Faculty Consider Revamping Bio

The number of concentrations within the life sciences may expand from five to eight as early as next year, if a proposed major restructuring of the life sciences is approved by the Faculty this semester.

Under the proposed plan, the existing Biochemical Sciences and Biology concentrations would be reconstituted into four new concentrations—Chemical and Physical Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Neurobiology, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrations.

While the Biological Anthropology track within the Anthropology department would continue to exist, a separate concentration in Human Evolutionary Biology would also be created.

In addition to this restructuring of concentrations, the Psychology department would add a new Social and Cognitive Neuroscience track.

“This is a somewhat historic event” that would mark the first introduction of a new concentration since 1992, Robert A. Lue, the executive director of undergraduate education in Molecular and Cellular Biology, said yesterday.

The preliminary proposal was presented to the Faculty Council—the highest governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)—at its meetings yesterday.

And while the plan still needs the approval of both the Council and the full Faculty, the initial response has been positive, with many faculty saying the proposal will bring the formal structure of the life sciences more in line with how it is actually studied today.

“The old boundaries [between departments] are still nineteenth century ones,” said Council member and Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn. “This was a twenty-first century plan.”

On the request of Council member and Anthropology department chair Arthur M. Kleinman, the Council “voted a memo of enthusiastic reception” of the proposals, Mendelsohn said.

“We’ve been working for about two years,” in order to make concentrations in the life sciences “smaller, more flexible, and more closely affiliated with natural groups of faculty,” Professor of Anthropology Daniel E. Lieberman said.

Professors said they designed the changes to respond to larger developments in the life sciences as well as to address student and faculty discontent with the construction of current concentrations.

The Biology department has become “enormous, huge, and unwieldy,” Lieberman said.

The proposal would preserve the old system of concentrations alongside the new one for current students. Incoming freshmen, however, would choose concentrations exclusively from the new system.

According to Mendelsohn, “the major impetus was that they found the old boundaries of concentrations no longer applicable...so what they did was design a program that crossed those boundaries.”

Lue explained that the proposed concentrations will “more accurately reflect focused areas of inquiry” in current biological research.

Lue said life science concentrators have not been told formally of the proposals because the changes have yet to meet the approval of the Faculty.

The Council will likely see legislation on the concentrations by this spring or early next fall, Mendelsohn said. The legislation will then go before the full Faculty for approval.

“The hope is that if everything goes well, in the fall, when everyone comes back, there will be this spectacular cluster,” Lue said.

At yesterday’s Faculty Council meeting, members also approved two motions from members of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) calling for secondary fields of study and delayed concentration choice for undergraduates.

The motions will be voted on at the April 4 meeting of the full Faculty.

The first motion, put forth by Berkman Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke, also a Council member, calls for “an optional secondary field allowing students to receive recognition for focused coursework in one area outside of the concentration.”

The other motion, presented by Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic Warren Goldfarb ’69, moves to delay concentration choice until after the third term while requiring students to meet with at least one concentration advisor by the end of freshman year.

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.