complex organic molecules while also supporting the systematic exploration of atom-mediated chemistry, and the upgraded UHV system will enable controlled studies of reactions in astrochemical environments while providing clean, reproducible delivery of atomic and radical species.

“Combining Temperature and Voltage for Sustainable, Distributed Chemical Synthesis”

The chemical industry is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions because of processes that rely on high temperatures and pressures. Chemical manufacturing needs new, more sustainable methods to convert resources (such as carbon dioxide, water, and renewable electricity) into valuable products. Electrochemistry is appealing because it uses renewable electricity to drive chemical reactions in mild conditions. However, existing electrochemical methods cannot convert carbon dioxide to the large hydrocarbons needed. Schiffer aims to combine the best aspects of both industrial and electrochemical processes to produce hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide. This approach could support more economical, distributed, and sustainable chemical manufacturing.

“Unmasking the Invisible: The Hidden Universe of Viral Immune Targets”

Viruses are experts at disguise. They can infiltrate cells, replicate rapidly, and evade immune detection. Understanding how viruses evade T cells without losing fitness is essential for developing better vaccines and antiviral therapies. Weingarten-Gabbay will map thousands of viral immune targets, engineer a directed-evolution platform to identify T-cell-escape mutations, and quantify fitness costs of immune-escape mutations to uncover how viruses navigate the trade-off between immune evasion and replicative fitness. This project will uncover novel immune targets, illuminate principles of viral evolution, and provide exceptional training for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in advanced experimental and computational approaches.

Adjusting to the reality of an incurable disease is hard, never mind talking about it. Even so, Sue Goldie, the Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Health at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, decided to share her journey with a stranger.

In October, Goldie, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021, was the subject of a New York Times feature by John Branch, whom she allowed to follow her life for more than two years. This month, she spoke at the Chan School about fighting the disease and her decision to make that fight public.

“It was not uncomplicated,” Goldie said. “I think it requires a lot of mutual trust to let someone in your life to see you at those raw moments and you really don’t know what they are going to write … I just felt this sheer responsibility to try to speak out loud and to try to give voice to what is so difficult.”

Parkinson’s disease stems from a depletion of dopamine in the brain. Motor issues include tremors, rigidity, and slowness of movement. As the disease worsens, it can cause problems with balance and gait. But the condition runs much deeper than visible symptoms and is really a multi-system disorder, Goldie noted.

“The one thing about Parkinson’s that is absolutely true is it plays out differently in everyone,” she said, pointing to wide variability in onset of symptoms and timeline.

For her, some initial symptoms appeared while she was training for her first Ironman triathlon — a challenge her son had introduced her to.

“I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I just wasn’t feeling well,” she said.

Working with a coach, she continued to bike, run, and swim — all while serving as the faculty director of two centers and teaching three large courses. Her coach started to notice some asymmetry on her left side, particularly with swimming.

She then began to notice a left-sided tremor.

“That was what brought me finally to a neurologist,” she said.

After her diagnosis, Goldie kept training. She and her coach agreed: As the disease presented new challenges, they would figure out case-by-case solutions.

They added a long straw on her bike to save herself having to lean over to reach her water bottle. As fine motor control worsened, they switched to electronic shifting, and changed her cleats to make it easier to clip out.

“There’s something about problem-solving that feels like you’re moving forward,” she said. “And it leaked over into my work world as well.”

The diagnosis had brought deep anxiety over the potential impact on her academic endeavors.

“It’s really frightening to me to have cognitive effects from Parkinson’s,” she said. “I think when you’re at an academic institution, where the currency of your value is your thinking, the fear I had was about: What does this mean for my identity? What will people think?”

The antidote to her anxiety has been discovering new ways to do what she loves. One example: her innovative approach to designing educational multimedia. Goldie is well known for her ability to distill complex concepts using sketches, diagrams, and iconography visuals — a feature of her work at the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) and her online courses at the Chan School — but her tremor made it harder to do so in the same way.

“So I got an iPad, and I would draw ahead of time, and then I would cut pieces out,” she said. “I would move the pieces around instead of drawing.”

When a large group of high school teachers attending a workshop at GHELI noticed collections of visual drawings next to each lesson plan, they quickly began exploring how they could use the “visual language” in their own lessons.

“And it was just this example where something that was a workaround actually became this sort of pedagogical innovation,” Goldie said.

After the Times story was published, Goldie received hundreds of letters from patients who said they felt seen, and from people who told her that she had helped them see loved ones better. Their words left a mark.

“The best way I can respect the fact that these individuals took time to write to me is to read every one and to try to listen and learn in terms of what I want to do next,” she said.

N. Stuart Harris was 14,000 feet up Mount McKinley, and the conditions weren’t looking good. His patient, a veteran who was hiking as part of a Wounded Warriors program, had entered his medical tent complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. Was it an altitude-related illness? A pulmonary edema? Maybe a heart attack? 

“There was a limited amount of material — oxygen and diagnostic EKG and other things,” said Harris, who at the time in 2011 was working for the National Park Service in Alaska. “We had just a little nylon cot that he was on, resting in a tent, with 8,000 feet of ice underneath us up on the glacier.” 

The weather was too bad for a helicopter, so with evacuation off the table, Harris — who is now the founder and chief of the Division of Wilderness Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School — did what he always strives to do: He told the truth. 

“I told him, ‘These are the things I’m concerned about; these are the risks if we run out of medications, or if we run out of oxygen, or if we’re not able to get you off the mountain in two or three days.’ I would like to think that we, whether it’s as physicians or patients, should be able to talk about risk in a little bit more of a realistic, humane way.”

The veteran eventually made it down to Anchorage and recovered, Harris said. It was likely high-altitude pulmonary edema, a life-threatening form of altitude sickness. But Harris doesn’t know for sure. In his line of work, he has to be OK with not knowing sometimes. 

Risky decisions are a daily reality in the emergency room. A common example: whether to intubate. Putting a tube into someone’s trachea is not risk-free, especially if there’s been trauma to the area and blood and teeth are in the way. But if you wait too long, you lose your chance. Patients might be intoxicated or unresponsive; the details of their condition are unknown. Those urgent decisions are drilled into medical students’ brains: Act fast, with whatever information you have. 

“It isn’t like if something bad happened, it was inevitably a bad decision — no. Given the confines, maybe you did what needed to be done. Sometimes what might seem a little bit more risky is exactly the right choice because it overall reduces risk,” Harris said. 

