Julius Richmond at the celebration
Observed HSPH Dean Barry Bloom, Julius Richmond's commitment, vision, and spirit have transmigrated during his lifetime to some of today's international public health leaders.
Held at the Harvard Club of Boston, the day-long Richmond Symposium also launched a new Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. See sidebar.
The symposium aimed to establish a scientific and action agenda for the next century of advancing the healthy development of children through research, education, policy, and practice. The talks echoed several themes of Richmond's storied career in research, public policy, and advocacy, especially for America's poorest young children.
Richmond, John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy Emeritus, is a former U.S. Surgeon General who produced two landmark reports during his tenure from 1977 to 1981. Healthy People: The Surgeon General's Report on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Smoking and Health. Richmond also brought national attention to developing a strategy to combat infant mortality and for eliminating disparities in health status. To hear Richmond reflect on his experiences, watch a new video interview at the Richmond Symposium homepage.
Jim Yong Kim, François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at HSPH, opened the symposium and introduced Derek Bok, interim President of Harvard University, who welcomed participants.
Jack Shonkoff
The symposium then focused on several main themes and corresponding reaction panels.
STRESS AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT
Michael Meaney, a professor at the Douglas Hospital Research Centre of McGill University, reported on the biology of maternal caregiving and stress in an animal model. He has found molecular evidence in the brains of rat pups that reflect, more or less, grooming by their mothers. Pups who are licked more show increased modest responses to stress and tend to be less anxious and more curious. The behavior difference in low-licked pups appears to come from chemical modifications of a gene that dampens the stress-response circuitry. Another change in the brain appears to help the pups pass down their mothers' grooming attention to their own young. The effects are reversed if pups are raised by different mothers.
Megan Gunnar, a professor at University of Minnesota who studies how infants and young children respond to potentially stressful situations, said, "The early years of life matter because the ongoing interaction between early experience and gene expression affects the architecture of the maturing brain. It's not all over at age three, but it takes more effort to get in and rework some of those neural pathways that have been stabilized."
HEALTH DISPARITIES
Despite a growing knowledge of the association between early childhood development and later learning abilities and health, disparities persist, noted David Williams, HSPH Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health. He has developed a measure of the stress of everyday discrimination and has linked it to health effects in adults. Other studies suggest that the experience of mothers can affect their children well before birth. In one study, after adjusting for socioeconomic status, the infant mortality rates of babies born to college-educated black women were higher than those born to white women who had dropped out of high school, meaning that the babies of the most advantaged African-American women had worse mortality rates than those of the least advantaged white women. The discrimination effect can be startling. One California study found uniquely elevated rates of low birth-weight babies and pre-term births among Arab-American women in the six months following 9/11.
A DOMESTIC AGENDA FOR HELPING CHILDREN
Bettye Caldwell, professor of pediatrics in child development and education emerita at the College of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, emphasized the continuing need for high-quality, large-scale early childhood development programs. In the past, she had established with Richmond a pioneering day care center in Syracuse with an extensive program of cognitive and emotional stimulation for infants as young as six months. The program trained personnel, involved parents, incorporated careful evaluation, and showed significant developmental gains in the experimental group.
Arthur Rolnick, director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, pointed to long-term follow-up results from the Perry Preschool Project as a means to help build political will and devise a domestic social strategy to improve the health of American children living in low-income families. This classic-model program, for example, showed an impressive 17 percent return on investment, adjusted for inflation-better than the stock market over time, Rolnick said. Head Start is not getting the same rate of return because not enough money is being invested per child, he asserted.
AN INTERNATIONAL AGENDA for HELPING CHILDREN
Paul Farmer (l) and Dean Bloom
The Richmond model is what researchers need to collectively look at the broader social and economic causes of outcomes for children, Farmer concluded. "No child should have their potential snuffed out when we know so much," he said.
Other speakers included Kurt Fischer, GSE; Charles Nelson, Children's Hospital, Boston; Kathleen McCartney, GSE; Dan Pedersen, Buffett Early Childhood Fund; Allen Grossman, HBS; Joy Phumaphi, World Health Organization; Albina du Boisrouvray, Association François-Xavier Bagnoud; Mark Rosenberg, The Task Force for Child Survival and Development; and Theresa Stichick Betancourt, assistant professor of child health and human rights, HSPH Department of Population and International Health.
—CCM
Harvard Establishes Center to Advance Scientific Understanding of Children, their Health, and Education
Harvard University has announced the establishment of a new research and policy center bringing together neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and a range of social scientists to advance understanding of the biology of health, learning, and behavior in young children.
The Center on the Developing Child was announced at the September 26 symposium honoring the 90th birthday, life, and work of former U.S. Surgeon General and Harvard emeritus professor Julius Richmond (see above). The Center will initially draw on faculty from HSPH, GSE, and HMS-affiliated Children's Hospital Boston, and will ultimately involve faculty based in all of Harvard's schools and affiliated hospitals.
Said Derek Bok, interim President of the University, at the symposium: "Professors, administrators, and students alike are beginning to transcend the traditional boundaries of schools, departments, and disciplines to come together in a common interest on important real-world problems in their teaching and research. And in consequence they're collaborating more and more across boundaries, and in new ways, recognizing that in real life, important problems are rarely only economic problems, or health problems, or political science problems; they're simply problems, which we must attack from many different directions, but with all the tools and perspectives that are available to us. It's a very good thing that students and faculty are perceiving these needs and committing themselves to truly collaborative work such as what we anticipate from this new Center on the Developing Child."
The Center will be headed by Jack Shonkoff, professor of child health and development, with appointments at HSPH, GSE, and HMS-affiliated Children's Hospital Boston.
Said Shonkoff: "Our objective is to produce new knowledge and close the gap between what we know and what we do. To this end, we will devise science-based strategies to reduce inequalities in opportunity early in life, and will work to build broad-based support for implementing those strategies in both the public and private sectors. We view the use of science to improve life prospects for all children as both an important moral responsibility and a wise social and economic investment."
Copyright, 2009, President and Fellows of Harvard College
