David S. Jones

A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine

Areas of Research: Science & Race, Global Health / Public Health, History of Biology, History of Medicine, Medical Humanities, Psychology & Theories of Mind, Science & Technology Studies, Technology & Society

David Jones completed his A.B. at Harvard College in 1993 (History and Science), and then pursued a Ph.D. in History of Science at Harvard University and an M.D. at Harvard Medical School, receiving both in 2001. After an internship in pediatrics at Children's Hospital and Boston Medical Center, he trained as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and then worked for two years as a staff psychiatrist in the Psychiatric Emergency Service at Cambridge Hospital. He joined the faculty at MIT in 2005 as an Assistant Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology. From 2004 to 2008 Professor Jones directed MIT’s Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. In 2009 he was appointed as a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in recognition of his sustained contributions to undergraduate education. He also taught as a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he was awarded the 2010 Donald O'Hara Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2011 he left MIT to join the Harvard faculty as the inaugural A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine, a joint position between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine. In 2018 he received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 2020 he was named a Harvard College Professor.

His initial research focused on epidemics among American Indians, resulting in a book, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2004). His next project, Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), examined the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics. He has published widely in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and other venues, on these two topics as well as about human subjects research, Cold War medicine, HIV, planetary health, race, and the COVID-19 pandemic. His research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently at work on four other book projects, including histories of the evolution of coronary artery surgery, of heart disease and cardiac therapeutics in India, and of the threat of air pollution to health in both India and the United States. His teaching at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School explores the history of medicine, medical ethics, and social medicine.

Media

Gina Kolata, “Many Medical Decision Tools Disadvantage Black Patients,” New York Times, 17 June 2020.
Gina Kolata, “How Pandemics End,” New York Times, 14 May 2020.
Christopher Lydon, “Springtime in the Plague Year,” Radio Open Source, 19 March 2020,
Richard Harris, "Are We Reaching The End Of The Trend For Longer, Healthier Lives?” NPR, 23 September 2016.
Gina Kolata, “A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline,” New York Times, 8 July 2016.
Alice Park, "A Cardiac Conundrum," Harvard Magazine, 3/2013.
"Harvard Portrait," Harvard Magazine, 9/2012.
Koch, Katie, "How doctors think, past and present," Harvard Gazette Profile, 9/1/2011.

Grants

with Sunil Amrith, “Toxic Air, Toxic Policy: The Threat of Air Pollution and Heart Disease in India.” Harvard Global Institute, 2017-2021.
“On the Origins of Therapies: Innovation, Imagination, and the Evolution of Coronary Artery Surgery, 1910-1970.” National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health, 2015-2020.
with Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Columbia University), “Relocating Heart Disease in the Tropics: Race, Risk, and Modernization in Post-Independence India.” National Endowment for the Humanities, 2014-2018.
with David Kaiser and Vincent Lepinay, “Predictive Modeling of the Emergence and Development of Scientific Fields.”National Science Foundation, Program on the Science of Science and Innovation Policy, 2010-2012.
“The Rise and Fall of Cardiac Revascularization: Therapeutic Evolution and Health Policy in the Late Twentieth Century.” Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2008-2012.

Books

Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
What's the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Selected Articles and Chapters

