Claudine Gay marked her inauguration as Harvard’s 30th president with a call to action, sharing her vision of a vibrant, diverse community equal to the particular challenges of the world’s most daunting problems.

“The courage of this University — our resolve, against all odds — to question the world as it is and imagine and make a better one: It is what Harvard was made to do,” Gay said Friday. “By continually recommitting ourselves to our central purpose, with renewed vision and vigor, we advance the prospects of humankind.”

Courage also imbues the story of Harvard’s progress from a dark history of deep entanglements with slavery to a welcoming campus enriched by the collision of different backgrounds and beliefs, noted Gay, the first person of color and second woman to lead the University.

“Our stories — and the stories of the many trailblazers between us — are linked by this institution’s long history of exclusion and the long journey of resistance and resilience to overcome it,” Gay said. “And because of the collective courage of all those who walked that impossible distance, across centuries, and dared to create a different future, I stand before you on this stage — in this distinguished company and magnificent theater, and at this moment of challenge in our nation and in the world, with the weight and honor of being a ‘first’ — able to say, ‘I am Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University.’”

The ceremony at Tercentenary Theatre began with an academic procession that included representatives from 185 universities and institutions around the world. It included invocations, musical performances, dance, and greetings from the Harvard community’s four pillars — students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The 30th president was welcomed formally by a representative of higher education, Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez of the City University of New York, which Gay’s parents attended, and a representative of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey, who pledged partnership with Harvard.

Gay delivered her address to an audience sheltering from steady rain under a sea of umbrellas. She said Harvard should continue to encourage and celebrate diversity in part for the varying perspectives and beliefs that enhance campus life.

“We embrace diversity — of backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives — as an institutional imperative,” she said. “When we do that, it’s not with a secret hope for calm or consensus. It’s because we believe in the value of dynamic engagement and the learning that happens when ideas and opinions collide.”

Among the many challenges Harvard must address is the public’s ebbing trust in higher education, she said. Nearly 40 percent of Americans say higher education has a negative effect on the country, a majority say that earning a four-year degree doesn’t guarantee success, and many believe that a college education simply doesn’t matter.

As democracies around the world grow increasingly divided with the rise of various anti-democratic forces and nationalist-populist movements, a group of Harvard scholars gathered Friday morning to assess the state of democracy in the U.S. and propose ways to revitalize it to ensure it best serves 21st-century America.

The event, titled “Revitalizing Democracy,” was one of six academic symposia that took place Friday across the University as part of President Claudine Gay’s inaugural celebration. Gay, a political scientist, has called “faltering” democracies one of the most pressing challenges the world faces. She said that seeking ways Harvard can join with the global community to find solutions is a priority for the University.

During a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School led by moderator Guy-Uriel Charles, Charles Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, faculty panelists identified some of the difficulties American democracy faces today.

Among the issues that panelists cited are an outdated reliance on institutions like the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, and the filibuster that permit a minority to thwart the will of the majority, and foreign actors and nation-states targeting the American electorate with threats and false information designed to widen political and cultural divisions and weaken consensus on democratic principles.

Many of the problems have been gradually emerging over time amid changes in population through immigration, shifts to a global economy, and the rise of digital technology.

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, said passage of immigration laws in the 1960s, the emergence of social media and structural reforms to both political parties in the 1950s have resulted in “unintended consequences” that affect our democracy today.

Some of the panelists noted that the country has only been a true multicultural democracy since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, while the Constitution, written by and for a white minority eligible to vote, has remained largely untouched since the Civil Rights era.

The “outsized” and very different experience that communities of color often have with policing compared to white communities fuels misperceptions about the state and crime and hardens fear-driven partisanship, said Yanilda González, assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School.

The panel offered ideas for how the Harvard community, particularly faculty and students, can start to dismantle these barriers and strengthen democracy so that it more fairly and equitably serves the changing America populace.

Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS, said research has shown that frequent face-to-face interactions between people with very different political views reduces polarization and will foster a “culture of democracy” in which disagreement is welcome and partisanship is not, so focusing more effort on bridging political gaps at the local or state level is critical.

Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Harvard College Professor, suggested an amendment to the Constitution that would impose term limits on Supreme Court justices at some future, mutually agreed upon date, could be an effective way to eliminate lifetime appointments, which partisans on both sides agree in principle runs counter to democratic practice, and to demonstrate that changes to the Constitution are necessary and possible.

Academic institutions, like Harvard, ought to begin working now to identify the models that can best move U.S. political institutions forward so that they truly support our multicultural democracy, said Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and director of the Center for European Studies.

“The ideas are already there,” Ziblatt said. They just require time and attention to refine them so they’re ready to be implemented when the time comes, much like was done following World War II to establish institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

“If we just sort of hold off until the moment is ‘realistic,’ then we won’t be ready when the moment comes.”

“Innovating for Impact: Science for the Mind and Body in the 21st Century”

Another panel, moderated by Amy Wagers, the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the co-chair of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, discussed Harvard’s biomedical research and the field’s untapped potential in improving health outcomes for billions around the world.

“I really wanted to highlight the many facets of innovation that are needed to realize the full potential of biological discoveries, spanning from the first arc of an idea to the experiments in their early days to the discoveries — and ultimately their application — in the real world,” Wagers said.

And the first step, all agreed, was to be unafraid to take leaps.

“We need to take big risks to solve hard problems,” said Kara McKinley, one of the panelists and an assistant professor at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. McKinley leads a lab that seeks to advance regenerative medicine by studying a repair mechanism in the uterus that may offer insights into how we can harness natural processes to heal wounds. “Because in the end, this is really the goal, to create cures and to do science that is in service to humankind,” she said.

Recognition happens when a person feels values and truly visible in their community and the culture at large. Smartphones can’t provide it. Nor can the latest chatbot.

“It’s something only other human beings can give you,” said Michèle Lamont, a professor of sociology and African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies.

In her new book, “Seeing Others: How Recognition Works — And How It Can Heal a Divided World,” Lamont distills nearly four decades of research into a nimble argument traversing vast territory, from emerging Gen Z narratives on race and gender to the Hollywood creatives bringing recognition to diverse groups.

“The book is a call to recenter our understanding of inequality,” said Lamont. “It’s not only about distribution of resources. It’s also about how people create their identity, how they make sense of their place in the world.”

One chapter focuses on artists and entertainers whose storytelling broadens the circle of people who matter. Comedian W. Kamau Bell, host of CNN’s “United Shades of America,” uses a technique Lamont calls “reflecting reality,” or circulating stories that defy stereotypes. Tanya Saracho, executive producer and showrunner of the Starz series “Vida,” favors “emotional modulation,” or shifting perceptions by pulling the heartstrings.

Another chapter draws from interviews with dozens of college students, initially collected for an academic paper on the evolving American Dream. Lamont admires the students’ embrace of “ordinary universalism,” or focusing on commonalities over differences. However, she’s quick to note that they too fail to recognize all groups, including older Americans. “I argue in the book that the Boomers are allies,” Lamont, a Boomer herself, said in an interview.

Other chapters probe what Lamont calls “neoliberal scripts of self” — or how notions of worthiness are so closely tied to economic achievements in modern America. This leaves poor and working-class people feeling culturally alienated, if not downright invisible, she argues. As evidence, she cites the surfeit of wealthy characters, with their vividly posh lifestyles, on screens big and small.

“Think of the number of recent series that are celebrating rich people, whether it’s ‘Succession’ or ‘White Lotus,’” Lamont said. “There are very few working-class heroes in our media today.”

Still, she insists that inequality can’t be understood in strictly material terms. When research subjects are asked about experiences that feel discriminatory, most don’t focus on a lack of affordable housing or quality schools, she says. “The things they talk most about are assaults on the self. It has to do with feeling ignored, underestimated, or overlooked.”

The author rejects the idea that recognizing racial, ethnic, and gender identities distracts from economic divisions, citing her decades of research on group boundaries. Rather, she advocates for devising new narratives with positive representations for all. At one point, Lamont suggests that the politics of recognition can even break barriers between those at opposite political poles.

“Few acknowledge that there is a common quest for recognition between the white working class who support right-wing populist candidates and progressive groups of LGBTQ+ people and anti-racist advocates,” she writes.

Lamont closes the book with an appeal to upper-middle-class parents, whose patterns of self-segregation, she argues, are an underappreciated barrier to unity and empathy in American life.

“We talk a lot about racial segregation in the U.S., but the enormous increase in class segregation, in my view, is equally egregious,” Lamont said. “It’s becoming more difficult for upper-middle-class people to understand the plight of the poor.”

