The Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology: The First 25 Years, 1970-1995 (review)

Since 1970, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have offered a joint training program in the health sciences and technology leading to an M.D. and/or a Ph.D. degree, an initiative that the authors of this book claim is the only formal collaborative program (other than ROTC) to exist between these two nearby institutions. As part of a commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the program, faculty and administrators who helped to create and lead it wrote the volume under review.

The first few chapters describe the background to and the circumstances surrounding the program's origins. When the authors reminisce about its creation, it is interesting to note the prominent role of World War II, as well as the turmoil of the 1960s. One major impetus for the conception of this joint initiative was encouragement (as well as an offer of significant federal funding) for MIT to start a medical school in the mid-1960s; the university declined this offer. The first group of twenty-five students entered the Health Sciences and Technology Program in 1971. Chapters in this book summarize the further history of the program, including the formation of the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics Doctoral Program in 1978.

At times the book dwells heavily on administrative structures and reads like a series of loosely abstracted annual reports. The program has trained several hundred M.D. and M.D./Ph.D. graduates, the details of whose training and the titles of whose theses are contained in the extensive appendices. Most graduates focused on molecular and cellular biology, as well as other biologically oriented fields, with a significant minority choosing to do their Ph.D. in bioengineering. A series of interviews gives voice to students who participated in the program. The authors attempt to provide insight into the many issues that confront people who wish to set up such collaborative ventures between universities, although most of the solutions they implemented are of limited generalizability.

As is usually the case with such volumes, the chapters are uneven, and the book contains no sustained narrative. It will be of most interest for those who participated in the program under discussion. But there is grist here for the historians' mill, for those who wish to study the educational process, or for those who want a compilation of research topics thought to be of interest at these two prominent institutions.