‘My fear level has really plummeted’

Harris isn’t one to shy away from risk in his personal or professional life. He remembers rock-climbing as a teen near where he grew up in the mountains of southern Virginia. “I was well on my way up when I recognized, ‘Yowza.’ There was a sense, even in that adolescent male brain, which is pretty devoid of accurate risk assessment, that there was no way to go but up.” 

He continued to embrace risky situations. He became a whitewater rafter. In college, he worked as a firefighter. He practiced emergency and wilderness medicine in the Himalayas, in Japan after the 2011 tsunami, and at the remote base camp on Mount McKinley. He has also served as board chair of the National Outdoor Leadership School and is the co-creator of the monthlong senior medical student course, Medicine in the Wild, with NOLS Wilderness Medicine. He founded the MGH SPEAR (SPace, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited) MED Division, which provides expert medical care in extreme environments.

Those experiences made him an evangelist for the idea that a little bit of risk can be good for you. It helps build resilience and comfort with failure, he said. Plus, it makes life more interesting.

“We’ve become so risk-averse in some aspects of our civilization and culture, and with our children, that I think we’re creating tremendously larger risks and we’re just not recognizing them,” he said. 

It’s not an argument for recklessness. Proper risk assessment, Harris said, is about balancing likelihood with downside. His metaphor, naturally, is of rock-climbing: An amateur climber bouldering indoors, 6 feet off the ground, with a mat underneath and a friend spotting, might have a high likelihood of falling but the downside risk is pretty low. On the other hand, a highly skilled athlete lead climbing in Yosemite might have a low risk of falling, but the downside could be permanent and fatal. 

What’s the secret sauce, the personality trait that comes out when decisions need to be made? Acceptance. 

“My fear level has really plummeted,” he said. “Part of it is that I’m just old enough. I’ve seen enough patient presentations and human nature and other things. I have an idea of what I can control in those things I work very hard to alter for the better. But I also have seen enough to know that I’m a wee little person, and even as good as I am, or not, I’m not going to change some outcomes.” 

It might sound like fatalism, but Harris situates his philosophy squarely in the camp of Stoicism: Focus on what can be controlled and be humble in the face of what can’t. His favorite people are the ones who have gotten “kicked in the teeth” a few times. Asked if he ever feels frustrated with people who come into the ER because they’ve done something risky and gotten hurt, he doesn’t hesitate: Never. 

“I’ve done so many dumb things in my life, I just happened to get lucky,” he said. “You can’t be in this job and not realize that.” He added, “It’s not very interesting to hang out with people who haven’t seen the ugly downsides and experienced them personally. It makes us who we are.”

Most envision the realistic style of the Greeks and Romans when thinking about the art of ancient Europe. But there were other peoples and ways to think about depicting the world, and that includes the Celts, the diverse group who inhabited Britain, Ireland, and a vast portion of continental Europe.

“Archaeology and art history are still very Greece- and Rome-focused in the United States,” said Susanne Ebbinghaus, the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art and Head of the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art. “So I thought, ‘Oh, it would be amazing to bring some of these objects here.’”

The Harvard Art Museums are sharing these artistic contributions in a new, first-of-its-kind exhibition called “Celtic Art Across the Ages,” which explores the objects created by those labeled “Celts” from the Iron Age to the early medieval period, as well as from the Celtic Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century and even more recent time periods. 

It also considers the evolution of imagery and ideas in the region amid the spread of Roman rule.

Laure Marest, the Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins, said that this exhibit seeks to question assumptions about long-held artistic narratives.

“History is written by the winners,” Marest said. She pointed out that the themes of Greek and Roman art have been revered for a long time by Western audiences, but Celtic art — which co-existed alongside them — is different.

Marest said she was struck by how contemporary some of the pieces feel, with their reliance on abstraction, ornamentation, and deconstruction of forms. 

“The art they produce is actually surprisingly modern in some ways,” she said. 

One such example is a fragmented piece of sandstone in the shape of a head, discovered in Heidelberg in southwestern Germany in 1893. 

It was likely part of a warrior sculpture and often surprises viewers: It is not figurative, not clearly human, plant, or animal; it is almost cartoonish in its construction — features that are shared by other examples of Celtic art. 

Other imagery in the exhibit is fantastical in nature — featuring dragon-like or other mythical creatures — or incorporate different ideas of deities. 

There is also a bronze sculpture featuring the goddess Artio with a tree and a bear. Found in 1832 at Muri, near Bern, Switzerland, elements of the sculpture appear to have been changed and repurposed at different time periods.

Why? What significance did this deity hold to the people at the time it was created? What inspired the people who created — and changed — this divine image? It hints at the complexity of life for the various Celtic peoples under the spread of Roman rule.

“Most of the ancient inhabitants of central and western Europe are unlikely to have considered themselves Celts,” said Ebbinghaus, even though they may have related languages, practices, and traditions.

She explained that the people we refer to as Celts, Gauls, or Galatians weren’t as homogeneous as we tend to think. These ancient populations spanned a large geographic area and each had its own name and culture. 

“We’re deliberately trying to separate the clichés about Celts from art that has been called Celtic,” said Penny Coombe, the Kelekian Curatorial Fellow in Ancient Art. 

Coombe said the exhibit invites viewers to reflect on what this means.

“This term Celtic has endured for nearly 3,000 years, albeit with a huge gap in when it was used … What does relate all these very different artifacts to one another and is that a real relationship?” she said. “How is this term repurposed and reused in different ways at different times, and how does it become politically relevant in later periods of building nationalism, building nationhood?” 

The exhibition brings together nearly 300 objects from collections in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. 

Curated by Ebbinghaus, Coombe, Marest, and Matthew M.L. Rogan, senior curatorial assistant for special exhibitions and publications, the exhibit has taken years to come together and relies heavily on significant loans from many European museums. 

It also features items from local collections, including items from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and Boston College.

Items range from jewelry to functional objects like arms and armor, horse trappings, chariot components, and feasting equipment to objects associated with the church.

One of the items on display is a pony cap, an ornamental hat with horns created for a small horse. This piece is loaned from Scotland and has an associated line drawing that shows how it would have looked on the animal’s head. 

“It’s so unusual,” Coombe said. “Why would you dress up a really tiny horse with this piece of armor … What do the horns mean? They’re decorated with scrolling and incised patterns, which seems to be similar to ornament that’s seen on shields that come from the River Thames in a distinctly British style.” 

The curators hope that Celtic Art Across the Ages will offer viewers an opportunity to deepen their understanding of art and appreciate what its nuances can reveal about the past. 

“Many populations lived in the ancient world, and, yes, interacted with Greeks and Romans. We should be skeptical of written histories and think about who is the author,” Ebbinghaus said. “We can learn to see in different ways and unexpected ways.” 

