October 17, 2020

To: Alumni of MHC360

From: Harold Varmus

Recently I received a nice note from one of the members of the 2020 class of MHC360, commenting on my appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show and suggesting that I send all of the course graduates some comments about the pandemic and some links to my recent writings about it.

As is doubtless true for all of us, my life has been significantly altered by the pandemic: my wife and I have been living upstate for most of the time and, until a few months ago, my lab was closed.   Nevertheless, I’ve been surprisingly busy, and have devoted considerable energy to efforts to understand the pandemic and to deepen my understanding of a central issue in our course: the complex relationship between Science and Society.

I have done this through both group projects and my own reading and thinking.    A couple of efforts stand out.   Early in the pandemic, ten prominent scientists gathered frequently by Zoom to discuss our concerns and then wrote an article that was published in The Atlantic in May: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/lack-testing-holding-science-back/611422/  In the spring, President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, reassembled half of the former members of PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology)—those who had worked on reports dealing with responses to health emergencies, including the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009—and we have met weekly since then to discuss federal policies and write several reports that you can find at www://opast.org.   After our report on testing came out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted deeply flawed recommendations about the testing of asymptomatic people, prompting me to write an op-ed in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/opinion/cdc-testing-coronavirus.html).   That led to a number of other appearances, including the one on TRMS that some of your colleagues saw:

The Rachel Maddow Show – MSNBC.

Other aspects of science that we discussed in MHC360 have also come to the fore during the pandemic: political interference in the awarding of grants (https://www.wsj.com/articles/nih-presses-u-s-nonprofit-for-information-on-wuhan-virology-lab-11597829400), political engagement by scientists (the endorsement of Joe Biden by a large group of Nobel Laureates), greater attention to health disparities (even here in New York at the NY Genome Center: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/science/genetic-cancer-research-race.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share) and to representation of minorities in the research workforce; etc.

I am also planning to revise MHC360 next spring to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic and its lessons for an understanding of Science and Society (https://macaulay.cuny.edu/academics/upper-level-courses/spring-courses/science-and-society/).  I hope you will recall that we dealt with infectious diseases in the past in many sessions (when viewing Arrowsmith or reading The Microbe Hunters or discussing patenting, discrimination, and some other topics).   More such examples, drawn from Covid-19, will be used.  This plan assumes that the MHC and CUNY will bounce back from current impoverishment sufficiently to pay its adjunct professors (!) and that enough students enroll in the course.   If you have brilliant friends at MHC who might enjoy the course, please encourage them to register for it!

 

I trust you are all thriving and healthy.

 

With warm wishes,

 

Harold Varmus