By detailing how stigma has been reduced historically for certain groups, such as couples in same-sex marriages and people who are HIV-positive, Lamont believes she can encourage readers to help set in motion similar changes for others, including religious minorities, immigrants, and overwhelmed caregivers.

“The book is very hopeful,” she said. “It helps people understand how they can contribute to creating a more inclusive world, even in those discouraging moments when you can see things going backwards.”

Excerpted from “Mary Climbs In: The Journeys of Bruce Springsteen’s Women Fans” by Lorraine Mangione, professor of clinical psychology at Antioch University New England, and Donna Luff, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

Sometimes a person needs help on a foundational level, more than what a friend or teacher can provide, either for a crisis or for something chronically wrong in their life or their sense of self. Sometimes a kind of help different from spiritual guidance feels more compelling, and the problems or distress feel more worldly, complicated, or debilitating on an everyday level. The hurt and pain may stem from events in the world, a major loss, trauma from childhood or the present, problems within relationships, or inter­nal struggles that have long simmered or suddenly erupted. Fear of losing hope altogether, that one is stuck forever, can take over, along with paralyzing self-doubt, questioning everything. People look to religion for help, seek out an elder in their community, call a doctor for a physical explanation, turn to substances to relieve the pain, search the internet, sit alone in a room, read an inspirational or self-help book, or write in journals. Others go to therapy for profes­sional help. And some turn to Bruce Springsteen as their “therapist.”

Before embarking on this journey into the intense issues many women expressed in our surveys, we need to add a caveat. Bruce Springsteen’s work is not psychotherapy, and we are not advocating for its use instead of psychotherapy. It is its own unique creation and cannot be reduced to another process or experience. It can sometimes be extremely helpful to women in despair or in crisis, or who are going through normal life transitions or events that are daunting. His music is a tool that some women fans have used for psychological growth. It is not designed to be psychotherapy and does not include the basics of psychotherapy in a literal sense. Psychotherapy is an analogy to understand the tremendous impact that his work can have on some women fans, and to see what contributes to that impact. We consider his work as another potential healing practice, in the tradition of art’s healing elements, and within practices that are not modern Western psychology, but not as a substitute for psychotherapy.

For some women, Springsteen, through his music, is there often, even every day, helping through issues and conflicts, whether by inspiring hope, creating a sense of connection, or allowing a release or catharsis. A few use “therapist” to describe this presence. “He’s my therapist. I listen to his music every day to maintain peace of mind.” “It helps me every day … listen to E Street Radio on my commute to and from work. Hard to give an example … suffice it to say that Bruce music is my therapy.” “The fact that you can feel his enjoyment in what he does and makes each show feel like it’s just for you. He feels like my therapist I always leave a show feeling amazing and needing more.” “It gave me energy in a very hard moment, the last concert was like a therapy bringing me back to the joy of living!” While most women did not explicitly say therapist or therapy, the healing image reverberates throughout descriptions.

These straightforward statements describe the heart of the help. “When feeling down songs I go to when feeling angry songs I go to when feeling happy songs I want to sing along too.” “His songs relate to all of us, he inspires and gives you hope.” “I can’t think of a single time in my life when Bruce wasn’t a way to help me. He has a song for every thing your heart needs!!” “If I’m pissed off or sad about something, the best cure for me is ride in my car with Springsteen up loud.” “Yes, just get past things. Make me realize I’m not alone feeling certain ways.” “It has definitely helped me during difficult periods of my life, more often to boost my mood. Occasionally by listening to sad songs and having a good cry.” “It has helped me understand my feelings, helped inspire me to keep pushing forward, and helped me feel Understood.” “It’s made me pick my ass back up and get on with living.” “Made me relaxed and it’s comforting to know you will never be let down.” The abiding pres­ence of Springsteen and his work feels basic to their help and support.

The longevity of Springsteen’s career and fans’ devotion contrib­utes to fans feeling helped over decades and across developmental phases and milestones. Many women noted low points of their lives and high points of his help. Research has shown that therapy can be similar when it is “intermittent,” such that one returns to therapy when in pain or crisis or at a turning point. These women described ongoing, intermittent kinds of help, sometimes from a spe­cific song or concert that evocatively spoke to them.

Intimate and grand existential moments, the big questions of life, often unbidden, stand out. “Springsteen’s music helped me through feeling lonely in high school, through a breakup in college, through feel­ing homesick away from my family, through feeling stressed out on a day to day basis. Springsteen is my go to when I need an emotional pick-me-up.”

“When I was in my teens I was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis and every time I heard ‘Born to Run’ it helped me to overcome the pain and try to live a normal teenage life. I always felt that Bruce was sing­ing it for me. As stated earlier ‘We Are Alive’ more recently helped to deal with the loss of my mom who I was very close with. The lyrics in that song have helped me know that she is always with me. Also when my husband lost his job during the recession songs like ‘Jack of all Trades’ felt like it was written for us personally and helped us to get through possibly the most difficult time of our marriage.”

The breadth of help for these women is startling. These aren’t just love songs, or motivational songs, or songs about work, or illness — they are experiences of deep meaning amid turbulence, with Springsteen in a healing role.

Songs do not have to be exact replicas of a person’s life. “Relation­ship struggles, death of my mother, raising kids, getting older. Even though his characters may not be MY story … they still resonate with me. I can start listening to a song and my entire mood can and will change …. again, I FEEL the music.” “It helped me in my youth and later as I had some hard times in some jobs. And I met my hus­band, who is a Springsteen fan, too, and we are married now and are since 20 years together. If my life gets in trouble Springsteen and his music are always like the big rock on the shore.” That rock on the shore, its solidity and security, could be something people are search­ing for in a world where it may be harder to rely on what used to give people strength and solidity. A rock is symbolic of that which stands with you or on which you can stand.

Excerpted by permission of Rutgers University Press, copyright 2023. 

The phrase “A moment of possibility” is highlighted in red.

Draped around columns in the Lammot du Pont Copeland Gallery in Pusey Library are transcripts of remarks made by Claudine Gay after the announcement of her appointment as the University’s 30th president. Some phrases are highlighted, connecting her words to Harvard’s present and future — “harnessing the power of ideas.”

To mark Gay’s inauguration the Harvard University Archives is celebrating the legacy of the University’s presidents with two special displays. The first is the Pusey Library exhibit titled “A Moment of Possibility: The Harvard Presidency from Henry Dunster to Claudine Gay,” which runs through June.

The second is a special viewing of the presidential insignia on Friday, directly following the inauguration.

On Friday, Claudine Gay will be inaugurated as Harvard’s 30th president, poised to seize a “moment of possibility” for the University. Gay, who started in the role July 1, spent the summer building her leadership team, settling into Massachusetts Hall, and connecting with faculty, students, and staff. We talked to her about takeaways from those conversations and her sense of Harvard’s direction in the coming months and years. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q&A

Claudine Gay

GAZETTE: Tell me about your first few months as president. Have there been many surprises?

GAY: There probably hasn’t been a week in my entire Harvard career that hasn’t had at least one surprise, and the last few months have been no different.

The good news is that most have been very positive surprises, including the warm welcome that I’ve received from the community. And, as I’ve begun having conversations with members of the community, I’ve been really struck by the ambition of this place. That was something I knew from my prior roles at Harvard, but learning all the ways that that ambition exists across the University has been awe-inspiring. One highlight was spending half a day at the Law School immersing myself in the community there. I was able to sit in on the property class for the 1Ls. The professor, Molly Brady, is a marvelous teacher. Lucky students. Beyond that, I’m trying to settle in and build my team.

GAZETTE: From a personal standpoint, has your day changed a lot?

GAY: I am a creature of habit and there are certain routines that I will never give up, including exercising every day. My son sometimes still lets me pack his lunch — though he usually would rather go to Raising Cane’s or Chipotle. So, my life is definitely busier, but some of the basic structure that I lean on to keep my life on the rails remains.

GAZETTE: Does the exercise help keep you grounded?

GAY: It definitely helps mentally: being able to focus on something that is not work and knowing you’re doing something good for yourself. That’s very satisfying. And the weather is still so pleasant out, it’s nice to be able to go outside to run. It is an important part of my life.

GAZETTE: You did a lot of outreach over the summer. To name just two examples, you met with members of the community at ice cream socials and joined with colleagues to help students and families on move-in day. How important are these direct connections?

GAY: I think they’re really important. They’re certainly important for me, because I learn a lot by being able to connect, human-to-human, with people. I also believe that they’re important for the community, which wants to understand who is leading them.

