What I appreciated most about this summer’s seminar series was the variety of departments that were sampled. I feel like if it were my personal decision to decide on faculty, they would all be from the same department or institute—my interests would naturally coincide with subject areas in microbiology or molecular biology—but then I would not have been exposed to some subject areas foreign to me. For example, I was actually quite fascinated by Dr. Susan Alberts’ research on the social determinants of health using baboons. Because my experience is almost solely in the realm of microbiology, the idea of using primates to simulate human social behavior seemed really novel and interesting to me at the time.
Dr. Alberts’ work capitalizes on the strict dominance hiearchy existing in the baboon society to simulate human social status. One of the major problems with studying humans is that there are many other determinants of health beside the social aspect that might skew data (such as unhealthy habits like smoking, etc.), however this is largely overcome by studying baboons (which obviously don’t partake in human-associated habits like smoking). Her field work has revealed much about the effects of social status on health, including the idea that access to resources is a primary offshoot of social rank. Access to resources, she argues, has a substantial effect on lifespan in baboons.
