As the professor who teaches the main introductory biostatistics course each fall, Marcello Pagano is one of the School’s star lecturers. Over the years, thousands of students have scrambled out of bed for an 8:30 a.m. dose of Pagano wisdom on the null hypothesis, the normal distribution, Berkson’s fallacy, and dozens of other fundamental concepts in biostatistics. He delivers it from the well at the bottom of steeply pitched Snyder Auditorium, pacing back and forth with occasional felt-tipped-pen flourishes on the overheads to make a point. Over the years, a lot of biostats has been learned like this, but now Pagano thinks there may be a better way.

With the able assistance of software developer Ellen Dorsey-Little, Pagano is designing a CD-ROM that brings biostatistics to life for students in ways that would have been impossible before today’s technology. Pagano is also looking forward to the day when the combination of his CD-ROM and the Web might null the need for that ringside seat in Snyder and turn the Internet into the normal way of distributing knowledge. "We can do things today with computers that you wouldn’t have dreamed of doing only 20 years ago. All of us--researchers, professors, and students alike--have more insight now into the data and what it really means than we ever had before."

Developed with seed money provided by the School and a grant from Pfizer Inc., the pharmaceutical company, Pagano’s CD-ROM allows students to move through concepts at their own pace, switching back and forth from lectures to examples and graphic renderings of statistical principles. Animated, interactive visuals provide students with a more intuitive, nearly physical "feel" for the data. After all, it’s not performing the calculations--impractical in any case--that brings understanding, but a grasp of the relationships among factors. Students are able to manipulate data, massage it, modify it--playing out an almost infinite number of "what if?" scenarios. Pagano has used the CD-ROM with students on a number of occasions this year and plans to fully integrate it in his syllabus next September.

What excites Pagano most these days, however, is the Internet. "We want to be the School of Public Health to the world. This means providing access to greater numbers of learners. The Internet is providing us with the means to provide the knowledge and skills necessary to improve public health worldwide."

Access is also a question of affordability, and "distance learning," as Pagano envisions it, will address this question as well. "Right now, people have to give up a year of their lives to come here. That’s a luxury. You have to get a year off; maybe your spouse also has to take a year off. Then you have to somehow make up that income on top of your tuition, relocate your whole family to Boston, and afterward move home again and try to resume your life and work. When all is said and done, it can cost a quarter of a million dollars. Even developing nations who may want to send physicians and others here can find that sum prohibitive. What if, instead, a student came here for six weeks in the summer, and after that returned home with three or four CD-ROMs?"

Pagano is not arguing that a CD-ROM can take the place of the professor; in fact, professors would be present "live on-camera" at specified times during the week for students from all over the globe to dial in via the Internet and ask questions. Then, the following summer, students would return for a second six weeks in Boston.

Asked if the vital interchange between professors and students wouldn’t largely be lost in this arrangement, Pagano says, "Perhaps," but he quickly adds that a great deal of it would remain. "I have a friend," he says, "who met her husband on the Internet. They met in a chat room, corresponded for some time, eventually agreed to meet, and now they’re married! So I have to think a good deal of that human chemistry comes through."

-- Richard Hoffman