Amutah, Christina, Kaliya Greenidge, Adjoa Mante, Michelle Munyikwa, Sanjna L Surya, Eve Higginbotham, David S. Jones, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Dorothy Roberts, Jennifer Tsai, and Jaya Aysola. “Misrepresenting Race — The Role of Medical Schools in Propagating Physician Bias.” New England Journal of Medicine 384 (online 6 January 2021).
Jones, David S. “COVID-19, History, and Humility.” Centaurus 62 (2020): 374-384. https://doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12296.
Jones, David S., and Stefan Helmreich. “The Shape of Epidemics.” Boston Review, 26 June 2020. Available at http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/david-s-jones-stefan-helmreich-shape-epidemics
Vyas, Darshali A., Leo G. Eisenstein, and David S. Jones. “Hidden in Plain Sight—Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms.” New England Journal of Medicine 383 (27 August 2020): 874-882 (online first 17 June).
Jones, David S. “History in a Crisis—Lessons for Covid-19.” New England Journal of Medicine 382 (30 April 2020): 1681-1683 (published online 12 March).
Dunk, James H., and David S. Jones. “Sounding the Alarm on Climate Change, 1989 and 2019.” New England Journal of Medicine 382 (16 January 2020): 205-207.
Dunk, James H., David S. Jones, Anthony Capon, and Warwick H. Anderson. “Human Health on an Ailing Planet—Historical Perspectives on Our Future.” New England Journal of Medicine 381 (22 August 2019): 778-782.
Jones, D.S., and K. Sivaramakrishnan. “Making Heart-Lung Machines Work in India: Imports, Indigenous Innovation, and the Challenge of Replicating Cardiac Surgery in Bombay, 1952-1962.” Social Studies of Science 48 (2018): 507-539.
Jones, D.S., and K. Sivaramakrishnan. “Transplant Buccaneers: P.K. Sen and India's First Heart Transplant, February 1968.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 73 (July 2018): 303-332. doi: 10.1093/jhmas/jrx059.
Truog, Robert D., Thaddus Mason Pope, and David S. Jones. “The 50-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death.” JAMA 320 (24/31 July 2018): 335-336.
Jones, D.S. “Surgery and Clinical Trials: The History and Controversies of Surgical Evidence.” In T. Schlich, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery, pp. 479-501. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.
Jones, D.S., and G.M. Oppenheimer. “If the Framingham Heart Study Did Not Invent the Risk Factor, Who Did?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 60 (Spring 2017): 131-150.
Jones, D.S., C. Grady, and S.E.. Lederer. “Ethics and Clinical Research—The 50th Anniversary of Beecher’s ‘Bombshell.’” New England Journal of Medicine 374 (16 June 2016): 2393-2398.
Bothwell, L.E., Jeremy A. Greene, Scott H. Podolsky, and David S. Jones. “Assessing the Gold Standard: Lessons from the History of RCTs.” New England Journal of Medicine 374 (2016): 2175-2181.
“Therapeutic Evolution or Revolution? Metaphors and Their Consequences.” In Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jeremy A. Greene, Flurin Contra and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
Pollock, A., and David S. Jones. “Coronary Artery Disease and the Contours of Pharmaceuticalization.” Social Science & Medicine 131 (2015): 221-227.
Jones, D.S., Jeremy A. Greene, Jacalyn Duffin, and John Warner. “Making the Case for History in Medical Education.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 70 (2015): 623-652.
“Death, Uncertainty, and Rhetoric.” In Beyond Germs: The Impact of Colonialism on Indigenous Health in America, ed. Alan C. Swedlund, Kathy Cameron, and Paul Kelton, pp. 16-49. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2015.
Oldfield, B., and David S. Jones. “Languages of the Heart: The Biomedical and the Metaphorical in American Fiction.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 57 (2014): 424-442.
Jones, D.S. “How Personalized Medicine Became Genetic, and Racial: Werner Kalow and the Formations of Pharmacogenetics.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 68 (2013): 1-48.
Jones, D.S., and J.A. Greene, “The Decline and Rise of Coronary Heart Disease: Understanding Public Health Catastrophism.” American Journal of Public Health 103 (July 2013).
Jones, D.S. “The Prospects of Personalized Medicine.” In Genetic Explanation: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, pp. 147-170. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Podolsky, Scott H., Jeremy A. Greene, and D.S. Jones. “The Changing Role of the Medical Journal.” New England Journal of Medicine 366 (19 April 2012): 1457-1461.
Jones, D.S., Scott H. Podolsky, and Jeremy A. Greene. “The Burden of Disease and the Changing Task of Medicine.” New England Journal of Medicine (21 June 2012): 2333-2338.
Jones, D.S. “Olympic Medicine.” New England Journal of Medicine 367 (26 July 2012): 289-292.
Jones, D.S. “How Much CABG Is Good for Us?” Lancet 380 (11 August 2012): 557-558.
Jeremy A. Greene, D.S. Jones, and Scott H. Podolsky. “Therapeutic Evolution and the Challenge of Rational Medicine.” New England Journal of Medicine 367 (September 2012): 1077-1082.
Jones, D.S., and J.A. Greene, “The Contributions of Prevention and Treatment to the Decline in Cardiovascular Mortality: Lessons from a Forty-Year Debate.” Health Affairs 31 (October 2012): 2250-2258.
Jones, D.S., A. Cambrosio, and A. Mogoutov. “The Detection and Characterization of Translational Research in Cancer and Cardiovascular Medicine.” Journal of Translational Medicine 9 (2011): 57 (12 pages).
Dorr, Gregory M., and D.S. Jones. “Facts and Fictions: BiDil and the Resurgence of Racial Medicine.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 36 (Fall 2008): 443-448.
Jones, D.S. “The Persistence of American Indian Health Disparities.” American Journal of Public Health 96 (December 2006): 2122-2134.
Jones, D.S., R.H. Perlis. “Pharmacogenetics, Race, and Psychiatry.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 14 (March-April 2006): 92-108.
Jones, D.S., and R.L. Martensen. “Human Radiation Experiments and the Formation of Medical Physics at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley, 1937-1962.” In Useful Bodies: Humans in the Service of Medical Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jordon Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks, 91-108. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Jones, D.S. “Virgin Soils Revisited.” William and Mary Quarterly, 60:4 (October 2003): 703-742.
Jones, D.S. “The Health Care Experiments at Many Farms: The Navajo, Tuberculosis, and the Limits of Modern Medicine, 1952-1962.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (Winter 2002): 749-790.
Jones, D.S. “Technologies of Compliance: Surveillance of Self-Administration of Tuberculosis Treatment, 1956-1966.” History and Technology 17 (Winter 2001): 279-318.
Jones, D.S. “Visions of a Cure: Visualization, Clinical Trials, and Controversies in Cardiac Therapeutics, 1968-1998.” Isis 91 (September 2000): 504-541.