“Celtic Art Across the Ages” will be on display March 6-Aug. 2 at the Harvard Art Museums. A print catalog featuring more than 30 essays by international specialists accompanies the exhibition. The exhibition also features a variety of programming, including an Irish animated film marathon and Welsh poetry readings. The Museums are free and open to the public.

For more than a century, condensed matter physics has grappled with one of its greatest unsolved challenges: how to build superconductors that operate at room temperature and transmit electricity with no loss.

Now, in a paper recently published in Nature, a team of Harvard physicists has reported new insights into why one promising superconductor has yielded mysteriously uneven results.

The researchers used a novel method to study materials at high pressure by adding quantum sensors to a simple device pioneered by a Nobel-winning Harvard physicist in the last century, a tool that will likely prove useful to advance future work.

“We can ask questions at high pressure that we could never ask before,” said Norman Yao ’09, Ph.D. ’14, professor of physics and senior author of the new study. “And the question that we’ve been getting the most from our colleagues is: Can you measure our rock too?”

Most existing conductors cannot transmit electricity without some resistance and thus lose power (in the U.S., about 5 percent of electricity is lost in transmission but in some countries the losses amount to half of energy production). Superconductors have zero resistance — and thus no energy loss — making them potentially a revolutionary innovation.

In theory, better superconductors could make it economically feasible, for example, for wind farms in Siberia to power eastern Asia or solar panels in the Sahara Desert to supply Europe.

They also hold great potential in other applications such as magnet technologies, motors, maglev trains, high-energy particle accelerators, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. Currently, MRI machines use liquid helium to bring the superconducting coils down to minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit.

Superconductors were first discovered in 1911, but practical applications long remained elusive because the materials require extremely cold temperatures.

One breakthrough came in 1986, when J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller discovered superconducting copper oxides, or cuprates, that worked at much higher temperatures than previously known materials (the pair won a Nobel Prize only 19 months later).

This revelation sparked a historic conference known as “The Woodstock of Physics” and the search for other “high temperature” (which here means not quite so cold) superconductors. Among the earliest proposed materials were the nickelates — layered nickel oxides that were chemical “cousins” of the cuprates.

In 2023, the first bulk nickelate superconductor was discovered. The discovery generated excitement, because the material had a critical temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, which, though deathly cold by human standards, is relatively warm for a superconductor), but also caution, because superconductivity emerged only under extremely high pressures.

This material proved to have puzzlingly uneven performance, and some scientists suggested only a small percentage of the material really was capable of superconductivity.

To better understand this mystery, a team led by Yao and Chris Laumann ’03, an associate professor of physics at Boston University, sought to study these materials at micron scale by adding some new tricks to an old technology.

In the first half of the 20th century, Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman conducted pioneering experiments of materials under high pressure by using a vice-like apparatus that squeezed samples between two cone-shaped anvils of steel or tungsten carbide (Bridgman won a Nobel Prize in 1946).

Later, other researchers switched the anvils to diamonds, one of the hardest naturally occurring materials on Earth. Besides hardness, diamonds offer another advantage: They can be turned into sensors.

By bombarding the diamonds with ions and baking them at high temperature, researchers create defects known as “nitrogen vacancy centers” that can detect magnetic and electric fields. In 2019, the Yao group became the first to add these nitrogen vacancy centers to the diamond anvil, allowing them to take new measurements of materials under pressures above 100 gigapascals — roughly those in the outer core of the Earth nearly 3,000 kilometers below the surface.

In the experiments, the diamond anvil cell — a device about the size of wine cork —  and the sample are mounted on a rod and lowered into a cryostat, a refrigerator whose temperature can go down to 4 degrees Kelvin, or about minus 452 Fahrenheit.

A beam of green light is directed into the interior of the diamonds, the nitrogen vacancy centers fluoresce red, and the light bounces back up a series of mirrors into a photon detector. A complex series of operations boils down to this: Changes in the red fluorescence reveal tiny shifts in the local magnetic field around the nickelate sample, a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect and a key indicator of superconductivity.

“This nitrogen vacancy measurement is able to see superconductivity on significantly smaller-length scales and long before conventional methods that are based upon resistance,” said Srinivas Mandyam, co-lead author of the new paper and a Ph.D. student in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying physics. “When you’re trying to discover new compounds, this might pick it up much earlier than the usual way would.”

With this technique, researchers can map samples at millionths of a meter and correlate local superconducting behavior with temperature, pressure, stoichiometry (the ratio of elements in the material), and other forces including normal stress (compression) and shear stress.

“The tools that we’ve been developing as a group are quite special because you can really image functionality under pressure and determine where exactly the material acts as a superconductor,” said Yao.

The researchers adjust pressure like a “tuning knob.” Near the critical pressure, they saw the first evidence of superconductivity in localized regions. As they added pressure, these superconducting regions encompassed larger portions of the rock. They also discovered that superconductivity was curtailed by shear stresses.

Until now, the uneven results in nickelates had been attributed to a range of possibilities, such as inhomogeneities in chemistry and structure. The new study reveals that a single sample really should be seen as a collection of micron-scale localities that behave differently.

These insights could help engineer more efficient materials — a small step toward the ultimate goal of superconductors that work at ambient temperatures and pressures.

Laumann, a frequent collaborator with the Yao group, said the new tools would allow researchers to “sniff around this neighborhood better,” and more deeply investigate the properties of the varied types of superconductive materials discovered so far.

“It’s like if a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” said Laumann. “If nobody is there to tell you, it’s just not something you can see or discuss. The fact that we can now make these local measurements opens up a whole new range of questions.”

More than 200 years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” the story continues to inspire writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Guillermo del Toro and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

In this edited interview, Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, who has taught the novel in the course “Modern Monsters in Literature and Film,” discusses the historical context behind Shelley’s creation and why “Frankenstein” remains alive in the cultural imagination.

You have said that the novel “Frankenstein” is dear to your heart — why?

It has as much to do with the form of the novel as the content of the novel. I love that it’s a story inside a story inside a story. I love the fact that the first thing we encounter are these letters that this polar explorer is writing. He writes — as everyone knows now that Guillermo del Toro has preserved that part of the novel in his adaptation — that he comes across Victor Frankenstein as he is pursuing his monster, aiming to take revenge on him. Frankenstein tells his story, and then within Frankenstein’s story, we get the story of the monster, which he tells himself. What I love about that complicated structure is how Shelley has set things up in such a way that it becomes such a surprise when the monster begins to speak for himself for the first time. We go from thinking that the creature is repugnant in his monstrosity to realizing that he’s eloquent and persuasive, and maybe more human than his creator.

