Popular Stanford Major : Human Biology: Child of ‘70s Thrives in ‘80s

One of the most popular undergraduate majors at Stanford University these days is a course of study called “human biology,” a program that did not exist 20 years ago.

A rigorous blend of natural and social sciences, human biology--”hum-bio” in the student vernacular--is a child of the environmental movement of the 1970s that has survived and thrived in the 1980s. Now it ranks second only to economics as a field of concentration for undergraduates.

“In the beginning it was thought we might have 50 or 60 students,” said H. Craig Heller, professor of biological sciences and director of the program. “But last year, we awarded about 250 degrees, and now 750 or 800 students (about 15% of all Stanford undergraduates) take our courses at any one time.”

What makes this remarkable is that human biology is the kind of interdisciplinary program that research-oriented universities such as Stanford have always had trouble sustaining. Faculty members, particularly at prestigious universities, tend to concentrate their efforts on relatively narrow academic specialties and view with suspicion attempts to link one specialty with another.

‘Great Books’

At the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, there were several efforts to organize interdepartmental programs in the wake of the student protests of the 1960s, but all failed. A “great books” curriculum for freshmen and sophomores flickered for a few years, then died. So did Berkeley’s experimental Strawberry Creek College, in which the university offered small undergraduate seminars that attempted to relate one academic field to another.

But Stanford has encouraged these multidisciplinary enterprises with some success.

In addition to human biology, there are nearly a dozen other interdepartmental programs, including American studies, feminist studies, international relations, public policy and one called symbolic systems, which includes material from computer science, linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

Almost 25% of Stanford graduates now major in one of these programs, of which human biology is unquestionably the largest, best-financed and most successful.

Core Courses

As sophomores, human biology majors take a series of core courses that introduce the natural sciences, the social sciences and the relationships between the two.

After completing the core courses, each major selects an “area of concentration” from one of a dozen or more options, such as adolescents and educational institutions or biological and psychological development of the human organism. The area of concentration is intended to discourage the “dabbling” that has given many interdisciplinary programs a bad reputation.

As juniors and seniors, students take much of their course work within these areas of concentration, often from prominent faculty members.

For instance, Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry and developer of the first commercially successful contraceptive pill, has taught courses on biosocial aspects of birth control and feminist perspectives on birth control.

Acid Rain

Each student must also complete an internship, usually lasting one academic quarter. Most internships are done in the Stanford area, but some students venture as far as Montana to study acid rain or Kenya to do wildlife research.

About half of the human biology graduates go on to medical school or to health-related jobs. Others wind up in business, industry, law, teaching or public service. Barbara Morgan, who is supposed to be the next “teacher in space,” is a human biology graduate. So is Greg Baty, who plays tight end for the New England Patriots.

Merton Bernfield, professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medical School and an instructor in the program, said human biology graduates are accepted by medical schools in about the same percentages as those who graduate as regular biology majors.

But Bernfield believes that the human biology graduates are different because “they have a deeper perspective on a number of issues that are going to impact on their lives as doctors.”

Campus Clout

One reason for human biology’s success is that the program was started in 1970 by faculty members who had a lot of campus clout, including Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who now is president of Rockefeller University; David Hamburg, a professor of psychiatry who is now president of the Carnegie Corp., and Donald Kennedy, then a biology professor and now Stanford’s president.

“At first, there was very substantial opposition from a number of departments on the campus,” Bernfield said. “They had the idea we were ‘soft.’ There was the notion that ‘interdisciplinary’ meant less rigorous, less demanding.”

But the stature of the founding faculty helped to combat this opposition, as did a $2-million grant from the Ford Foundation.

Crucial Ingredient

Half of the money was placed in an endowment, which has paid for the part-time services of five or six faculty members each year. Money to buy faculty time is a crucial ingredient in the success of an interdepartmental venture, and of all the Stanford programs, only human biology has a substantial annual budget--$600,000.

Albert H. Hastorf, professor of psychology and former provost of the university, said a lot of the success had to do with good timing.

“We were a product of our time,” he said. “The students were caught up in concern about environmental problems, but they didn’t have a lot of information. One of the things that was pushing us was to try to get some empirical information into the environmental movement.”

But human biology has lived beyond the peak of environmental interest, partly because many of its courses are excellently taught.

Early Days

In the early days Lederberg and Paul Ehrlich, author of the “The Population Bomb,” taught in the program. The introductory lectures of biologist Colin Pittindrigh are said to have been among the most remarkable offered on the campus.

Today that tradition is carried on by such professors as anthropologist William Durham, who is himself a human biology graduate and who has received one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants.” University President Kennedy still finds time to deliver a lecture or two each year.

Human biology is not without problems, not the least of which is lack of money.

“They badly need a better bench,” Hastorf said, using a sports metaphor to suggest that the program needs a group of professors who could fill in for the dozen or so who now carry much of the teaching burden in the core courses. Director Heller agreed.

Carry Full Load

“What we’re asking of many faculty is above and beyond the call of duty,” he said, noting that some professors carry a full load of teaching and research in regular departments and participate in the human biology program too.

One of the goals of Stanford’s recently announced five-year, $1.1-billion fund-raising campaign is a dozen “centennial professorships,” which would free professors from their regular departmental duties to teach in interdisciplinary programs. Heller hopes to get one or two of these.

Heller is also aware of the need to guard constantly against the charge that human biology does not demand as much of its undergraduates as do regular Stanford departmental majors.