WE WRITE to promote a positive vision for collaborative education at the university. We are working together on AIDS politics and epidemiology. The Cavalier Daily has noted that the University lags behind peer schools in undergraduate research programs ("Studying independent studies," Jan. 23). In addition to the competitive reasons for creating such programs, we advocate expanding them because of the intrinsic value of our academic relationship - what we gain by learning together and by caring to learn about each other as well as our world.
Our work provides opportunities to see science and politics in action. Science does not end in the laboratory, but rather must be disseminated to the larger body politic. And the myriad medical responses to AIDS or any epidemic are often painstakingly developed in politics' quagmire.
By working together, we traverse disciplinary boundaries and study AIDS' biology and epidemiology while investigating health politics. Our contributions as pre-med student and political scientist are not limited to our disciplines. Indeed contributing broadly and rigorously across disciplines is the hallmark of an effective liberal arts education. By working together, our backgrounds become synergistic components in our shared endeavors.
Behind the rapid spread of AIDS are its epidemiology, and ultimately its biology. Initially, we are learning how AIDS' biology affected public policy-making in San Francisco and New York City. The biological nature of HIV allows efficient transmission through gay sex and the virus itself poses particularly cruel consequences due to its ability to permeate the brain membrane. How do political institutions transform medical discovery to make the proper public policy to prevent the disease from spreading? This is our ultimate question.
The nature of the HIV virus is intriguing. Viruses co-evolve with humans because, similar to humans, they try to increase their own fitness. A virus increases its fitness by improving its ability to spread itself. An example of the HIV virus attempting to outsmart its human hosts is its latency period. This long latency facilitated AIDS' initial exponential spread because people transmitted HIV before they knew they carried it. If future viruses make similar adaptations, then we could confront an epidemic as profound as AIDS, but our combined knowledge of medicine and politics could avert a second catastrophe.
Doctors rarely are trained to use non-medical resources, including politicians, to attack diseases from a social perspective. AIDS and other diseases are medical and social phenomena and doctors should be prepared to approach them as such. If the knowledge and training medical students acquired paid greater attention to health policy and doctors learned about health politics, they would be better equipped to effectively attack disease. Following medical school, doctors are well equipped to treat patients and work in their expertise - medicine. They can treat an afflicted patient, but do they know how to end the disease? In the early 1980s, doctors treated AIDS' symptoms, but the knowledge of how to curtail, let alone stop, AIDS lagged. The collaboration of doctors and politicians with shared knowledge of public health, politics and medicine coupled with the goal of improving global health would have been invaluable. In our increasingly global society, it will become even more valuable in the future.
Politicians mishandled the AIDS epidemic initially. Research funding was late and meager. Fearing its stigma, politicians avoided mentioning AIDS and generally perceived AIDS not as a medical problem, but as a gay men's problem. Politics stymied research, and people died. When another epidemic surfaces, medical professionals and politicians would help themselves and their constituencies by understanding early AIDS politics.
Medical doctors and researchers have a common goal: improving the current and future health of people through effective medical responses. But these responses interact with politics. Doctors know the medical issues while officeholders allocate funding for research and care. Together doctors and politicians have a shared responsibility to mobilize and channel social responses to health threats. Similar to the students and faculty assuming collective and cooperative responsibility for education, the medical and political professions cooperatively should share responsibility for improving global health.
We plan to travel to the University of California at San Francisco to engage our research. In San Francisco, our individual backgrounds will help us create a new understanding of disease and the politics it creates. The university is expanding its efforts to develop such programs - one example is the Center for Global Health directed by Dr. Richard Guerrant. The center provides scholarships and grants for interdisciplinary groups of students with faculty mentors to conduct research internationally on issues as diverse as epidemiology, pediatric infectious diseases, language and information technology, and political science.
If we care enough to really engage one another, and if the administration, faculty and students assume collective responsibility for our educational endeavors, then we can improve our community regardless of the ambitious programs of peer institutions. Their value is more than sufficient not only to recommend such programs, but indeed to mandate them.
(Glenn Beamer an assistant government professor. Jason Romesburg is a third-year College student.)
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