Mary Shelley wrote this novel at age 18. How did she do it?

She was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two literary celebrities in the 1790s, who were notorious for their support of the revolution in France and progressive politics. Shelley had a strong education and was exposed to literary people through her childhood.

So, if anybody was going to be able to do something like that at age 18, it would have been Mary Shelley. But what I find more astonishing is that by the time she writes “Frankenstein,” she has eloped with a married man, and by the time the novel is published in 1818, she has been pregnant more than once. She had to become an adult very quickly. The ways in which Victor Frankenstein responds with horror and disgust when his creature comes to life might resemble those of a new mother who’s horribly frightened by the responsibility of having to care for a newborn infant.

In the backdrop of the early 19th century, a time of turmoil in Europe, Mary Shelley crafts her novel. What historical contexts shape “Frankenstein”?

From the preface to the novel that is reissued in 1831, we know that “Frankenstein” was her contribution to a very famous ghost storytelling contest among her; her husband to-be, poet Percy Shelley; the poet Lord Byron; and John Polidori, the author of the first English vampire novel.

It’s the summer of 1816 when Shelley and her friends end up in Switzerland in a sort of self-imposed exile from England. By then, the long war between the British empire and the Revolutionary France and then Napoleonic France had been over only for a year. Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley come of age at a period of terrible political repression, and of immense unrest and immense injustice in England. That sense of injustice is important in the novel. It strikes me that the creature is asking Victor Frankenstein for justice: “Do right by me” is his plea. In a way, the novel is a response to a time when notions of equal rights are circulating, but there aren’t the legal structures to ensure that rights are observed or secured for those who need them.

Some scholars have said that the novel is a cautionary tale about science. What is your view?

It’s important to remember that the novel’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.” In classical mythology, Prometheus is the titan who steals fire from the gods of Olympus in order to benefit humanity. So, there’s a notion of technological progress written into that subtitle. By the time she composes “Frankenstein,” Shelley is aware of experiments with galvanism, which used electricity on corpses to communicate the spark of life to the dead, and she also knows that some of those experiments often involved the corpses of convicts, and she seems to be reflecting on how these experiments disrespect the humanity of other human beings. Shelley explores the ethical consequences in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, when ambition overpowers people’s sense of what they owe to one another.

How have perceptions of Frankenstein changed over the years?

It got fairly harsh reviews when it was first published anonymously, maybe because of its dedication to William Godwin, which was catnip for conservative commentators who decided that anything that was dedicated to Godwin had to be politically dangerous. The novel’s political stand has been in some ways overshadowed by an 1823 play based on “Frankenstein” titled “Presumption! or, the Fate of Frankenstein” and the dramatic adaptations that followed. The consequence is that what disappeared from the cultural memory about “Frankenstein” is the fact that the creature speaks and tells his own story and tries to persuade Victor to do justice. In the 1823 play, the creature is barely a speaking part. And beginning with the 1931 film, where Boris Karloff plays the monster, the many spin-offs gave us a silent monster in ways that might make him less human than he seems when you read the book. That was one of the ways in which the novel got misremembered over the course of the 19th century. Part of that misremembering would include the many allegorical representations of class relations and race relations that used the image of Frankenstein as a vengeful monster.

Of the many screen adaptations of Frankenstein, which one is your favorite?

I would say that the James Whale from 1931 is my favorite version because it’s a black and white film, and even though the monster, played by Boris Karloff, doesn’t speak, his hands are astoundingly eloquent. Guillermo del Toro promised more fidelity to the original text by including the polar explorer’s storyline in his movie, but he continues to leave out the story of Justine, a working-class woman who is executed because of Victor’s hubris and his failure to be accountable for the catastrophes that he’s unleashed. I also think that del Toro’s movie makes the morality really obvious and includes a scene of forgiveness between Victor and the monster at the end, which Shelley never wrote. By leaving things mysterious and ambiguous, Shelley gave us something that our imaginations will be able to feed on for as long as we’re still reading books. Movies for the longest time have overshadowed the book. But “Frankenstein” is now one of the most frequently taught texts in high schools and English departments.

Why does the story of “Frankenstein” still fascinate us to this day?

It’s always going to be relevant because it deals with issues of justice, equality, and how we exclude versus include other people within our community; a lot of stories of racism and racial exclusion have often been rooted in the “Frankenstein legend.

The novel is so rich that it is eternal, and the questions that it raises are existential questions: What does it mean to be human? What is it like to belong or not belong? When we don’t ask to be born, and yet here we are, how do we make the best of it? All of those are profound questions that go with being human. And I don’t know of many novels that raise them as effectively as Shelley does in “Frankenstein.”

Two new studies led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute challenge a decades-old assumption that the thymus, an organ best known for its role in establishing immune function in childhood, becomes irrelevant in adulthood. Using AI to analyze routine CT scans, researchers uncovered that adults with a healthy thymus had increased longevity and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer. In a separate study of patients with cancer, the researchers found that thymic health may influence response to immunotherapy — a treatment that depends on the strength of a patient’s immune system.

These findings, published in two papers in the same issue of Nature, suggest the thymus plays a far more consequential role in adult health than previously understood, and might provide a new target for personalizing disease prevention and cancer treatments.

The thymus is a small organ in the chest that helps train T cells, priming the immune system to protect the body from infections and disease. For decades, doctors believed the organ was mostly inactive after puberty because it shrinks with age and produces fewer new T cells. As a result, its role in adult health has rarely been examined in large populations.

Previous research has linked T cell diversity to aging and immune decline, but most of those studies relied on small, blood-based analyses. In contrast, the new studies examined more than 25,000 adults in a national lung cancer screening trial and over 2,500 participants in the Framingham Heart Study — a large, long-running population cohort of generally healthy adults.

The team analyzed the size, shape, and composition of the thymus, generating a “thymic health” score. People with high thymic health scores had about a 50 percent lower risk of death, 63 percent lower risk of cardiovascular death, and 36 percent lower risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low thymic health. These associations remained significant after adjusting for age and other health factors.

The researchers theorize that when thymic health and T cell diversity decline, the immune system may become less able to respond to new threats, like cancer or other diseases. Their analysis found that chronic inflammation, smoking, and high body weight were associated with poorer thymic health, suggesting that lifestyle and systemic inflammation may influence immune resilience across the lifespan.

“The thymus has been overlooked for decades and may be a missing piece in explaining why people age differently, and why cancer treatments fail in some patients,” said Hugo Aerts, corresponding author on both papers, Harvard Medical School professor of radiation oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and director of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program at Mass General Brigham. “Our findings suggest thymic health deserves much more attention and may open new avenues for understanding how to protect the immune system as we age.”

