From: Harold Varmus, course instructor

January 20, 2021

Welcome to Science and Society, the 2021 version of MHC360!

I am writing this memo two weeks before the first meeting of this year’s Science and Society course at Macaulay Honors College for at least three reasons: to welcome you to the course; to provide you with some information about its broad contours; and to describe my expectations for the first few sessions.

This is an extraordinary year for science and for this course, because the Covid-19 pandemic has riveted the world’s attention to a problem that only science can solve, because the pandemic’s effects have been so pervasive, affecting every element in society, and because the course of the pandemic has been influenced by so many events, ideas, and behaviors that illuminate the complex relationship between science and society—the core issue in the course.  For that reason, I have adjusted the usual framework of MHC360 to accommodate special attention to various facets of the pandemic, hoping both to heighten interest in our sessions and to help all of us (including me) to wrestle with the confounding aspects of the pandemic and its consequences.

So we will be looking at the large issues that the course usually raises—What is science?  What draws people to scientific careers?  Why do governments pay for science?  How is science communicated and judged? Etc.—but in nearly every session, aspects related to Covid-19 will receive special attention.   Furthermore, I have organized a session that will be devoted to a consideration of—even a debate about—why the US suffered so badly during the pandemic, in comparison with even the poorest countries in the world.

I have provided with this mailing the assignments for our first two sessions.   The first session will be devoted first to course mechanics (boring but necessary and brief) and then (at much greater length) to getting to know each other and to discussing the nature of scientific work.   As in past years, the second class will deal with the motivations that drive scientific careers, using a fictional example, the career of a complicated medical scientist, Martin Arrowsmith, from Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Arrowsmith.  The book is long but fortunately there is a superb movie from 1931 that tells the story very well and I have provided a link to it.   Because the main event in the movie (and the novel) concerns a clinical trial during an epidemic of an infectious disease, the story will lead us to a parallel reality, the current pandemic.

I am very much looking forward to meeting all of you in two weeks and to working with you for the rest of the term.  If you have questions, feel free to contact me directly (varmus@med.cornell.edu) or through my assistant, Dawn Thomas, dat2023@med.cornell.edu.