Introduction to Global Medicine: Bioscience, Technologies, Disparities, Strategies
MIT's graduate seminar brings together medical students, MD/PhD candidates, and HASTS PhD students to examine the social and ethical dimensions of biotechnology as it moves from laboratory to bedside. Sessions pair readings and discussion with visits from researchers and practitioners including George Daley and George Church on stem cell and genomics work, Bruce Walker and Pardis Sabeti on building labs in Africa, and Paul Farmer's Partners in Health colleagues on delivering first-world quality care in Haiti, Peru, and Rwanda. Amy Farber's work on patient-centered research for orphan diseases also features. The course traces how discoveries travel through research pipelines into clinical practice, and asks students to weigh medical anthropology's patient-doctor perspective against the technical drive to innovate. Materials include the syllabus, readings, and discussion topics from MIT OpenCourseWare, offered free with no certificate.