How two Harvard graduate students spent their summer in the Massachusetts State House

 

By Caitlin McDermott-Murphy

 

In Vermont in 2008, a five-year-old boy named Bjorn tested positive for arsenic poisoning after drinking water from his family’s well. The family moved, but Bjorn’s illness worsened. It took three months for his parents to realize that, even though the water in the new well tested below the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for safe drinking water, the arsenic levels were still high enough to poison their son.

While Bjorn did eventually recover—despite slowed development—this story is all the more upsetting because it’s preventable. That’s why Meghan Blumstein and her Environmental Studies classmates at Middlebury College, who met Bjorn not long after his battle, decided to mobilize science for the public good. The group collected data on arsenic levels in well water, interviewed residents, and collaborated with government partners, eventually pushing to pass legislation to educate Vermonters about potential safety risks and provide free well-testing kits.

On a National level, scientific input is essential to develop public policies for complex issues such as water safety, vaccination, genetic engineering and climate change. “In this new world,” said Angela DePace, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University and founder of the Scientific Citizenship Initiative in a promotional video, “it’s not going to be enough for scientists to be isolated geniuses working in the lab. We’re going to need to be able to work in teams, inside and outside of academia.”

 

During her summer policy fellowship, Meghan Blumstein, who studies plant physiology in the Holbrook lab, researched environmental issues that affect Cape Cod residents. Photo by Aaron Ye/Harvard Staff Photographer

 

That’s not a simple task, according to DePace. “In higher education,” she said, “science training hasn’t historically included the kinds of skills needed for collaborative interdisciplinary work, such as how to communicate effectively, how to work well in teams, and how to respect and incorporate different viewpoints and types of expertise.” In 2018, she founded the Scientific Citizenship Initiative to expand STEM student training in leadership, communication and ethics and to develop fellowships for scientists to serve in their communities. This month, the Initiative is accepting  for their second cohort of students.

Their first cohort included just two students, Blumstein and Porter Ladley, both current PhD candidates in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Over the summer, the two fellows worked in the office of a state legislator three days a week for 10 weeks, researching topics from ocean acidification to the opioid epidemic.

Blumstein is no policy neophyte; but she’s been hunkered down in the lab for some time now. The Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology graduate student has been studying plant physiology in the Holbrook lab. But, she said, “I was missing the applied part.”

Working for Massachusetts State Senator Julian Cyr, who represents Cape Cod, Blumstein researched ocean acidification, which could threaten the region’s fishing and tourism industries, and solar panel legislation. Some days, she said, she felt like an investigative journalist, dredging up data from stacks and stacks of documents. Other days, she compiled qualitative data—personal anecdotes from Cape residents—and felt like a social scientist. When drafting policy, she learned to pull information from sources beyond the familiar quantitative data. “It really helped me understand how, as a scientist, you can best interface with the legislature,” she said. “What they listen to, what they do not listen to.”

“So much of what we do in research is so planned out,” said Porter Ladley, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “Something like policy is more fluid and you have to be more flexible about what you want to work on, what you want to do.”

 

Porter Ladley designs new drugs in the lab and investigated drug pricing at the State House. Photo by Sophie Park/Harvard Staff Photographer

 

When a critical issue—like skyrocketing drug prices—comes up, Representatives can shift priorities quickly. When that happens, they need solid data and fast. Down the hall from Blumstein, in the office of Massachusetts State Representative Jon Santiago, Porter Ladley spent his fellowship researching how negotiations between drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and insurers end up overburdening patients. By the end of the summer, Santiago had enough background to start drafting legislation to bring these talks out into the public.

In Andrew Myers’ lab, Ladley works to fine-tune antibiotics—like the veteran tetracyclines—to treat cancer. Like Blumstein, he has a long record of community outreach: In high school and college, he volunteered as an EMT. He chose to study chemistry hoping to solve the opioid epidemic by halting addiction. Although he’s not sure what he’ll work on next—cancer treatment, antibiotic resistance or the opioid epidemic—he is certain about one thing: He won’t perform his science in a vacuum.

“There definitely is a dearth of scientists involved in policy,” Ladley said, “but hopefully that will change.”