Summers Outlines Global Health Agenda

University President Lawrence H. Summers laid out a broad but hazy vision yesterday for Harvard’s role in addressing global health issues.

Standing before a crowd of over 100 at the School of Public Health (SPH), Summers urged the University to expand its global health efforts on three fronts: training students to be leaders in public health, using the University’s drawing power to focus debate on health crises and pushing Harvard to participate in new research on public health.

Summers was the keynote speaker at a forum convened to discuss how the University can best address Africa’s health troubles. He was joined by SPH Dean Barry R. Bloom and Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative Max Essex.

Bloom and Summers stressed that the University’s role should not be direct intervention but rather arming Africa’s future leaders with the research and training they need to address these health problems themselves.

“The major vision here is to train leadership,” Bloom said.

Summers declined to talk about specific new global health initiatives, and Bloom said that due to the school’s financial constraints, no expansion of the SPH’s mission in Africa is on the horizon. But Bloom underscored the school’s current work in 22 African countries.

Summers took the opportunity yesterday to link this initiative with three of his favorite themes: reforming the undergraduate curriculum, increasing graduate student financial aid and expanding the University’s research and offerings in the life sciences.

On the curriculum, Summers said that global health—an interdisciplinary field that merges science and social science—should be a more regular part of the Harvard undergraduate education. The College’s current curricular review will present many opportunities to introduce such a new focus. In an interview after his appearance, Summers acknowledged that he has discussed the importance of global health education with Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71.

Summers also said yesterday that he will expand graduate student financial aid with the aim of ensuring the enrollment of the best students at the SPH, regardless of financial concerns.

Bloom highlighted the importance of such increased aid.

“We are still not anywhere near where we have to be,” he said, though he added that Summers’ support has galvanized work at the SPH.“For the first time, we’ve gotten on the radar screen of Harvard University and its president,” he said. “This is a guy who really understands a lot about global health.”

Summers also said he hoped more students of the life sciences would focus at least in part on public health issues. He has repeatedly talked about upcoming University-wide initiatives in the life sciences, and he hinted that global health projects might be among those.

Summers declined to give examples of how the University plans to use its “convening power” or how it intends to encourage further public health research, although he said he was considering recruiting a number of major health experts. Former Harvard economist Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76, a noted global health expert, was lured away to Columbia University last year.

Summers emphasized the necessity of addressing public health crises in general and the African crisis specifically.

“I am convinced that the public health of the developing world and especially Africa is the single issue that has the greatest importance over the next half-century,” he said. “There is no other issue of comparable significance for humanity.”

“That progress that is possible and that disaster that is looming will be part of how our generation is judged,” he added. “The failure to address global disease in as effective a way as we can would be a moral failure.”

Summers said he believed that Harvard experts, and the scientific community more broadly, could significantly alleviate the problem, calling it “one of the most tractable” global issues.

“This is not true of any of the world’s other great problems,” he added.

And Summers pledged that the University will make any findings widely available.

“Our approach should be to support whatever handling of intellectual property will ensure maximal dissemination,” he said. “I’ve got no desire to see the University make money off of drugs that cure diseases that are killing people in the poorest parts of the world.”

After Summers spoke and fielded questions, Essex outlined the efforts of his AIDS Initiatives, with centers in Senegal, Botswana and South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania. Bloom also spoke briefly about the SPH’s efforts in Africa.

The conference was sponsored by the SPH’s Africa Health Forum—a student group that focuses on African health issues—and the AIDS Institute.

Pride M. Chigwedere, a third-year SPH student and president of the forum, opened the panel by noting that while he hopes the University can do more, it is on the forefront of global health efforts.

“Harvard is already doing a lot—much more than any academic institution that I know of,” he said.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.