The ice cream socials were terrific. I got to meet a lot of people on three very different parts of our campus. But it was summertime and many people were away, so it’s been nice to reconnect with larger groups since the semester has gotten underway.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, groups of Adams House residents sat in the Randolph Hall courtyard doing homework at café tables or relaxing in hammocks. Just inside, other students video chatted in “the phone booths,” small private study rooms on the ground floor. In a music practice room down the corridor, Chris Ruiz ’26 played piano.

For Ruiz, whose primary instrument is the trumpet, the practice room is one of the best new spaces in the hall, which reopened this summer after years of renovations that began in 2019 as part of the Harvard Undergraduate House Renewal Program. With enough space for several musicians and outlets for plugging in amps, Ruiz called it a great spot for future jam sessions with his blockmates.

The first week of every October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the winners of the Nobel Prize to celebrate outstanding contributions to physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.

Fifty Harvard faculty have received this prestigious award while working at the University. Economist Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, when he was at Trinity College in the U.K.

We asked seven of these laureates how winning changed their lives, what influence it had on their work, and how they dealt with the sudden notoriety.

“I was recently knighted; that’s something that obviously wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t won the prize.”

Oliver Hart
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor
Winner of the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Bengt R. Holmström, for “their contributions to contract theory.”

“Did my life change after the Nobel? It surely did. You get an enormous amount of attention. I was the kind of academic who was writing for many other academics, so I wasn’t getting much attention in the outside world before the Nobel. Initially, everyone wants to find out what you think about a number of things because there is this idea that maybe this person has the answer to all the questions, and very soon they figure out you don’t [laughter], and the attention diminishes. But it still stays at a significantly higher level than before. It’s a big change.

“Since winning the Nobel, I have been working on two areas. The first was a continuation of the work for which I won the prize, which is about contracts, particularly about contractual incompleteness and how people deal with the fact that any contract is going to have stuff left out of it. As a result of winning the prize, I got to know a legal practitioner based in Stockholm, with whom I started a collaboration, which was just pure serendipity, and it just wouldn’t have happened without the prize. The second is corporate social responsibility, which I’m very interested in, but that perhaps would have happened anyway.

“The Nobel is such a magical name and the fact that I’m a Nobel laureate seems to matter. But I would say after the first year, it’s back to normal with a few extra things. It mostly is business as usual.

“Unfortunately, contract theory has not become any more popular among graduate students just because of this prize. Initially, I received lots of requests from high school students wanting to be my research assistant and from journalists who want me to give my views about the U.S. economy or the Chinese economy. I always say the same thing, which is, ‘I’m the wrong person for that.’

“The other thing I didn’t anticipate was this feeling, and probably I’m not alone in sometimes thinking, ‘Why on earth did I win the Nobel? Did I deserve it?’ This kind of impostor syndrome, I certainly experienced, and still experience it. I felt more deserving before I won it than after [laughter]. That feeling was a bit of a surprise, but by and large, though, it’s been very positive, there’s no question about that. A surprising thing was that I was recently knighted; that’s something that obviously wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t won the prize.

“Some people ask what the secret to winning the Nobel is, and I’d say that the secret is to work hard, to produce good work, and not to think too much about it. To say the obvious, there’s a considerable amount of luck involved because there are many people who are worthy of it who don’t win it. I don’t think anybody’s aim should be to win the Nobel Prize. It certainly wasn’t my aim when I started out. I think the only thing you can really do is to do the research that interests you and to see where it goes.”

“I have always wanted to start a charity focused on children’s education and healthcare for the poor. The money I received from the Nobel Prize gave me the opportunity …”

Amartya Sen
Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy
Winner of the 1998 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences “for his contributions to welfare economics.”

“I can’t say that the Nobel Prize changed my life in a big way. Winning the Nobel in 1998 did not lead me into new directions in my research or have a gigantic effect in my career. I see the Nobel as one of many recognitions that exist to celebrate achievements in science, literature, and so on. After the Nobel, I continued to work on the issues that have always preoccupied me: the economics of poverty and human development.

“A positive effect of winning the Nobel Prize was that the subject of education and healthcare for the poor gained more attention and interest around the world. As for any negative effects, I can’t think of any, but I would have to say that the celebration tends to take a lot of your time; there are many social obligations, which can distract you from work. After I won the Nobel Prize, there was a lot of interest, particularly in India and Bangladesh, about me and my work, and many people kept reaching out to me to do interviews.

“I have always wanted to start a charity focused on children’s education and healthcare for the poor. The money I received from the Nobel Prize gave me the opportunity to start the Pratichi Trust in India. The trust is named after Pratichi, my ancestral home in Santiniketan, India, and what it does is to provide basic schooling and medical care for young children. The Nobel Prize allowed me to channel some resources to those causes I deeply care about.”

“There’s also been a fun side to the prize … As part of a fundraiser, I spent an evening once playing poker with comedian Steve Martin, who is a better player than me, even though I’m the game theorist.”

Eric S. Maskin ’72, Ph.D.’76
Adams University Professor
Winner of the 2007 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger B. Myerson, for “their work on mechanism design theory.”

“Did winning the prize change my life? Not my daily life, at least not on most days. I got into this line of work because I love research and teaching — and that’s what I mainly still do. My colleagues and students don’t care much that I won a prize, which was for work done many years ago. They’re more interested in my current thinking. So, if I make a claim about, say, income inequality in the class I’m teaching this term, I have to back it up with logic and evidence — argument by “authority” won’t do. Furthermore, I don’t think the prize has changed what I work on. But there’s little question that the prize has given me a wider audience. One area I’m interested in professionally and as an activist is election reform, i.e., improving the way we elect our political leaders. And, through my notoriety, I’ve had many chances to write op-eds on this for newspapers, give public lectures, testify before legislatures, serve on task forces, and help draft legislation. I especially like talking to students about what I do in the hope that some of them might get interested in learning more about it.

“There’s also been a fun side to the prize — I’ve talked to kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, and many others I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise. I met the royal family of Sweden, of course; King Charles when he was the prince of Wales; the king of Jordan, whom I met at a climate change conference; the king of Thailand; and the king and queen of Spain. As part of a fundraiser, I spent an evening once playing poker with comedian Steve Martin, who is a better player than me, even though I’m the game theorist.

“Among the negative effects, there are too many distractions from teaching and research, and secondly, I’m being asked questions that I’m not qualified to answer because journalists think Nobelists know everything — and feeling the temptation to answer them anyway. For example, I get asked, ‘What is going to happen to the unemployment rate next year?’ Economic forecasting is not a strong aspect of economics, but I’m especially unqualified because that’s not something I studied. I’ll be asked questions such as: How should we resolve the tensions with China? Or, how do we end the war in Ukraine? There’s always a temptation to talk about stuff that you don’t know about. I think it’s better to resist that temptation, but it’s not always so easy.

“I have a son who is severely disabled from a brain injury when he was very little. He attended a wonderful school in Pennsylvania for disabled kids when he was of school age. I was very happy to be able to repay the support that they gave my son and the family by giving most of my prize winnings to them.”

“Being a Nobel laureate made it possible for me to be invited to present lectures at traditional Black colleges, like Fisk University, and inspire students to realize their potential.”

Martin Karplus
Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus
Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”

“Being awarded the Nobel Prize certainly did change my life. However, as one Nobel laureate colleague said, I was lucky that it happened so late (I was 83 at the time) because he had found
it to be very disruptive to his day-to-day activities. I was fortunate that the changes the announcement brought were largely positive. I was able to continue my work, but it did not lead me to discover new directions in my research.

“It gave me the opportunity to reach a larger audience. Being a Nobel laureate made it possible for me to be invited to present lectures at traditional Black colleges, like Fisk University, and inspire students to realize their potential. I declined many invitations which came my way to give lectures on subjects about which I did not know anything.”

“Even now, nearly four decades later, I still receive invitations to give talks in countries near and far, as well as requests from postdocs from all over the world who want to do research in my group.”

Dudley Herschbach, Ph.D. ’58
Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, Emeritus
Winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, for “their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes.”

“The biggest change was that I was invited to give talks about my research all over the world, not just the U.S., Britain, and Germany. I gave talks in Egypt, Israel, Japan, China, and even Kuala Lumpur, among many other countries. Also, postdoctoral fellows from all over the world wrote to ask if they could join my research group at Harvard. Even now, nearly four decades later, I still receive invitations to give talks in countries near and far, as well as requests from postdocs from all over the world who want to do research in my group. I also continue to receive letters from young people who have read about me and my research. Often, they ask me to autograph photos of me they’ve found on the Internet. Usually, the photos were taken many years ago. These young scientists have no idea that I’m now 91 years old and no longer doing scientific research, but I always sign the photos and send them back. I want to do all I can to encourage young people to pursue science. It’s such an exciting world.