In a second study, the researchers analyzed CT scans and outcomes from more than 1,200 immunotherapy-treated patients. Patients with stronger thymic health had about a 37 percent lower risk of cancer progression and a 44 percent lower risk of death, even after accounting for other patient, tumor, and treatment factors. These findings point to a previously underappreciated role the thymus may play in shaping how well patients respond to modern cancer immunotherapies.

The researchers caution that their findings will need to be confirmed in future studies, and the imaging method is not yet ready for routine clinical use. While lifestyle factors were linked to thymic health, the studies did not test whether modifying those factors can directly improve thymic function.

The team is currently leading additional research to investigate whether other care-associated factors may impact thymic health. In one study, they are examining whether unintended radiation exposure to the thymus in patients with lung cancer may affect outcomes. 

“Improving our understanding and monitoring of thymic health could eventually help physicians better assess disease risk and guide treatment decisions,” said Aerts. 

This research received funding support from the National Institutes of Health.

Southern states have historically underperformed in educational achievement. But a recent rise in test scores in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee has led some experts and journalists to describe the “Southern surge” as one of the few bright spots in U.S. education over the past several years.

According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, Alabama ranked first among states in math recovery and third in reading, Louisiana ranked second in math recovery and first in reading, Mississippi sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, and Tennessee third in math recovery and ninth in reading.

The scorecard is a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College, to compare learning loss between 2019 and 2024.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, and the center’s faculty director, spoke about the lessons for other states.

Why have the recent educational gains in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee become such a big story?

It’s a big story that we all ought to be paying attention to because the federal government essentially handed power over K-12 decisions back to states in 2015. That was a decade ago, and nationally, achievement has been declining.

I think it’s largely because a lot of states, including Massachusetts, were not ready to take the reins. And this subset of Southern states has undertaken ambitious reforms to the way they teach literacy that seem to be paying off in terms of improved student achievement.

State leadership matters more than ever, and we ought to be encouraging states to step up with ambitious efforts to reverse the decline.

Your center examines educational policies and their impact on students’ achievement. Did the data surprise you and your team?

Part of what we’re trying to do at the center is highlight not just states, but individual districts that have been improving. For instance, Compton in Los Angeles is a low-income community that has made unusual progress since 2019. Union City is a low-income district in New Jersey, and they too have seen bigger increases than many of the higher income districts in the state.

The truth is that before 2015, many states, including Massachusetts, were making a lot of progress. But over the last decade, policymakers in many states have been leery about investing their political capital in education reform because they fear controversies.

We need to remind them that investing in state and local efforts to improve K-12 education leads to educational progress. In our center, we’re trying to provide evidence on the specific policies that are making a difference to inspire other communities and states to do the same.

What are the factors behind the success stories in the Southern states?

Unfortunately, we don’t know which policies these states have pursued were most important. For instance, Mississippi, which now ranks sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, invested a lot in literacy coaches. Based on other research I’ve seen, the literacy coaches might have been a critical part of the Mississippi success.

Massachusetts is working on literacy reforms that don’t include much funding for coaches, but they include some of the other less controversial aspects of the Mississippi plan, like changing curricula and changing teacher training.

Our center is studying whether specific policies, like teacher coaching or student grade retention, are the key moving parts — so that states don’t just pick the most uncontroversial (and ineffective) aspects of the Southern state initiatives.

What changes did Louisiana and Alabama implement?

Louisiana provided state incentives for districts to change their curricula in math and literacy and also provided state support to retrain teachers in how to use those new materials. It also made it easier for districts to combine funding across different federal funding streams to pursue priorities and cleared away some of the red tape involved in federal funding.

Alabama passed a Numeracy Act in 2022, and provided math coaches to low-performing schools and funding for summer learning, especially for students in early grades.

But I hesitate to say that every state should do exactly the same thing because we don’t yet have good evidence on which aspects of their plans made the most difference. Going forward, we want to help states learn which specific policies make a difference.

Can you explain the cases of Tennessee and Mississippi?

The literacy reforms in Mississippi go back to 2012, when they shifted their early literacy curricula to emphasize more phonics-based literacy instruction, which is sometimes referred to as the science of reading.

The state provided funding for coaches to work with teachers in early grades, starting with the schools that were struggling the most. They also had a requirement they believe was a critical part of their success, which was requiring students to pass a literacy test at the end of third grade before proceeding to fourth grade.

It was a controversial move. Massachusetts has shied away from that requirement. But it could turn out to be critical.

Tennessee offered training for its K-5 teachers in phonics-based literacy instruction. They did not invest in literacy coaches statewide, although I’m guessing some individual districts did it.

Mississippi and Alabama also use what are called universal screeners to try to identify kids that have dyslexia and other issues early rather than wait for them to fail in third or fourth grade.

One thing that Tennessee did, especially during the pandemic, was invest statewide in tutoring programs to help students catch up.

What are the lessons for other states?

The most important thing that states need to realize is that it’s up to them whether their students’ achievement recovers — or continues to fall.

There is not going to be any federal leadership on K-12 education. It’s not just the current stalemate in Washington. The federal government gave the power back to states in 2015, and the decline in students’ achievement began that year.

It got worse during the pandemic, but it started back in 2015.

States need to realize that if we’re going to turn this around, it will depend on their own leadership. Four states have clearly taken that message to heart: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Let’s hope that Massachusetts and other states decide to step up and show some leadership, too.

This year, Harvard College is home to one current and two former National Youth Poet Laureates, a lineage that began with inaugural honoree Amanda Gorman ’20. National Youth Poet Laureate Evan Wang ’29 and former laureates Salome Agbaroji ’27 and Alyssa Gaines ’26 recently spoke with the Gazette about how the title changed them, balancing arts and academics, and how their poetry has evolved during their time at Harvard.

When Wang sits down to write (usually late at night in his dorm room), he is already thinking about the stage. The first-year tests each line for how it may sound when spoken aloud, and imagines what hand gestures he can use for emphasis.

“When I’m prepping for a performance, I think of ways that I can accentuate certain aspects of the poem,” he said. “I really want to have fluctuation; it should never be monotone. Which word you choose to stress within the poem redefines the meaning.”

As National Youth Poet Laureate, Wang is in high demand. His debut chapbook, “Slow Burn,” comes out next month. He has been working with a composer on a choral piece that the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia is scheduled to premiere in June. This year he’s performed at the Google DeepMind headquarters in London, the AFS Youth Assembly in New York, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in D.C.

