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“If we are going to be engaged in global advances in human health, we have to have global partners. We cannot do it by simply staying here and reading about it.”
In modern times, technology has typically flowed from West to East. But someday, Westerners may benefit from medical devices that cost less and are more durable because they were originally developed for use in the villages of rural India. At least that’s part of the thinking behind a new program initiated by the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). For nearly 40 years, HST, a pioneering collaboration between the Harvard University Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has worked to bring innovations in non-medical fields such as information technology, engineering, and materials science to the patient bedside and to clinical research. The catchword for the program is convergence, with faculty focused on fostering collaboration among researchers from disparate fields.
Since 1970, HST has worked to build a new class of health professionals, training physicians who are at the cutting-edge of technology and engineers who have meaningful experience at the patient bedside. Driving the experiment is the core belief that innovation occurs when individuals are forced to abandon the isolation of their own academic departments or professions and gain experience in other disciplines. “It’s all about the broad connections, as well as the unexpected connections,” says HST Director Martha Gray. “And it isn’t as simple as putting the engineers next to the physicians next to the biologists. What that leads to is a condominium, a series of adjacent silos.”
Now, HST is taking the bold step of trying to translate its unique educational and research model to India. The move could be a boon, allowing researchers to make new connections in the world’s second fastest-growing economy while also enabling them to broaden HST’s focus on the convergence of new technologies on a global scale. Despite the promise, however, HST must face critics who see such moves as contributing to an erosion of American competitiveness.
This new initiative first got underway in November 2007, when Gray and Dr. M.K. Bhan of the Indian Ministry of Science and Technology signed a letter of intent to establish a new Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) near New Delhi. As part of the agreement, HST will help recruit and train new THSTI faculty members, and each year, starting in September 2008, four recruited THSTI researchers will join HST for two-year terms as faculty fellows. A concurrent program allows HST students to rotate through Indian medical institutions as part of their training.
“This is the natural progression,” says Larry Smarr, director of another institution committed to melding cutting-edge information technology, electronics, and medical research, Cal-(IT)2, a joint program of the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine. “HST could not possibly be at the forefront if they were not reaching out in this way.” Smarr describes his own institution as being equally ecumenical, but more ad hoc in its global outreach, with individual researchers creating opportunities for intellectual exchanges.
Still, the idea of top U.S. biomedical training programs expanding overseas has received a chillier reception in some circles. In July 2007, Congress held hearings on university globalization, seeking assurances from several university presidents that, by establishing foreign campuses—and in effect exporting American know-how—such programs would not hurt American competitiveness. At a subcommittee hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology, some congressional leaders, not surprisingly, took an “America-first” perspective. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) told the New York Times, “It’s one thing for universities here to send professors overseas and do exchange programs … but it’s another thing to have us running educational programs overseas.”
