Honors

Alzheimer’s and Aging

This Praxis Lab is designed to link our current scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease with social and public policy issues facing patients, families, and society at large. The course will concentrate on knowledge, communication, inclusion, and dignity by studying the intersections of science, philosophy, emotion, ethics, and public policy. It will ask students to consider these questions: What does it mean to be old in America? To be dependent? To have Alzheimer’s Disease? What do you think your community needs to know about the disease? How will you communicate what you have discovered?

Participating students will develop a basic scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and will explore the medical, ethical, philosophical, and public policy issues that accompany it. They will be able to apply their own interests and expertise to address this emerging problem. Students will recognize how the humanities inform the medical and scientific and also how the medical and scientific approach to disease is inadequate and must draw upon the social sciences and public policy to be fully successful and be informed by the humanities to best understand the ramification of disease. At the end of this course, students will better understand how society chooses to frame disease can affect policy, knowledge and stigma.