SHC - Undergraduate

The program in Science in Human Culture (SHC) prepares students to confront the impact of science, medicine, and technology on society--and on their own lives. It welcomes pre-medical students who wish to explore the broader social, ethical, and economic world within which modern medicine operates. It welcomes students in the humanities and social sciences who seek to understand the intellectual transformations which attended the rise of science and modern medicine. And it welcomes science and engineering students interested in thinking beyond the problem sets assigned in their specialized courses. A growing number of students are joining the program because it offers them a chance to integrate their understanding of science, medicine, and technology into a liberal arts education, and because it offers them the freedom to tailor an adjunct major or a minor to their own particular interests.

Here are some of the questions which courses in the program address:

- Why have we come to believe in scientific explanations?

- How is scientific knowledge translated into radical new technologies-from the atomic bomb to the genetic testing of fetuses?

- How has the rise of medical science and the new economics of medicine changed the relationship between physicians and patients?

- What are the philosophical and religious implications of our changing understanding of space, time, and biological evolution?

- How has science contributed to (and undermined) our sense of human difference, including racial and sexual difference?

To address its pressing problems, modern society typically turns to a variety of specialized disciplines. And, as is common at American universities, students at Northwestern are asked to have a "home" major in a particular field. This means they are expected to master a subject in depth and bring a refined methodology to bear on a set of narrowly defined problems. However, disciplinary approaches often fail to provide the wider viewpoint which important problems demand. No single disciplinary approach can treat, for instance, the ethical and social issues in the development of modern medicine, or in the formulation of technology policy. The program in SHC was designed to offer students the chance to take a wider "problem-oriented" perspective before they take on a narrow professional role. By combining their major field with SHC--either as an adjunct major or as a minor--students will be able to explore the topics they care about in an interdisciplinary manner.

To this end, SHC also allows students to choose from a menu of courses and focus on topics of interest to them. Hence, SHC is ideal for pre-medical students--including those who are majoring in the biological sciences--who want to understand the broader implications of medical practice, the ethical dilemmas faced by physicians, and the social and economic pressures currently confronting medicine. SHC also welcomes students majoring in the social sciences who are interested in pursuing a career in public health or technology policy, and who understand that these problems cry out for an interdisciplinary thinking. SHC can also be an excellent preparation for students planning to enter graduate school in the history, philosophy, or sociology of science. And finally, SHC can be a valuable tool for engineers or scientists who want to see how their chosen disciplines have shaped--and been shaped by--the wider world.

Above all, the major is meant to appeal to all those students who rebel against the claim that human knowledge can be sharply divided into disciplinary fields, or into the "two cultures"--so neatly symbolized at Northwestern by the north and south ends of campus. After all, one of the main purposes of a liberal arts education is to break down these barriers and to give students a chance to see how a full range of disciplines have treated human problems. Science in Human Culture gives students that opportunity.

Science in Human Culture - Northwestern University
Program Head: Ken Alder Harris Hall 306S   tel: 847 491 7260   k-alder@northwestern.edu
Program Administrator:   Natasha Dennison   University Hall, Room 020   1897 Sheridan Rd.   Evanston, IL 60208-2245
tel: 847-491-3525   fax: 847-467-2733   shc-program@northwestern.edu