"These guys! every graduating student from this school owes their diploma to these guys--every one of us!" declares Maria Fernanda Marino, MPH’98. "Seriously, we come in here going bananas, and very calmly they say, ‘Now, now. Let’s have a look.’ They not only help you, they show you what to do next time."

"These guys" are the professional staff of the Microlab, the School’s student computer center, where Philippe Jacob, Sid Atwood, and Ribika Moses proffer their expertise, encouragement, and humor to about 400 students every week. The Microlab is neither micro nor especially lab-like, but about 70 PCs humming away in a honeycomb of subterranean rooms, two levels below the School’s Kresge Building.

Jacob, who worked as a translator and technical writer before joining the Microlab at its inception 13 years ago, has heard most of the questions before. "Since students are generally doing the same homework, I usually know what they’re asking after four or five words. It’s often just a matter of knowing which buttons to press."

Atwood, a former actor and computer programmer, is the manager of the Microlab, which is officially named the Instructional Computing Facility ("we call it that when we wear ties," he laughs). Atwood compares his job to working on ten easy crossword puzzles a day and one or two hard ones. "We’re service oriented," he says. "We live for the distress call because that’s where the real teaching begins--where the student is stuck." "Besides," he grins, "we get to be heroes!"

"It’s a great team," says Moses, who came on board two years ago after working in the biostatistics department. "There’s almost nothing that we can’t figure out among the three of us."

The glass outer wall of their office is adorned with multicolor currencies from around the world, a reflection of the School’s international diversity. Cartoons and wry quotations abound. Mounted on a wall outside the office, an antique black Olivetti typewriter is captioned, "Think our laser printers are slow?" The humor and informality is the accretion of years of work to offset the lab’s windowless quarters and the anxiety level of students in the throes of it’s-due-tomorrow deadlines.

Not that you’ll often find any of the three sitting in the office; more often they’re out in the lab. "We don’t just wait for them to come to us," Atwood says. "Especially with the men. It’s more like, ‘Hey, how’re you doing?’ Then on to some topic of general interest; then, finally, ‘Oh, by the way, I was wondering: how do I get my data into this table here?’"

The Microlab got started in 1984. Biostatistics Professor Marcello Pagano recalls how he coaxed donations out of computer companies: "We’d tried being loyal customers, the idea being that IBM should reward our loyalty by donating some machines, but that didn’t work. Then one day, walking past the Digital machines, I mentioned that I was talking to Digital about donating 25 machines. The IBM rep said he would arrange delivery [of IBM machines] the following week! And then, of course, when Digital found out, they sent us 25 machines as well."

Now computing is so much a part of a student’s life--and public health research in general--that it is hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t possible to produce a histogram with a couple of keystrokes. Yet it is not computer power for its own sake that’s exciting, argues Atwood, but rather the power of computers to invite new kinds of inquiry, to turn data this way and that, and to borrow methodologies from other disciplines. "Software is developed to ask specific research questions," he says, "but then it can be modified for use in any number of other situations that were never envisioned by the programmers. We can ask whatever questions we want because each of us has the equivalent of our own little Univac right on our desks, and it doesn’t cost $200 a minute to use it." Moses adds, "The students push us with their questions. They are aware of all that’s at stake in the field of public health. There’s a feeling we’re about to solve some very big, very old problems. It’s a very exciting time."

Exciting but cramped. Even in its expanded state, the Microlab is too small; there are times of the day when every single computer is being used. One solution to the space problem may be cyberspace. The Microlab is developing its own Web site (www.hsph.harvard.edu/icf) that students and alumni will be able to access with a password. The Web site may, in part, function as a nice, comfy chat room for the School’s far-flung alumni. "We will mostly function as a catalyst," says Jacob, "providing alumni with the means to talk with one another, not only about their careers and families, but also about their research." The Web site could also open the door to "distance learning"--a hot topic in academe. According to Jacob, while the School has embraced the concept of distance learning, the technology is not yet fully developed. "Right now, a certain amount of the talk about distance learning is hype. After all, we have had the ability to videotape classes and send cassettes to people for a long time. The Internet is very slow and inefficient right now, but in the next few years, when all the connections are high-speed, fiber-optic cable, then it will be a magnificent, truly interactive vehicle."

But of course, you do have to know which buttons to press.

-- Richard Hoffman