Dean’s Report 2013 I 2014 1
It has been said that a single cell contains an entire universe. At Harvard Medical School, life itself—from the molecular to the astronomical—is a vast landscape of scholarship and inquiry. n Studying the most elemental levels of life, an HMS research team has encoded 70 billion copies of a textbook in DNA. At a higher level of magnitude, our scientists have developed a device that allows them to monitor how cancer cells change during metastasis. Among several global initiatives, many faculty members continue to partner with the government of Rwanda to transform that country’s health care system. Reaching for the stars, an HMS scientist who studies the physiology of animals in some of Earth’s more extreme environments was selected to join NASA’s 2013 astronaut class. n On these and other horizons, the HMS community is defining the boundaries of medicine, and then surpassing them, as it explores each new dimension of discovery. Dean Jeffrey S. Flier