Epidemiology assistant professor Michael Mina discussed the threats that some variants of the coronavirus may pose â despite the fact that tens of millions of people in the U.S. are now fully-vaccinated â during a Harvard School of Public Health Event on Tuesday.
In the forum jointly held by the School of Public Health and The World, a media organization, Mina said that though ânot all variants are worryingâ â and many are a ânormal part of virus biologyâ â variants that cause the virus to transmit more, cause worse symptoms, and evade the immune system may be concerning.
The issue of invariant transmissibility has more to do with the fact that the virus stays at its peak for longer, rather than the way the virus transmits, according to Mina.
Former Harvard Astronomy professor and Adams House Master William Liller â48 couldnât take his eyes off the stars.
In the early 1970s, Liller could be found early in the morning at Harvard College Observatory measuring the sizes of stars, putting in âmore than his share of the workâ each day to aid his graduate students, according to William R. Forman, one of Lillerâs Ph.D. advisees.
âYou would get there at 10 ⦠and there would be this long list of plates that heâd already been through,â Forman said. âHe was not there yelling at us, âYou got to do more.â No, he was just showing us that he was doing it, and we better get to work.â
Bernard Lown, whose lifeâs work spanned from pivotal breakthroughs in medicine to humanitarian efforts against nuclear war that won him the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, died at age 99.
Lown died Feb. 16 of complications from congestive heart failure, according to his son Fredric Lown, after a decades-long academic career serving as a professor of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Womenâs Hospital. Lown is survived by his three children, Fredric, Anne, and Naomi. His wife, Lousie Lown, died in 2019.
âHe was a force of nature,â said longtime colleague Joseph D. Brain, a professor of environmental physiology at HSPH.
When Nina C. de W. Ingrao taught Spanish, she stood in a Boylston Hall classroom âalmost like the director of a symphony with this absolute grace, moving her hands in very precise motions to orchestrate grammatical exercises in the classroom,â according to Romance Languages and Literature professor Luis M. Girón-Negrón â88.
Girón-Negrón described moments like this â Ingrao âday in and day out in the classroom, doing what she did best without force, without dramaâ â as his strongest memories of Ingrao, a longtime colleague and friend. When âeverything else was so turbulent,â Ingrao possessed a consistent commitment to her students.
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of terrified New Yorkers fled the city, which had fast become an epicenter for the virus. Alexander Goldfarb had the opposite response.
The doctor immediately drove to Queens, New York, to treat patients at Elmhurst Hospital, which had been decimated by the virus and suffered a shortage of healthcare providers. He worked at the hospital for a week straight, intubating around six patients every night.
âAll of this was a great risk to himself,â said Robert S. Brown â59, a longtime colleague of Goldfarbâs. At the time, personal protective equipment was in short supply, but Goldfarb âcared about his patients and wanted to save lives.â