Biology Class in the Time of Ebola
From Megan Rokop
 When I was planning my current UMass Boston Honors course early in the spring, I had no idea how timely our reading of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Arrowsmith (by Sinclair Lewis), would be. Despite being written 90 years ago, the pages of Arrowsmith read like the daily news, due to the tragedy of the Ebola outbreak.
In Arrowsmith, the main character (Martin Arrowsmith) discovers a potential new treatment for bubonic plague, which works well in his animal tests. But before he can conduct any proper clinical trials for safety and efficacy, he is sent off to the fictional Caribbean island of St Hubert, where massive numbers of the residents are perishing from an enormous outbreak of the plague. Entire villages are being lost to the epidemic. Martin is faced with the ethical dilemma of whether or not to carry out the controlled trial he has been instructed to perform, thereby providing only half the residents with the experimental treatment.
Through discussing Arrowsmith in my class, we find ourselves constantly going back and forth between two worlds—a fictional world created 90 years ago, and our real world today—which parallel each other in eerie proximity. We talk about the ethics of clinical trials, and fast-tracking approval for experimental trials when controlled trials are neither feasible nor ethical. We mourn the loss of characters we have come to know throughout the book—brave researchers, medical professionals, and public health official— as they too become casualties of the outbreak.
Before I came to teach at the Honors College at UMass Boston (where this course is ongoing), I was working on several science education projects with Pardis Sabeti, a professor at Harvard University who focuses her work on infectious diseases, including malaria, cholera, and Lassa fever. We piloted a now-ongoing training program in which her collaborators from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal come for 6 weeks each summer for training relating to their work on the infectious diseases that plague their home countries.
Since my work with Pardis, Ebola has taken over the efforts of her group and of her collaborators. Pardis authored the paper (published this August in Science) in which the genomes of the Ebola strains from the outbreak were sequenced, thereby elucidating the molecular history of the current outbreak. Two months later, at the time of publication of the report, 5 of her co-authors were dead.
I have shared articles about the work of Pardis and her collaborators with my students, which has led to some very moving and sobering moments in the class. But there is also room for a sense of hope and community in the story of Ebola. Pardis and her collaborators have recorded a song and music video entitled “One Truth” (with her band Thousand Days) that is a tribute to the health care workers who have lost their lives to Ebola. Watching the video is watching an international team banding together in a selfless and important act of reflection and compassion.
The passion of those working on the ground and in the field has been deeply inspiring to my students. I encourage biology teachers around the world to take a moment in your classes to honor those impacted by Ebola—the now over 10,000 cases in Africa and the handful of cases elsewhere—by raising the issue of the outbreak with your students.
Below I provide some links to articles, videos, and podcasts that relate to the work of Pardis and her collaborators, including the music video “One Truth.” I hope these resources are helpful to you, as you take the time to turn the Ebola outbreak into a teaching moment that may just inspire the next generation of tireless infectious disease researchers, medical professionals, and public health workers.
Articles:
Videos & podcasts:
If you would like to chat more about any of the readings, in-class activities, or assignments I am using in this class (which I entitled “Learning Biology through Reading Fiction and Non-fiction”), feel free to contact me at <rokop@alum.mit.edu>.
Megan Rokop is the Associate Director of the Honors College at UMass Boston, where she is a biology faculty member. She is trained as a microbial geneticist.
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