“After winning the prize, I continued to pursue my research in molecular beam chemistry. I could never have pursued my research without the benefit of generous grants, most of which were funded by the National Science Foundation. Scientific research is well-supported in our country, but the humanities are not. Thus, I donated my prize winnings to organizations in the humanities. Most were classical music organizations. All members of our family and most of our friends benefited from classical music performances, both as auditors and performers. I also funded an important project with my Nobel Prize winnings. I commissioned the American artist Patricia Watwood to paint a portrait of the great Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Among other significant contributions to astronomy, Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that hydrogen is millions of times more abundant than any other element in the universe. I donated Watwood’s portrait to Harvard. It now hangs in the Faculty Room in University Hall. With Watwood’s permission, I paid for technicians at the Harvard Art Museum to make a copy of Payne-Gaposchkin’s portrait. The copy was installed at the Harvard College Observatory where Cecilia carried out her brilliant research.”

“I knew objectively the discovery we made in the year 2000 was the kind of discovery that sometimes wins prizes, but I always remind students that a prize is a tribute to nature, not a tribute to us.”

William G. Kaelin Jr., M.D.
Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director, Basic Science, for the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center
Winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza, “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

“I’ve heard stories of Nobel laureates who said their lives were changed after winning the prize, but I have tried to stay focused on my work. My mentor David Livingston was a physician scientist at Harvard for many years, and he used to say that a good scientist should always think that the most important thing they’re ever going to do lies ahead of them. I try to adhere to that advice. In addition, as a physician scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I see patients in the waiting areas every day. I certainly know we have a lot more work to do collectively to try to control this disease better. That keeps me grounded. Finally, COVID struck several months after I got the prize. I like to think I would not have gone off onto the banquet circuit for a year, but I had no choice; like everyone else, I was just trying to stay at home and survive COVID. In any event, I don’t think winning the Nobel Prize changed my life all that much.

“Among the positive aspects, one of the wonderful things is being able to share it with all the people in your life who made it possible to win the Nobel Prize. It’s been wonderful to be able to share this with my family, my colleagues, my mentors, and my trainees. Sadly, you might know that my late wife died in 2015. It was extremely sad that I couldn’t share it with her because she was instrumental in everything I did, professionally. But it was wonderful to share it with my two children. I used a fair amount of the prize money to have two white-tie formal parties in Newport, one for my family and friends, and the other for my past and present trainees. It was my way to say thank you to the people in my life who helped make it possible. Secondly, because of my slightly different stature in the field, I can hopefully add my voice to the many voices trying to champion science and investments in science. I have a new voice now, if you will, because people listen to me in a way that they wouldn’t have listened to perhaps before.

“I had been properly warned ahead of time about potential negatives. I was warned that just because you win the Nobel Prize, you don’t suddenly become an expert on Middle East peace, on saving the whales, and all sorts of issues. I’m very careful about what causes I will lend my name to, or what petitions I will sign. If you’re not careful, you could spend a lot of time on the road giving talks, meeting people, going to banquets, and I think I’ve managed that well. My primary responsibility is to the people who’ve trusted their scientific training to me and my laboratory. I have to make sure I’m available for those people first.

“We were very fortunate to have won some of the pre-Nobel Prizes, such as the Lasker and the Gairdner. I knew objectively the discovery we made in the year 2000 was the kind of discovery that sometimes wins prizes, but I always remind students that a prize is a tribute to nature, not a tribute to us. A Nobel laureate used to say that most scientific prizes say more about the discovery than the discoverer. We stumbled upon something nature had done that was beautiful and elegant and unexpected.

“I wasn’t completely surprised that I won the Nobel Prize before I died. What surprised me is how different this prize feels, compared to all the other prizes, and how it has taken on an almost mythological proportion. I like to think I’m an analytical, rational person who can understand and explain this, but I can’t completely understand it. Part of it is its long history, and it’s linked to the Swedish royal family, and it doesn’t hurt that Sweden is thought of as being neutral and fair. But I can also see the great care that goes into every aspect of the celebrations in Stockholm; they have done a fantastic job over the years to make this prize feel very special.

“Like many other laureates, I’m often asked, ‘quote-unquote,’ what’s the secret of winning a Nobel Prize? The answer I heard another laureate gave, which I would have given as well, was that the secret is: Don’t think about prizes. If you set out to win prizes, statistically, you’re going to wind up disappointed, but if you set out to do good science, you do your job well, and you’re extremely lucky, you may occasionally win a prize. I tried to remind people, first of all, that the real prize is doing something that you enjoy so much that you feel guilty that people pay you for it, which is the way I feel. The other prize is seeing something nature had done that is so beautiful and elegant, and appreciating that you’re the first person in the history of mankind who has understood it. Another prize, so to speak, is if your discovery occasionally enables the development of a new medical treatment. Already, our work led to some advancements, both in the treatment of anemia and kidney cancer. That’s far more meaningful, and far more objective than a bunch of people around the table deciding to put a blue ribbon on your work. I’m glad that we celebrate science with the Nobel Prize, but I wouldn’t want to see it become a preoccupation for anybody. The focus should be on enjoying one’s work and hopefully doing it well and trying to make contributions.”

“One area where I feel the prize allowed my research to have more impact is market-shaping approaches to encourage investments in innovation …”

Michael Kremer, Ph.D.’92
At the time of the award, Kremer was working at Harvard. Now, he is at the University of Chicago.
Winner of the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, for “their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.”

“I’m heartened by the increased recognition that the 2019 Nobel Prize has brought to the field of development economics. More students are keen on working in development economics, and universities have been expanding their development economics programs and allocating greater resources to research within this field. Harvard has many wonderful graduate students and some great faculty in this area. Unfortunately, it has lost some people as well, and I hope it will be able to rebuild soon.

“One area where I feel the prize allowed my research to have more impact is market-shaping approaches to encourage investments in innovation in ways that also broaden access to the innovations once developed. I had earlier proposed the concept of advance market commitments to incentivize the development and accessibility of vaccines targeting diseases that primarily affect low- and middle-income countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, several governments and international agencies requested support to explore contract structuring to expedite vaccine development. My colleagues and I recommended issuing contracts to establish vaccine manufacturing capacity ahead of clinical trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, which consequently obtained access to vaccines relatively quickly. This approach was adopted but unfortunately not by many other countries.

“Currently, I serve as the chair of a commission focused on innovation in climate change, food security, and agriculture. Many innovations in climate adaptation and mitigation in agriculture have potentially high social benefits, but don’t receive adequate investment due to limited commercial incentives. For example, providing high-quality weather forecasts to farmers in low- and middle-income countries could significantly bolster their resilience to climate change. However, under existing institutions, it would be difficult for private firms to recoup investments in this area. The Innovation Commission is working to identify mechanisms to overcome such barriers and facilitate the scaling of effective innovations.

“We are also exploring market-shaping institutions to stimulate innovation in climate change solutions. Cement accounts for about 7 percent of emissions globally and half of cement is purchased by the government. Governments could spur the development of various promising green cement technologies by announcing that they would account for the social cost of emissions from cement used in construction when evaluating bids for the construction of public infrastructure. We are getting substantial interest in these ideas from policymakers, and I think that is certainly due in large part to the Nobel Prize.”

The Milky Way is often depicted as a flat, spinning disk of dust, gas, and stars. But if you could zoom out and take an edge-on photo, it actually has a distinctive warp — as if you tried to twist and bend a vinyl LP.

Though scientists have long known through observational data that the Milky Way is warped and its edges are flared like a skirt, no one could explain why.

Now, Harvard astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) have performed the first calculations that fully explain this phenomenon, with compelling evidence pointing to the Milky Way’s envelopment in an off-kilter halo of dark matter. The work also bolsters current thinking about how the galaxy evolved and may offer clues into some of the mysteries of dark matter.

The new calculations were led by Jiwon Jesse Han, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student affiliated with the CfA. Published in Nature Astronomy, the work includes co-authors Charlie Conroy and Lars Hernquist, both faculty members at the CfA and in the Department of Astronomy.

Our galaxy is located inside a diffuse cloud called the stellar halo, which extends much farther out into the universe. In groundbreaking work published last year, the Harvard team deduced that the stellar halo is tilted and elliptical in shape, like a zeppelin or football.

