“The center will have a big role to play in changing the curriculum,” said Tarr Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Markus Meister. “You can imagine that with 10 additional faculty to teach neuroscience, the curriculum will look very different from the way it looks now.”

Alumni Endowed Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology Joshua R. Sanes at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, who will become director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience in July, said the new focus on neuroscience will provide a healthy balance to the current broad study track of Mind, Brain and Behavior (MBB) at Harvard, which incorporates such fields as linguistics, psychology and sociology in studying the brain.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest in neuroscience. The MBB program is quite broad, and neurosciences is only one of its components,” said Sanes, as he explained that neuroscience is a way of studying the brain that’s based purely in biology. “So I think there is a huge need for education opportunities in neuroscience for undergraduates, both in terms of course work, seminars and lab opportunities.”

Sanes said one of the key aspects of the neuroscience center will be to attempt to combine studies of neuroscience and behavior and that new courses designed in the field of neurobiology will reflect this focus.

In addition, Sanes said the neuroscience program in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) will work closely with HMS and other graduate programs.

“Larry Summers is quite interested in having the university together, and FAS and HMS have not worked together well in the past,” he said. “We are in the vanguard of increasing interactions between FAS and the med school.”

This February, in a significant boost to an existing initiative, the School of Public Health was granted $107 million over the next five years from President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. This funding for the Treatment Care and Prevention Initiative in Botswana, Nigeria and Tanzania will allow doctors to better treat patients, according to Professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease Phyllis Kanki, one of the leaders of the initiative.

“It’s really wonderful,” she said. “We have programs in these countries, and we’ve been able to do research, but we’ve had our hands tied behind our back in terms of being able to provide treatments.”

Summers has said global health—an interdisciplinary field that merges science and social science—should be a more regular part of the Harvard undergraduate education.

He has stressed “that we have an obligation to use what we know to address AIDS, malaria” and other global health crises.

In mid-April, the Microbial Science Initiative was finally announced publicly after two years of planning, initiating what will be a massive collaboration of five departments—biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and earth and planetary sciences—to research bacteria at a microscopic level.

Daniel P. Schrag, professor of earth and planetary sciences, said in April that he hoped the initiative would allow students to experience research in a new light, taking the “bacteria out of the test tube.”

And Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Roberto G. Kolter hinted at the time that new microbial courses will be available to students by next spring and possibly even for non-concentrators by the following fall.

RUFFLED FEATHERS

Despite the year’s rapid push toward a new science program, not everyone agrees that the changes made are good ones, or that they were achieved fairly.