Wang began to pursue poetry seriously in 2021, after a spoken word poem he wrote and performed about his own experience with racial microaggressions garnered positive attention in his school district.

“That just really motivated me to continue writing about my own experiences, because I realized how quickly a poem about myself can become a poem for others and can be about others,” Wang said.

Wang’s poems are reflective and confessional, and he writes mainly about queer romance, yearning, and the immigrant experience.

“I’m always taking risks,” Wang said. “I’m always diving deeper into myself to see what I’m really trying to say. A lot of my mentors describe my poetry as ‘sharp,’ because a lot of my lines are terse. They don’t waste a lot of breath, and they really are a gut punch.”

Wang said his approach to poetry changed after seeing a video of author Ocean Vuong, one of his greatest inspirations, performing the poem “Head First.”

“The poem was so vulnerable, but it used the word ‘stupid,’ which is quite colloquial,” Wang recalled. “For so long, I thought poetry had to be pristine. I thought it was Shakespeare and Whitman. From then on out, I wrote poetry as a way to explore my own vulnerability, as a way to become really intimate.”

Wang is chair of the IOP Coalition for the Arts, a creative director for FIG. Magazine, and involved in the Harvard College China Forum. He is passionate about poetry as a form of entertainment and wants to collaborate on projects that combine poetry with other art forms. It was when he heard dancer Misty Copeland speak about representation at the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony that he truly realized how much the arts have changed his life.

“I remember sitting in the audience thinking I cannot imagine a future where my life is separated from the arts,” Wang said. “That really served as a catalyst for me to really begin considering poetry as a viable career.”

Agbaroji believes that many Harvard students are poets, though few would describe themselves that way. Too often, she said, the label feels reserved for those with awards or titles. She hopes to change that perception.

“This is an art form that is so democratic and generalizable,” Agbaroji said. “You don’t need a recording studio, you don’t need a film crew, you literally just need your brain and the words. I’m hoping to influence people to try to write and create in a way that doesn’t necessitate excellence, but maybe just fun.”

The social studies concentrator is currently recording a spoken word poetry and music album in the SOCH studio . She said having a project with an end goal has given motivation to her writing practice.

“I make the time between classes, while I’m eating dinner, sometimes in my bed at 3 a.m., because I am so eager for people to experience the work,” Agbaroji said. “It’s a different motivation. Before I was writing because I was struck with inspiration. This one is a sense of urgency, because I’m just so excited to put out my first official project.”

She recalled her first year at Harvard as a “balancing act,” juggling academics and a social life while serving as National Youth Poet Laureate. Sometimes that meant having a little FOMO (she missed Yardfest because she was giving a TED Talk) but resulted in some incredible memories, like meeting President Joe Biden and former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on a visit to the White House.

Agbaroji, who began writing poetry at age 14 during the pandemic, has always written about social and political issues, advocating against inequality and injustice. But recently she’s made room for more personal writing.

“I’m giving my work space to be about me: ‘Salome had a bad day today, let’s write about that,’” she said. “I think I’m appreciating that breadth I’m gaining as I mature as an artist.”

On campus, Agbaroji captains Omo Naija, Harvard’s African dance troupe, and is in the Signet Society. These days, the poets who inspire her most are rappers Kendrick Lamar, Noname, and Tierra Whack. Agbaroji, who is also a singer, regularly fuses poetry and music, which she said she was hesitant to do at first, due to the way she was first introduced to poetry: as an art form that is supposed to stand alone. Her album will feature both poetry and music.

“You’re supposed to be impactful with just your words and the stage. You shouldn’t need a song, you shouldn’t need a prop, all the power should live in the words,” Agbaroji explained. “But poets also know that rules are meant to be broken. I knew that coming to Harvard, that would be another element of myself I wanted to grow confidence in. I’m glad I did, and I keep challenging myself in that way.”

Last summer, Gaines realized she can’t live without writing.

It may not seem like a surprising revelation for someone who has been participating in poetry competitions since age 8. But after serving as National Youth Poet Laureate as a first-year, Gaines took a two-year break from poetry to explore other interests and career options through a joint concentration in Social Studies and History of Art and Architecture.

Then, an internship at Macmillan Publishers the summer before senior year brought her right back.

“I was around books all day long, and I was like, ‘OK, this is the thing I love,’” said Gaines, who declared a secondary in English. “I realized that I love writing, and I don’t see a life without it. I think poetry is always a part of the way I think about the world.”

Gaines recalls her first year as a pivotal time of growth and new experiences. On weekends she would often travel to perform her poetry at events like Bloomberg Philanthropy’s Earthshot Prize and the YPO EDGE summit and return to campus for classes and homework. Despite her status as National Youth Poet Laureate, she still felt impostor syndrome at Harvard, and felt pressure to pursue a practical career, even if it wasn’t her passion.

“I felt like the stakes were super high, and maybe I didn’t feel the authority to bet on myself as a writer, as a creative person,” Gaines recalled. “Through being at Harvard and being in classes with people who are throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the things that they love, I had to learn that that’s okay to do.”

This year, she has returned to creative writing in full force, working in whatever blocks of time she can find: between study sessions, in the dining hall, or even jotting down lines if they come to mind in class. Her work, which lately has explored themes of maritime navigation, the transatlantic slave trade, migration, and memory, carries a rhythm punctuated by alliteration that reflects her years performing spoken word.

Gaines serves on the art board of the Harvard Advocate, as well as the JFK Jr. Forum Committee at the IOP. She has been co-director of the Black Arts Collective and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. Poets who inspire her include June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Frank Bidart, and Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as Tracy K. Smith, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Professor of African and African American Studies.

 “I think it took some time for me to get back to writing poems and trying to see how my artistry, my craft, can develop,” Gaines said. “There’s so much for me to discover and to keep learning and to try again.”

Vladimir Nabokov never learned to type. Every word of every novel he published — including the classics “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” and “Pnin” — was typed by his wife, Vera, before being sent to editors.

“He wrote on notecards,” said Christine Jacobson, associate curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and co-curator, with Dale Stinchcomb of New York’s Morgan Library, of “Thanks for Typing: Women’s Type Labor in Literature and the Arts.”

Nabokov, Jacobson said, would shuffle the notecards “until he liked the arc of the story. And depending on how fleshed out they were, he would then either dictate them to Vera, or if they were in complete prose, he would hand them to her to be typed.”

“Thanks for Typing” explores the stories of women like Vera — typists who helped bring the novels and stories of famous literary figures to the public — as well as the thousands of women who served as secretaries and typists for government officials, scientists, researchers, and Hollywood creatives.