Building on that, the team assumed the same shape for the dark matter halo, the larger entity that encompasses everything in and around the Milky Way. Dark matter makes up 80 percent of the galaxy’s mass but is invisible because it doesn’t interact with light, so the shape of that halo must be inferred. Using models to calculate the orbits of stars within a tilted, oblong dark matter halo, the team found a near-perfect match to existing observations of a warped, flared galaxy.

“A tilted dark halo is actually fairly common in simulations, but no one had explored its effect on the Milky Way,” Conroy said. “It turns out that the tilt is an elegant way to explain both the magnitude and direction of our galaxy’s wobbly disk.”

Scientists had long surmised that the Milky Way formed due to a galactic collision; the astronomers’ work further underscores that hypothesis.

“If the galaxy was just evolving on its own, it would have had this nice, spherical halo, this nice, flat disk,” Han said. “So the fact that the halo is tilted and has a football-like shape suggests that our galaxy experienced a merger event, where two galaxies collide.”

Their calculation of the dark matter halo’s probable shape may also provide clues as to the properties and particle nature of dark matter itself, which remain unsolved mysteries in physics. “The fact that the galaxy is not spherical in our data implies that there is some limit to which dark matter can interact with itself,” Han explained.

Confidence in these findings might lead to better ways to cleverly study the unobservable dark matter that makes up most of the universe. This includes new ways to pick up on kinematic signatures of dark sub-halos, which are miniature dark matter halos zipping around the galaxy.

Federal agencies helped set the stage for a wave of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories about its origins through early missteps in messaging about the virus and control measures, stumbles that fueled public distrust and hampered government efforts, according to New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli

For instance, public health agencies failed to speak clearly and in a timely fashion about how the virus could spread indoors, Mandavilli said in a talk sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication on Wednesday afternoon. Officials initially put more emphasis on hand hygiene rather than masking and erred in communicating candidly about the vaccines and side effects. Anti-vaccine activists used all of that to their advantage.

“The lack of honest conversation has undermined trust in public health,” said Mandavilli. “Whenever there’s silence from the public health agencies on the topic, that’s when misinformation gets in, and suddenly, it’s difficult to counter that message because it’s simple; it gives you easy answers; it’s memorable. And once it gets in there, it’s hard to get rid of.”

A journalist with a master’s degree in biochemistry, Mandavilli joined the Times in May 2020, and covered the pandemic as it was unfolding. She talked about the pressure felt by health and science journalists to cover the story following the script of public health agencies and how it changed their relationship forever.

“Just like reporters who report on politics have to hold politicians accountable, science journalists have to hold scientists accountable and public health agencies accountable,” said Mandavilli, whose reporting put pressure on the World Health Organization to acknowledge in July 2020 that the virus can linger in the air indoors and be transmitted that way.

It took a few more months for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to acknowledge that. In October, the agency announced there was a “potential for airborne spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.” The slow responses from both agencies to follow the science left her distraught.

“It was an experience for me, unusual in science journalism, where you have to be the watchdog for these public health agencies,” said Mandavilli. “We sort of more or less believe what the CDC and WHO said, and all of a sudden, we were in a situation where we had to really question everything we were hearing.”

To improve trust in public health agencies, officials must have a clear and accurate communications strategy to encourage cooperation and head off rumors and suspicions, said Mandavilli. Leaders should also acknowledge what went wrong with their messaging last time and be more transparent and forthcoming about the information and data they have.

And they could take some important lessons from the anti-vax movement, she said in response to a question from a student in the audience.

“They knew to get the information in early,” she said. “They’re excellent at making it easy to understand; they use bite-sized points, memes, and things that people can really retain. They use social media very well. One thing I kept seeing over and over is that the government was absent from social media.”

In contrast, Mandavilli, said the anti-vax campaigners “were loud. And they were clear. And they had all the answers.”

With high-risk drinking on the rise across the nation, experts project the annual cost of treating alcohol-associated liver disease, or ALD, will more than double over the next two decades, increasing from $31 billion in 2022 to $66 billion in 2040.

The recently released report was led by Jovan Julien, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, and Jagpreet Chhatwal, director of the Institute for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General Hospital. It depicts a bleak scenario: an economic and public health crisis and a warning for planners and policymakers.

“The idea of drinking has become normalized in our culture,” said Julien, the report’s lead author, “and therefore the burden, both in terms of health and economic costs, has become one that we’ve become desensitized to.”

But the damage and deaths are preventable, said Chhatwal, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

“We can substantially reduce both the disease burden and the economic burden,” Chhatwal said. “We need interventions and policy-level actions to combat both the disease and its rising costs.”

The key would involve multipronged approaches to prevent people from reaching a level of chronic or regular heavy drinking. The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines heavy drinking as four drinks per day and 14 per week for men and three per day and seven per week for women.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend that adults either avoid drinking altogether or do so in moderation by having no more than two drinks a day for men or one for women.

The country must prepare for the impact of liver disease caused by excessive drinking, said Chhatwal. The paper estimated that from 2022 to 2040 the total costs will reach $880 billion: $355 billion in direct healthcare-related costs and $525 billion in lost labor and economic consumption. “That is not a small number, by any means,” he said.

But the number of deaths from alcohol-related causes is not small either. According to the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 140,000 people die every year in the U.S. due to excessive drinking. Those numbers are comparable to that of the opioid crisis, said Chhatwal. The CDC reported 106,699 drug overdose deaths in 2021.

“The numbers of deaths for both alcohol-related causes and opioids overdose are not far from each other,” said Chhatwal. “Drinking is socially acceptable, and drugs are not, so it doesn’t strike people that drinking can be harmful. But it is clearly harmful.”

The report predicts that if high-risk drinking trends persist, in 20 years about 956,000 people will die annually from ALD. Among them will be higher percentages of women and young people as cases among those populations are rising at a faster clip. In fact the percentage of ALD costs associated with female drinkers are expected to increase by nearly 50 percent in the next two decades.

Projected yearly alcohol-related costs in U.S.

During the pandemic, alcohol consumption increased with lockdowns, relaxed policies for alcohol delivery, and people working from home. Many who were moderate drinkers before became high-risk drinkers. A previous study showed that the two years of the pandemic will result in at least 8,000 additional deaths from alcohol-related causes in the next decade.

To Julien, one of the major takeaways of the study is the increase in heavier drinking among women and young people during COVID.

“That increase in drinking consumption can have residual impacts throughout their life course,” said Julien. “And so, both for the drinkers themselves and for policymakers, who are making policies that will impact folks across their life course, it’s important to consider what are potential interventions that can either reverse or control for some of these changes in behaviors that these particular cohorts have had.”Chhatwal said political and public health leaders should be considering programs to raise awareness about the effects of high-risk drinking and the development of effective therapies to treat advanced liver disease.

“There is underlying stress in society,” said Chhatwal. “We need to think about how to reduce that stress because that’s partially responsible for high-risk drinking. Some people see drinking as a coping mechanism, but it should not be a coping mechanism. There must be multipronged approaches to address this alcohol consumption crisis.”

Early mortality, due to ALD and other diseases that are preventable, is harmful to families, communities, and society in general, said Julien. Studies like theirs aim to present economic evidence to health officials and decision-makers, who have the responsibility to act.

“We’ve quantified, in a sense, what are some of the health and economic burdens of alcohol-associated liver disease,” said Julien. “We’ve tried to quantify what are some of the impacts, but there are many others that we can’t put a specific number to. And while the economics of it captures some quantifiable aspect of loss of life, it doesn’t capture the hole that’s left in a community when someone dies early, particularly from a hard and devastating disease, which is late-stage liver disease.”

Excerpted from “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey” by Ruth J. Simmons, Ph.D. ’73, LL.D. ’02, senior adviser to the president on engagement with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The cheap, rich soil of the Daly area in East Texas area encouraged my ma­ternal grandparents, Richard Campbell and Emma Johnson, to settle there in the 1880s. I am left to imagine what could have impelled the young couple to set off from Mississippi with such a mission, but in the era of their exodus, the South­west must surely have offered greater safety and opportunity for Blacks. Emma was born after slavery ended officially, and nothing is known of the family members she left in Missis­sippi, as she never spoke of them. Richard came originally from Virginia. He was born around 1870 to Martha Leonard and Andrew Campbell, both of whom had been slaves. Mar­tha’s two boys, Doc and Richard, had different fathers, a fact that was apparent from their features. Doc was very dark, and Richard was very fair. The Campbell boys gradually worked their way south to Mississippi, where Richard met Emma and the three set off together on a boat for Texas. They landed in Oakwood, an East Texas town founded in 1870 on the Trinity River, across from Daly.

