Biology of Health and Aging

What is “health,” biologically speaking? What is aging? These big, controversial questions are the subject of much debate, but the answers are crucial to everything we do in public health: what kinds of treatments and research we pursue, how we evaluate our progress, and whether we make a difference in people’s lives. The current biomedical framework is built on a reductionist view of these questions, building up the organism one molecule, cell, or tissue at a time. However, new research is increasingly showing us the interconnected nature of our biological systems, where risk factors for one disease are often risk factors for many. This course will provide a foundation in this new research, showing how it relates to old knowledge and paradigms, and using it to build a global understanding of what an organism is, how it maintains it health, and how this gets lost during the aging process. All of this will be situated within a public health perspective: how can we, as public health researchers, use this knowledge to ask better questions, to identify true risks and evaluate interventions, and most importantly to grow the health of our societies.