The inspiration for the exhibit was a viral social media tag — #thanksfortyping — started by University of Virginia Professor Bruce Holsinger.

“He was looking through academic monographs on Google Books when he started to pay attention to the acknowledgement section and notice the same language over and over again: ‘Thanks to Judy for typing’; ‘Thanks to my wife, Mary, for typing the manuscript and transcribing the interviews,’” Jacobson said. “It was like, thanks for typing, thanks for typing, thanks for typing, over and over again.”

“And so we wondered, what might we find if we looked for these stories in our own archives here at Houghton, and what would it look like to bring greater attention to those stories in an exhibition?” Jacobson said.

Exploring Houghton’s archives, Jacobson and Stinchcomb discovered typists for Emily Dickinson, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Oscar Wilde. As part of the exhibit, the curators paired examples of Dickinson’s handwritten poems — including her unique capitalizations and paragraph indentations — with typewritten versions created by Mabel Loomis Todd during the 1890s. Todd began publishing Dickinson’s manuscripts four years after her death, when Dickinson’s sister gave her hundreds of handwritten pages.

“We would not have Emily Dickinson’s poetry without her,” Jacobson said.

With responsibilities that ranged from research to copy editing, typists in some cases left an important mark on the finished product, Jacobson said, citing Todd’s decision to discard many of the oddities in Dickinson’s script and edits Vivian Eliot made to her husband’s poems.

Then there’s the influence typing had on the writer: “Henry James’ style changes very significantly once he starts dictating to a typist, and that is where you get the great late Henry James period, where his style is a lot more verbose and the sentences are very long and winding,” Jacobson said.

In addition to typists’ literary contributions, the curators wanted to contextualize how their work has been valued, or not, over time.

“From the moment the typewriter is invented, it is immediately associated with women and women’s labor,” Jacobson said.

When Christopher Latham Sholes invented the first commercially viable typewriter in 1872, he didn’t pose for press photographs but instead positioned his daughter at the machine, she noted. The very first photograph of somebody operating a typewriter, Jacobson said, captures Lillian Sholes — the original “typewriter girl.”

“The message that this would have been sending to 19th-century audiences would have been that this machine is so easy to use that a woman can do it,” Jacobson said. “Sholes is lauded as this person who paved the way for women to enter the white-collar working world, which is definitely true, but I think the issue here is that from its inception the contributions have been minimized, and not seen as a technical skill.”

From the turn of the century to the 1950s and ’60s, Jacobson said, women’s labor continued to be minimized while depictions of it grew more sexualized.

Mid-century typewriter manuals were “very much about catering to your boss’s every need and making sure that you look beautiful and hygienic for work,” she said. “They’re objects of sexual desire. They’re meant to adorn the office.”

The exhibit wouldn’t be complete without a chance for visitors to type for themselves, courtesy of a vintage Olympia in the Edison and Newman Room. Houghton is also partnering with the Harvard Film Archive to spotlight women who make their living at the typewriter, with screenings of “Meet Joe Doe,” “His Girl Friday,” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.” For showtimes, tickets, and Christine Jacobson’s show notes, visit the HFA website. 

“Thanks for Typing” will be on display through May 1.

There is a need for a Black bioethics, argued a recent panel sponsored by Harvard Medical School and Tuskegee University. One need look no farther than inequities in COVID-19 diagnoses and treatment during the pandemic for evidence, but another, devastating historical example is the 40-year-long Tuskegee experiment.

Moderator Rebecca Brendel, director of the HMS Center for Bioethics, gave a quick recap of the experiment, in which several hundred Black sharecroppers were enrolled in a U.S. Public Health Service study.

The 399 participants, all suffering from syphilis, were told they had “bad blood” so researchers could observe the progress of the untreated deadly disease in human subjects. The study ran from 1932 to 1972.

In 1978, a national committee of physicians, lawyers, and scientists issued The Belmont Report, which outlined ethical guidelines. (An official apology, from President Bill Clinton, finally came in 1997.)

But nearly 40 years after The Belmont Report, discrimination in healthcare remains a stark reality. Black mortality rates are still significantly higher than those of white people in the U.S., said panelist David Augustin Hodge, interim director, lead ethicist, and research professor at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Healthcare at Tuskegee.

“Black people die at a faster rate. Life expectancy is lower,” said Hodge. Minority children “are 3.5 times more likely to die in childhood” than white. These discrepancies translate to “about 80 million years of life that have been lost between 1999 and 2020,” he said.

Such deaths are often attributed to causes unrelated to race. For example, the higher mortality rate of Black people with COVID is blamed on co-morbidities. But the co-morbidities that make Black people more vulnerable, such as diabetes, are themselves a result of a healthcare system that has failed the Black community.

“If we do not give attention to Black lives and brown lives and the lives of the vulnerable, we will see these things happen,” said panelist T.S. Harvey, associate professor of medical and linguistic anthropology and global health at Vanderbilt University.

The Belmont Report, as Harvey pointed out is “strictly limited,” in that it discusses only research with human subjects.

Considering these strictures, “it has been applied too broadly” as an answer to discrimination, he said. Instead, bioethicists need to look to liberation theology as a model of “inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness,” he said.

“As a Black bioethicist. I’m just as interested in our Native American population. I’m just as interested in Alaskan or Asian Pacific populations. I’m just as interested in my Hispanic brothers down on the border, the Mexican brothers and sisters, or the Cuban brothers and sisters. In those in the Appalachian Mountains, those who are poor,” Harvey said.

“Because quite frankly, when we’re talking about ethics and when we’re talking about principles, we are talking about the least of us,” as liberation theology teaches, he said.

Complicating the problem of healthcare discrepancies is the rising use of AI in both medical and sociological research, both noted. Because AI draws from published material, it is inherently backward-looking — and replicates the biased research of the past, such as studies that only included white people or only men.

“Technology for all of its capabilities, whether or not we’re talking about artificial intelligence, large language models, or really sophisticated prosthetics, is not neutral,” said Harvey. “It replicates existing structures, existing notions.”

“If we do not understand or start to work with the power of implicit bias in technology, we will continue to go down the road of excising those communities that need to be involved,” said Hodge.

Exclusion also occurs “not by racism, but by comfort zones,” Hodge continued, noting that researchers tend to think in terms of the communities to which they belong. “When we’re talking about clinical trials, we [should be] talking about making the invisible visible,” he said.

To counter this ingrained racism and classism, said Harvey, we must “think about health disparities and who are the populations that are impacted now, and then reimagine those technologies and reimagine those interventions by understanding those challenges. But to do that, we have to move beyond utilitarian ethics to what Dr. Hodge talks about as fundamentally relational.”