After arriving in Oakwood, Emma and Richard soon made their jump-the-broom marriage legal by remarrying and recording their union in the Leon County courthouse. Their Holy Union of Matrimony took place on August 19, 1891, nine days after they had secured their marriage license, with Reverend Frank Lloyd, an ordained minister, officiating. The same “Minister of the Gospel” officiated when Doc married Bella Tryon, his second wife, two years later. Together, in 1910, Richard and Doc bought 60 acres of farmland situ­ated 16 miles northwest of Crockett in Daly. The pur­chase, made jointly with their wives for $300, required diligent planning, saving, and no small amount of ambition.

It is easy to see why Richard, Doc, Emma, and Bella crossed the river to farm in tiny Daly, where expansive cotton fields were surrounded by red oak and post oak trees and transected by creeks. Without a town center, the area was home to homesteads large and small that depended on nearby Grape­land and other towns for many needs. The absence of a busy town center gave Daly a quiet, peaceful character in a setting of gently rolling hills and verdant, fertile fields. Even today when I visit the area, I am taken aback by the beauty of the landscape, despite its deteriorating homes and farm build­ings and overgrown fields.

My mother, Fannie Campbell, was born on this beautiful land in 1906. She met and married my father, Isaac Stubble­field, there and bore all of her children within a few miles of her parents’ home. A devoted creature of this intimate land­scape, she traveled only to Grapeland, Oakwood, and, occa­sionally, county fairs in the region. For much of her life, she had only horses and wagons as transport and, after our family acquired an automobile, she never learned to drive. Her mar­riage also circumscribed her movements; she followed the many relocations prompted by my father’s employment first as a farmhand and sharecropper and, later, as a laborer in Houston.

Today, at the point where the paved section of Route 227 abruptly changes into hardened pebbly clay leading toward Cedar Branch, another Grapeland-area community, a me­andering climb to the left leads to the top of a cattle-grazed knoll where a small, weather-worn house once looked out over the fields below. With no street addresses, houses and properties often acquired the names of former owners or in­habitants. My father had moved our family to the house pre­viously inhabited by Eddie Bryant, a local farmer, and there I was born after the end of World War II.

I have no personal recollection of the Eddie Bryant house because a couple of years after I was born our family moved to the Murray Farm, working the Murrays’ cotton fields. Be­cause I can drive from Grapeland to Daly in only 10 or 15 minutes, the isolation of the Murray Farm and other sites in Daly when I was a child is difficult to imagine today. Yet, in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, round-trip travel from the area to Grapeland and back would have taken the better part of a day, making it impossible to go there with any frequency.

The Murray Farm was a village unto itself, with its own convenience store and a sanctified church and school close by. Sharecroppers typically bought on credit from the farm store, where mounting indebtedness to the owners often could not be satisfied. I was too young to be aware of the dire economic factors affecting sharecroppers. Like other fami­lies, we had a farm-owned house and a modest amount of space for a garden and chickens. These accommodations met our basic needs. All sharecroppers enjoyed the same state and, having this in common, they generally got along well and built friendships on the basis of their shared circum­stances. We were especially close to our nearest neighbors on the farm: Miss Lula May, Miss Florida, and Miss Sis. While I do not recall knowing many sharecroppers, their colorful names continued to live in family lore long after we moved away, perhaps because they typified the proclivity of Blacks to give their children names such as Mr. Son, Baby Girl, Mr. Junior, Mr. Brother, and so on.

The churches in Daly were the primary social outlets for Black sharecroppers. My father’s oldest brother, Elmo, helped establish Greater New Hope Baptist Church in the 1920s, just steps away from the Campbell 60 acres on Route 227. The building they erected was a rudimentary structure. The church remains today a center to which people return once a year for “homecoming.”

Home going and home coming are important concepts in the South, particularly in Black southern culture. “Going home” could mean going to heaven after death (as in gospel singer Mahalia Jackson’s magnificent spiritual in the film “Imitation of Life”), or it could simply mean returning to a country family’s ancestral home. Among my family and circle of relatives from Houston County, “up home” is synonymous with Grapeland, but every family defines “up home” on the basis of their town of origin. I suppose if Grapeland had been south of Houston, we would have said “down home.” “Down home” also connotes a return to one’s roots, to something that is basic, homespun, or a simple evocation of the original spirit of home, as in “down home” music or “down home” eat­ing. I associate “up home” with all of the meanings and nu­ances of “down home.”

Yet in my early years I had no sentimental attachment to this area. I yearned instead for distant, forbidden regions. Aware that some were moving away from the area, I won­dered what their lives might become elsewhere. I wondered how moving away might shape my own life. As my older sib­lings relocated to Houston in search of work, I looked forward to their letters telling of the world beyond the fields that I played in. With no images from television, movies, or maga­zines available, my imagination was free to build a whimsical world geography and imagine capitals and people unlike any I would later meet. While today’s children are stimulated by a barrage of visual and auditory sensations from their very first moment of life, we had nothing of the sort.

Our stimulation came in part from playing with and ob­serving the pets and feral animals on our farm: dogs and cats, birds and reptiles, squirrels and raccoons, horses and deer. Either they manifested unique personalities or we simply at­tributed exceptional traits to them. My father told us stories that anthropomorphized “coons,” squirrels, foxes, deer, and other animals, but we also relied on our own encounters with real animals to keep us amused.

Our home was abuzz with sounds of farm activity, but what I enjoyed most were the many hymns that floated through the house and fields. These could be heard at any time of night or day, and they usually served as accompani­ment for the many tasks my mother performed. She typically sang or hummed her favorite songs: “Old Ship of Zion,” “Amazing Grace,” “Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross,” and many negro spirituals. Singing was also a favorite pastime for others in the family. My sisters and I formed a trio that per­formed in church, still much talked about and ridiculed by family members. Recollections of my singing invariably bring gales of laughter.

Initially, Mama and Daddy had horses. We children were generally dependent on our feet when the wagon was hauling cotton and horses were in use pulling plows. Both playmates and adversaries, these horses often entertained us with their remarkable personalities. For sport, Old Dan, Daddy’s mean horse, would chase us, slobbering into our hair and tripping us. Mama’s horse, Minnie, disliked my father for some rea­son and she would provoke him. One day my father was be­side himself with anger after Minnie chased him onto our porch. In a fury, he retrieved his shotgun from the house and hurried back outside to end Minnie’s days. Seeing my father with the gun, the horse loped away into the woods. Our be­loved animals were our salvation on the long days when bore­dom often took hold.

Of course, isolation was sometimes an advantage in the racially segregated and hostile world of 1940s Texas. En­counters with whites often meant danger. The danger of not stepping aside as required when a white person passed. The danger of looking white people directly in the eyes and inex­plicably offending them. The danger of speaking impudently or with too much authority. The danger of appearing too proud. The danger of being in the wrong place. The danger of overstepping well-understood boundaries. In the presence of whites, one lived on edge because any of them, no matter their station, could summarily condemn a Black person to injury or punishment. So our parents urged us to observe the proper behavior when encountering whites. And, out of fear, we did.

Racial mixing in a social context was taboo. My eldest brother, Elbert, a responsible and “mannerly” child, was often admired by adults and given special privileges because of his maturity. When invited to a white man’s house to hear his daughter play the piano, Elbert considered it a great honor, but once he arrived at the large white house in Grapeland he was told, to his surprise, that he could not go inside; he would have to stand at the side window to listen. His indignity was typical of the behavior of whites in that era. To invite a Black person into one’s home or church would suggest social parity, an inconceivable notion.

Interracial activity in Grapeland was filled with such in­dignities. All institutions, of course, were segregated. Sepa­rate churches, separate communities, separate social events, and separate seating were ordained to prevent racial mixing. In the only local movie theater, Blacks were consigned to the balcony. Even places on the streets and sidewalks were ear­marked for one or the other race. After they had made their purchases and dropped their cotton at the local gin, Blacks typically gathered for recreation and socializing in an area on the side of the general store. No restaurants were available to them, so they bought meats and cheese and took their meal to that separate area to eat. Summer sausage and saltines, cheddar cheese, and red “sodie water” were a common meal, with ice cream and candy for children. My favorites were root-beer-flavored barrel candy, coconut striped candy, and peanut butter logs. The gathering site for Blacks was called “buzzards’ roost.” To many white people in Grapeland, we were a bunch of crude Blacks who reminded them of a flock of buzzards, gathering to feed on leavings and detritus. We swooped in, circled, came down for a feeding, and, once we had our fill, moved on until the next feeding.

