What might it mean to decolonize the history of science? Several emerging leaders of the field, and many graduate students, have been seeking answers to this question. On April 12 and 13, the Department of the History of Science, with the support of the Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair of Australian Studies and Harvard’s Indigenous Studies Program, hosted a workshop examining various “postcolonial” and “decolonial” approaches to remaking the history of science, as well as...

What secrets lie in the hearts of our ancestors? Signs of cardiovascular disease, for one, as a team of cardiovascular-imaging experts from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) recently helped discover.

Through a collaboration with an international team of researchers and anthropologists, BWH faculty and staff performed CT scans on five mummies from 16th-century Greenland in the Shapiro Cardiovascular Center early last year. The team was looking for evidence of plaque in the arteries — also known as atherosclerosis — to see if the leading cause of death in the U.S. today was also prevalent...

Andrew Groover celebrates the complexity of trees, and makes it his life’s work to unlock how they adapt to their environments. It’s knowledge that’s critical for the U.S. Forest Service research geneticist — he works in California, where concerns about climate change have grown as wildfires there have increased in frequency and intensity.

A practical problem for Groover, who is a University of California, Davis, adjunct professor of plant biology, is...