“We can use many, many different philosophical frames to think this through, but we need to recognize that technology is there as an aid and can be used in many, many ways, but also understand the kinds of disparities that some of these technologies reproduce,” he said.

One model may be found in the gaming community, where “the technology is in the hands of the gamers,” he said. In other words, it is driven by the users, which in healthcare would mean the patients or clients.

Beyond that, “I continue to push,” said Hodge, even as he identified a source of hope: “Young people are thinking about this kind of work: public health ethics, public health and bioethics, neuroethics, etc. It is important to engage.”

“What we hope to do is to build beyond,” concluded Harvey. “Reimagine the possibilities to think about the complexity of the problems as human problems that have human solutions.”

“Bioethics and Black History: The Legacy of the Tuskegee Report” was organized by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University, and the HMS Office for Culture and Community Engagement as part of the series “Reflecting on the History of Healthcare,” available on the HMS Center for Bioethics YouTube community

Researchers seeking to understand the impact of smartphones on driving safety have a warning for music fans: Release day might be dangerous.

The study, described in a working paper published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, showed a 43 percent increase in streaming and a 15 percent increase in traffic fatalities on the days that major albums drop.

Vishal Patel, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, and the paper’s first author, said that the work was inspired by a moment behind the wheel. His wife, a singer and avid music fan, texted him to listen to a song that had just been released on streaming services. Patel began scrolling through his phone. When he looked up a few seconds later, he realized that he’d started drifting out of his lane.

“It hit me that a split second longer with my eyes off the road could have meant a serious accident,” he said. “Then I thought, if millions of people are doing the same thing at the same time — on the day a big album drops — the cumulative risk on the road must be enormous.”

Smartphones tempt drivers to send emails, search, call up directions, or even find a recipe for dinner. Despite that ceaseless potential for distraction, research into the impact of phones on driving is scarce, according to Patel and the new paper’s senior author, Anupam Bapu Jena, the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. The principal obstacle is ethics: Researchers can’t conduct live experiments that might illuminate what’s going on in the millions of cars on the road today. They can’t, for example, ethically instruct half of a study group to keep their eyes on the road while telling the other half to search for music as they navigate traffic.

Enter Patel’s insight about the distraction of downloading music, which he recognized as an opportunity for a natural experiment.

The researchers analyzed accident stats on the release days of the 10 most streamed albums between 2017 and 2022, plus, for comparison, on the 10 days both before and after the release dates. Using Spotify data, they found an average of 123.3 million streams on the major album release days, compared with just 86.1 million streams on the days before and after — a 43 percent increase on release days.

Turning to traffic fatalities, they found an average of 139.1 deaths on release days, an increase of 18.2 fatalities over the average of 120.9 traffic deaths on the 10 days before and after the releases. Added together, deaths rose 15.1 percent, totaling 182 additional fatalities on the 10 days when those major albums were released.

“It could be manipulation of the device, it could be general distraction because of the excitement,” Jena said. “It could also be that you’re playing the music louder than you normally would play it, and that you don’t pick up things around you that you otherwise would have picked up. Any of those things are possible.”

Patel and Jena also examined accident characteristics, seeking insights on the potential role of factors other than distraction. Drivers tended to be sober, arguing against the possibility that they had attended boozy parties celebrating the album releases. The increase in fatal accidents was also larger in single-occupant vehicles, missing a passenger who might help manage the music. Drivers also tended to be younger, fitting the profile of younger people as more avid music consumers.

Patel’s investigation into distracted driving continues. Technology has advanced significantly since 2022, when data collection for the current study ended. Vehicle technology has advanced, with cameras and sensors eliminating blind spots and making switching lanes safer. Many vehicles come with automatic braking and other safety features. Among the open questions, Patel said, is the impact of artificial intelligence, which could allow a new array of distracting tasks to be performed while driving. AI could also, however, enhance safety by taking on tasks from the driver, like finding music or drafting a work email.

“People convince themselves they can multitask behind the wheel — scheduling calls, eating, putting on makeup,” Patel said. “Smartphones have dramatically expanded what’s possible to do while driving and, as cars become increasingly connected, the temptation to divide your attention is only going to grow.”

Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, we’ve created our own shortlist: movies with a tie to Harvard. Find out how much you know about Crimson cinema by taking our quiz. 

Step 1 of 10

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1. What novel set partially at Harvard was written to drum up interest in a movie?

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin

“Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman

“Love Story” by Erich Segal

2. Erich Segal based aspects of the male protagonist of “Love Story” on an actual Harvard undergraduate he met while on sabbatical. Who was it?

Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones

Nobel Prize-winning chemist Martin Chalfie

Film director and screenwriter Terrence Malick

NFL cornerback John Dockery

3. Michael Crichton ’64, M.D. ’69, whose novels “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” have been adapted as movies, used his experience as a medical student in the making of what hit TV show?

General Hospital

ER

M*A*S*H

Grey’s Anatomy

4. Ashley Judd, M.P.A. ’10, got her first starring role in the film “Ruby in Paradise,” which plays homage to what classic novel?

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf

“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton

“Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen

“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

5. In the 1994 comedy “With Honors,” a Harvard student’s life is turned upside down when he meets whom?

A genie he releases from a lamp in the Harvard Art Museums

A homeless man living in the Widener Library boiler room

An eccentric law student who became the inspiration for Elle Woods in “Legally Blonde”

A gargoyle from a Memorial Hall tower come to life

6. The critically acclaimed 2019 film “Just Mercy” features Michael B. Jordan as which Harvard Law School alumnus?

Civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston

Public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson

Legal scholar David B. Wilkins

Boston Municipal Court Judge George Lewis Ruffin

7. Alumna Ursula K. Le Guin is said to have influenced or inspired which of the following books and films?

“Cloud Atlas,” based on the book by David Mitchell

“Spirited Away,” an animated film by Hayao Miyazaki

“Eragon,” based on the book by Christopher Paolini

All of the above

8. The films “Mississippi Masala” and “Salaam Bombay!” share a behind-the-scenes connection to Harvard. What is it?

Harvard scholars advised on both movies

Their director and screenwriter met while studying at Harvard

Both films were funded by Harvard-affiliated production grants

Harvard provided archival footage used in both films

9. What Oscar-winning film got its start as an assignment in a Harvard playwriting class?

“Saving Private Ryan”

“Shakespeare in Love”

“Good Will Hunting”

“Forrest Gump”

10. Who was the first Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year to receive her award in person?

Jane Fonda

Ethel Merman

Katharine Hepburn

Liza Minelli

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