Yet racial mixing did occur. Some of the Blacks and whites who passed each other on the streets were blood relatives. We did not acknowledge this fact openly, but in a small town the truth was inescapable. Often family bonds were privately acknowledged as whites visited their Black relatives in the latters’ homes and neighborhoods, but never in the white relatives’ homes. The evidence of miscegenation was some­times plain to see in the Black faces that abruptly turned away to avoid being mistaken for “uppity niggers.” My father’s mother, Flossie Beasley, was related to one of Grapeland’s founding families. She was the granddaughter of Liza, a slave, and Jim Beazley, a white man. Even though the spell­ing of the surname changed, Flossie’s fair skin and straight hair, combined with other features, made her ties to the white Beazleys starkly evident. This history was not as well known to us as children, but adults accepted it as a manifes­tation of the pathos and hypocrisy of racial segregation.

Despite these circumstances, I grew up with little resent­ment of white privilege. Although my siblings and I set differ­ent expectations for ourselves, my parents did not appear to accept more than what was dealt them. Seemingly accepting the fact that they had no power to change their circum­stances, they mostly enjoyed their lives in rural East Texas. On my rare forays into Grapeland, I saw the treatment my parents and their friends received. These were my first les­sons in the barriers people construct that can so easily denigrate human worth and poison relations between races. At the first opportunity, many of the “buzzards” so mistreated by the town would leave Grapeland, taking with them to new lives a large measure of the humiliation that had been in­flicted upon them during their time in Houston County.

To be born in an environment in which one is legally des­ignated subhuman is a defining experience. Constant asser­tions that one is less deserving of basic human and civil rights can become deeply ingrained, dominating one’s self-image and blocking the will to pursue ambitious goals or express one’s true identity. I have frequently been told by whites that Blacks have “a chip on their shoulder.” They often say this as if it is ridiculous to have been marked deeply by the violation of one’s human dignity and rights. It is true that ideally we should not permit even the most heinous circumstances to mar permanently the course of our thinking and our lives, but we should not forget that such an ideal is more a desirable goal than an easy accomplishment. Living one’s life during and after the violation of one’s humanity is a test and task that any would find challenging, and it can be, at the least, an arduous lifelong pursuit.

Although I did not by any means witness firsthand the worst of what my parents and the rest of my family experi­enced in Grapeland, I was certainly made aware that being Black enclosed me in a web of stereotypes, which I would not likely escape. I had no thought that I would be exempt from the treatment my parents recounted from their past. To avoid being overtaken by the circumstances I had inherited, I had to imagine the world as a far more interesting and logical place, much as one might stubbornly build a castle in the sand, knowing that it will be washed away. But I never expected my imagined castles to replace permanently the reality of rural East Texas in the ’40s and ’50s.

Today, I own the land that my mother inherited from her mother. Once married, Mama never again lived on this land; she followed the moves and inhabited the homes dictated by my father’s employment. Though undeveloped, this land is worth my owning because it represents the strivings of the Campbells and Stubblefields and the deep and willful connections that Mama and Daddy made to each other and the region. I return to the red clay roads and sandy fields of Daly as often as I can to remind myself what I learned there: the need to stretch beyond the boundaries imposed upon me as a child. I return to marvel at how my interest in far different worlds was kindled as I wandered barefoot through the field  and meadows. I return to contemplate what my grandparents Emma and Richard, and my mother and father must have endured to keep us safe and to instill in us a sense of self-worth in the face of colossal barriers to pride and accomplishment. And so, I hold on to this land because “up home” is a journey I will always make and “down home” is a feeling I will always relish.

Copyright © 2023 by Ruth J. Simmons

 Wondering is a series of random questions answered by experts. Robert Paarlberg is an associate in the Sustainability Science Program at the Kennedy School and the author of several books on agriculture and food, including “Resetting the Table.” We asked him whether eating organic is better for us.

Is organic food, grown without synthetic chemicals, better than conventionally grown food? Roughly 40 percent of Americans say at least some of the food they eat is organic, so quite a few eaters clearly believe it is.

However, there is no reliable evidence showing that organically grown foods are more nutritious or safer to eat. In 2012, a review of data from 237 studies conducted at the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University concluded there were no convincing differences between organic and conventional foods in nutrient content or health benefit. The organic ban on synthetic chemicals also fails to improve food safety in the U.S., since the use of pesticides is now significantly regulated in conventional farming (insecticide use today is 82 percent lower than it was in 1972), and because produce in supermarkets has been washed to remove nearly all of the chemical residues that might remain.

In 2021, the USDA conducted its annual survey of pesticide residues on food in the American marketplace, testing 10,127 food samples from nine different states. It found more than 99 percent had residues safely below EPA’s tolerance levels, which are cautiously set at only 1/100th of an exposure that still does not cause toxicity in laboratory animals. Food scientists at the University of California, Davis, conclude from such surveys that the “marginal benefits of reducing human exposure to pesticides in the diet through increased consumption of organic produce appear to be insignificant.”

Many consumers continue to think organic foods come from small local farms, but most now come from distant industrial farms. By one estimate in 2014, only 8 percent of organic sales in the U.S. were still being made by small farmers through farmers markets or through community supported agriculture. Over 80 percent of all U.S. organic sales are now made by corporate conglomerates like ConAgra, H.J. Heinz, and Kellogg. The biggest retailers of organic foods are Walmart, Costco, and Kroger.

Most commercial farmers, both large and small, want to use at least some synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which means they can’t be certified as organic. This is why less than 1 percent of harvested cropland in America is certified organic. Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil has estimated that without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, 40 percent of the increased food production required by today’s population could never have taken place. Organic yields are lower, so if we shifted more production to organic we would also have to plow up more land to produce the same amount of food, which would reduce wildlife habitat and damage the environment.

Intuition tells us foods grown without manufactured chemicals are more “natural” and therefore better for the environment, safer to eat and helping small local farms. Even the fact that organic foods are more expensive seems a reason to think they are better. But in this case, intuitive thinking takes us in the wrong direction. If we follow the science, organic food loses its apparent advantage.

— As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer

Gentrification can have a ripple effect on communities. While it may improve certain conditions in low-income areas, rising housing costs can displace residents, causing social disruption and other downstream effects.

Investigators from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted a study using national data to examine the relationship between firearm injuries and gentrification. Their findings, published in JAMA Surgery, show that gentrified neighborhoods have a 62 percent higher firearm injury rate than non-gentrified neighborhoods with comparable socioeconomic characteristics.

“To prevent firearm injuries in these communities, we must understand where the behavior is stemming from,” said corresponding author Molly Jarman of the Center for Surgery and Public Health in the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s. “It’s vital we begin to investigate the factors causing social disruption and housing displacement, such as gentrification, to develop and implement targeted interventions to prevent firearm injuries.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 45,000 firearm injuries occurred in the U.S. in 2020. Injuries from firearms are linked to attributes of socioeconomic disadvantage, such as income inequality and minority status, but not all neighborhoods at socioeconomic disadvantage experience high levels of gun violence. Jarman and colleagues conducted their study to identify factors that may put neighborhoods at greater risk for firearm injuries.

The team collected U.S. Census tract-level data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Social Determinants of Health database between 2010 and 2019. They used rural urban commuting area codes to capture urban neighborhoods at risk of gentrification for the analysis. A total of 59,379 urban Census-tracts were examined from this data set. The investigators also collected geographical firearm injury data from the Gun Violence Archive from 2014 to 2019.

In the study, the investigators defined gentrification as a measurable value to identify and calculate the gentrified areas in their data sets. Their definition of gentrification was (a) an area in a central city neighborhood with (b) a median housing price that increased over the regional median value and (c) a median household income at or below the 40th percentile of the median regional household income. They identified 14,125 Census-tracts as gentrifying.

The team then compared the changes in rates of firearm injuries by identifying three financial categories with similar socioeconomic characteristics in the Census-tract data: low-income non-gentrifying, gentrifying, and high-income non-gentrifying. The team found that gentrified neighborhoods had a 62 percent higher firearm injury incidence rate than non-gentrified communities with comparable sociodemographic characteristics. They also found that neighborhoods undergoing the gentrification process experienced an additional 26 percent increase in firearm incidence than non-gentrifying neighborhoods.

“The process of social disruption and housing displacement due to gentrification puts people in the community in a high-stress environment,” said leading author Sarabeth Spitzer, of the Brigham’s Department of Surgery. “The solution is complicated, but our findings reveal an opportunity to identify communities that may be at increased risk of firearm violence. Hopefully, this allows support and resources, such as community outreach and education programs, to target these areas and mitigate this risk.”

