Science Editor Sarah Braner has finally beaten off the remains of summer lethargy with a cudgel and is thrilled to welcome you back to Science Fair, Bwog’s central for all the science – well, some of it – happening at Columbia. Well, happening at Columbia’s digital nexus. Well, just happening.

Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and the Covid-19 Pandemic

  • Monday October 12, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM, click here for more information
  • An event featuring many different speakers talking about the effects of our current pandemic on indigenous peoples. Not strictly science but science doesn’t mean much if it can’t be applied to society so I’m putting it in.

A Medical Disaster and its Aftermaths: The Quest for Sleeping Sickness Eradication in Colonial Africa. A talk by Guillaume Lachenal, moderated by Thomas Dodman

  • Tuesday, October 20, 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM, click here for more information
  • “Guillaume Lachenal will present an episode of late-colonial public health, the so-called ‘Lomidinization’ campaigns to eradicate sleeping sickness. After the Second World War, these campaigns were launched with great enthusiasm, and led to the administration of preventive Lomidine injections to more than 10 millions African colonial subjects. However, they were abandoned in the late 1950s after the discovery of their erratic side-effects and a series of fatal accidents. Retracing the rise and fall of that “wonder drug”, and the sequence of hubris, denial and violence that accompany it, Guillaume Lachenanl examines how colonial medicine left strong marks in African bodies, ecologies and memories – especially in the form of iatrogenic epidemics including HIV and the Hepatitis C virus.”

Post-Pandemic New York: The Future of the City

  • Wednesday, October 14, 2020 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM, click here for more information
  • “For decades, Professor Kenneth Jackson has taught Columbia students about New York’s history of resilience and re-invention. So how can the city rebound from the current crisis? Are the dire predictions of urban abandonment to be believed? If you took “The History of the City of New York” (or if you wish you had), return to Professor Jackson’s classroom. He’ll discuss the future of the City with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jodi Kantor CC ’96 and will take questions from alums.” [Editor’s note: again this might not be striiiiictly science but I’m putting it in anyway]

The Dean’s Grand Rounds on the Future of Public Health: Racism and the Public’s Health ​

  • Thursday, October 15, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM, click here for more information
  • “Initiated in 2008, Grand Rounds is a community conversation on the science, education, and practice of public health. The series provides an intellectual space within which to explore national and global public health challenges and the innovative approaches needed to transform the public’s health in the 21st century. COVID-19 has served as a magnifying glass on a broken, structurally racist and unequal health system which falls grievously short of protecting communities of color, the aged and the vulnerable. It also has highlighted the devastating consequences of our country’s absence of a public health system charged with protecting and elevating health for all. This year we will deepen our understanding, research, teaching and action on this topic, through our Grand Rounds on the Future of Public Health Series.”

Easily the stupidest joke I’ve done in a while via Walt Disney Pictures