Limitations of the study include that the data set from the GVA contains data as far back as 2014 and provides geographical information only, withholding any identifiable information about who was involved in the reported incident. The study was observational in nature and cannot show causality. As its next steps, the team plans to conduct an interventional study that tests the effectiveness of social support and firearm violence prevention strategies in gentrified communities.

The study was funded by the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation.

It was really kind of like tossing treats to your puppy during training.

Will Sorenson and Ryan Hong both played on the Harvard men’s volleyball team before graduating last May.

“We would always have gummy bears on the sideline for quick sugar, quick energy,” explained Sorenson, a graduate of the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, now a mechanical engineer at Boeing. “After matches, Ryan would throw them at me, and I would catch them in my mouth.” Teammates cheered. They tried longer and longer distances. Teammates cheered louder. That should’ve been the end of it.

But no. So now, the Guinness World Record for “the greatest distance catching a gummy candy in the mouth” ­— 177 feet, 2 inches, to be exact — belongs to Sorenson and Hong, who performed the stunt at Harvard Stadium a few days before graduation in May.

@guinnessworldrecords Greatest distance catching a gummy candy in the mouth: 54 m (177 ft 2 in) by Will Sorenson and Ryan Hong #candy #gummy #catch #catcher #guinnessworldrecords ♬ original sound – Guinness World Records

Their feat was a first, but it wasn’t Sorenson’s first Guinness. Blame it on social distancing stir-craziness, but after many practice sessions from his Currier House room during the pandemic, Sorenson (who is also a juggler) became the record-holder for “most consecutive bottle flips behind the back onto the forehead” in February of 2021. Don’t ask. (It was 31.)

So after recruiting Hong, and what felt like half the volleyball team as support staff, Sorenson began plotting a second record attempt: Just how far could they launch a gummy candy into the air, and catch it?

They did some research and discovered the existing record was 50 meters, or about 164 feet. And Guinness required the toss needed to be executed “mechanically,” so off to the internet for a slingshot.

Catching a gummy candy from that distance was sure to be a choking hazard, which wasn’t lost on Sorenson. Luckily, he had developed proper technique — using his tongue to block the throat, so his trachea was safe.

It’s a good thing, too, because according to a quick approximation by Harvard physics lecturer Greg Kestin, that bear could’ve been traveling at a clip of close to 22 miles per hour — comparable to that of a raindrop falling from the clouds. (But a little slower than a grizzly, admittedly the fastest of all bears, which can move at speeds up to 35 mph.)

Practice sessions in broad daylight unearthed one big problem — it was hard to see the candy in mid-air. That was when someone at Harvard Athletics had an idea. Could the open expanse of the football field, and a night sky illuminated by stadium lights, make it easier?

“When we tried it, it was like that gummy bear was glowing in the night. You could see that thing from half a mile away,” Sorenson said.

In the end it took Sorenson and Hong just two tries, with the achievement captured from several angles on smartphone video. At least six friends were deployed to help with candy-spotting, verification, and video documentation, per strict Guinness rules. And Philip Tor, assistant athletic director, served as official surveyor, even writing a letter attesting to the record distance.

Hong, an economics and statistics grad now working in investment banking, said: “I am really grateful for my experience as an undergraduate at Harvard, and this was a unique and memorable way to end my experience there.”

There’s been a lot of buzz around ChapGPT, Bard, and other generative AI tools since they burst into public view back in January. But not everyone is pleased with chatbots. Many writers, artists, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers say tech firms are training chatbot algorithms by using copyrighted work to create derivative content for profit, and they’re taking their fight to court.

There are several pending lawsuits against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, including one filed Tuesday in federal district court in New York by the Authors Guild on behalf of dozens of best-selling writers, including Elin Hilderbrand, Jonathan Franzen, and George R.R. Martin. The authors say OpenAI is feeding their books into ChatGPT’s large language model algorithm without consent, compensation, or attribution, in violation of U.S. copyright law. Calling it a “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the guild is seeking a permanent injunction and damages for lost licensing opportunities and for making authors “unwilling accomplices” in their own future market irrelevance.

OpenAI has said the books are used only to spur innovation, not to create new works, and said that use is lawful under the copyright law’s “fair use” provision.

Rebecca Tushnet studies and teaches copyright and trademark law as the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Law School. We asked her about the authors’ case against OpenAI and the broader legal questions around emerging technology. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q&A

Rebecca Tushnet

GAZETTE:  Authors claim OpenAI is “pilfering” their books to improve ChatGPT’s ability to spit out “derivative works” in clear violation of copyright laws. Is the law clear on this issue?

TUSHNET: No. And in fact, the law in terms of using works for training or for large-scale data-mining purposes has often been held to be fair use. The internet as we know it today, with Google and image search and Google Books, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t fair use to use these words and for an output that was not copying.

Now, the output, there are legitimate questions about. In theory, if you create an infringing reproduction, it’s still infringing even if nobody sees it. The question is one of responsibility. Should we say, “You shouldn’t make computers because they can be used to infringe” — something that copyright owners actually did think 20 years ago — or should we say, “What we have here is a tool that can be used or misused, and we should focus on curbing the misuse.”

GAZETTE: How does the law protect copyrighted work?

TUSHNET: You do have rights against reproduction or the creation of derivative works, subject to limits like fair use. There are other specific limits, but fair use is the big one.

GAZETTE: Is the definition of fair use the main issue here?

TUSHNET: That’s where this argument is going to go. The two questions are going to be: fair use for the training data, which I think is pretty clear under current law. And then, who’s responsible for the outputs — is it the prompter or is it the existence of the tool? The law, as it exists, is reasonably settled. But the law can change. I think OpenAI has the better of the argument, but we’ll see what the court thinks.

GAZETTE: Are there loopholes or carveouts in the law for particular industries, like technology?

TUSHNET: The copyright law is not like a set of rules you can fit on a page; it’s several hundreds of dense pages. Are there protections for specific industries? There are a ton. There are special provisions for religious camps and farmers associations, and all sorts of stuff. But none of them are all that relevant to most of the AI issues, except insofar as there are notice and takedown regimes for cases where the output of the AI is public. Congress made special rules for internet companies to deal with the fact that the scale of the internet was so big that they couldn’t treat Google like an ordinary publisher.

GAZETTE: Is current copyright law sufficient to deal with this new technological frontier?

TUSHNET: Where there is a need for guardrails, copyright is not the right way to handle it. Copyright owners, in general, have an interest in getting paid, which is not an interest in having socially beneficial output, or avoiding lies or hallucinations or anything like that. Copyright doesn’t handle questions like, “How do you make sure that the AI is not defaming someone or giving you instructions on how to eat a poisonous mushroom?” The law, especially fair use, was designed to be flexible and to handle new situations. And it’s done that quite well.

GAZETTE: Do you have a sense yet of how the courts may look at this issue or is it too soon to tell?

TUSHNET: A lot of times there’s a tendency to say, “This is completely different from anything we’ve ever seen. We need a new rule.” Occasionally, that’s right. But a lot of times our existing principles handle it. Right now, the copyright office says if a work is generated by AI, it’s not copyrightable; you need a human to do the creating. That seems, to me, to be right. That being said, you can get a human involved in tweaking an AI-generated work so that it becomes an expression of their own creativity. And that can have a valid copyright. I can’t own the forest, but if I take a nice picture of the forest, I can own a copyright in my nice picture, but only in what I did.

The problem is that the news cycle runs a lot faster than the legal cycle. It’s very hard to tell in the abstract when something has changed enough that you really want to jump in with a new law and when you want to let the existing legal system handle it. People end up going back to what their prior beliefs are about various things. If you believe that big tech is fundamentally evil, you will want new rules. If you believe that big copyright owners, all they want is the money, then you will probably say, “Let the legal system handle it.” And so, I think we’re definitely in the too-soon-to-tell period. Right now, the training set is fair use. In terms of the output, I have no question that a clever lawyer can get an output that looks infringing. But the question is, to whom should we attribute that output?

GAZETTE: Is it premature to try to settle some of the broader legal questions before the technology has fully matured?

TUSHNET: It’s a good question. The problem is things often develop very unpredictably. Thomas Edison thought that businessmen would use the phonograph to record memos and mail them to each other. That’s not how it was used at all. He didn’t foresee anything like the music industry that we now have. The well-known risk of regulating now is that we will write laws with the assumption that they’re going to do one thing, and just completely miss the actual path of technological development, including missing things that we should have been regulating. This is why my general position is, if you care about the potential for lost jobs, we need to look to labor law and unfair competition law. Copyright is not going to help you with that. In terms of defamation, the way you deal with that is you have a rule against defaming people. It doesn’t matter whether it was generated by AI: We don’t want you to do that.