Guest Lecturer Dr. Derek Yach, leader in global public health and current Director of Global Health Policy at PepsiCo, offers an inside look into how a member of the food industry balances the needs of the company, consumer, and public health. Dr. Yach offers insight into how PepsiCo is thinking about research and development as a key to transforming the company.
Guest lecturer Dr. Timothy Walsh offers a glimpse into current psychiatric understanding of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. He takes students inside the psychology of an eating disorder and the medical and behavioral complications that patients may experience. Dr. Walsh then explores the issues behind diagnosing, treating, and understanding these disorders from the doctor’s perspective as well.
Professor Brownell reviews public health as a profession and explains how it provides a different framework, compared to the traditional medical approach, for tracking diseases and trying to prevent them. Specifically, he explains how public health focuses on community/population (vs. the individual) and prevention (vs. treatment) and discusses which may be better for addressing problems of diet. He provides examples of how different forms of prevention (primary, secondary, tertiary) and the epidemiologic triad are utilized to address disease in public health.
In this lecture, Professor Brownell asks whether modern agriculture is environmentally, culturally, and morally sustainable. First, he explores how genetically modified foods both benefit and hinder world sustainability, such as with the case study of BT corn, and contamination to different parts of the environment. Secondly, he discusses the issue of animal welfare and its relationship with sustainability by exploring how modern food conditions encourage the mass production of meat. Arguments for and against the way animals are raised and eaten are also reviewed.
Professor Brownell reviews the energy costs of modern food tastes. Specifically, he discusses how agribusiness and what people choose to eat has consequences on the depletion of water, land, and fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming. In addition, he considers whether food production and the earth’s resources can keep pace with the demands of global population growth, and whether we can enhance sustainability in our food environment.
Professor Brownell discusses what the green revolution is and how it has impacted the world scene in both positive and negative ways. On one hand, the green revolution has increased world food productivity and decreased world hunger; on the other hand, it has produced negative environmental effects and failed to benefit all countries involved. Professor Brownell also reviews the green revolution’s technology advances including different kinds of irrigation systems, fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, and describes the future of the green revolution in Africa.
Final Exam covers the second half of the course.
The various postulates of quantum mechanics treated in previous lectures are reviewed and summarized. The uncertainty principle is again discussed and a new one between energy and time is introduced. The quantum mechanical behavior of an electron in a hydrogen atom is described. The principles of quantum mechanics are then generalized to describe two or more quantum particles. It is shown that identical particles have to be bosons or fermions, the latter obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, which in turn is key to explaining the periodic table.
The time-dependent Schrödinger Equation is introduced as a powerful analog of Newton’s second law of motion that describes quantum dynamics. It is shown how given an initial wave function, one can predict the future behavior using Schrödinger’s Equation. The special role of stationary states (states of definite energy) is discussed.
The allowed energy states of a free particle on a ring and a particle in a box are revisited. A scattering problem is studied to expose more quantum wonders: a particle can tunnel into the classically forbidden regions where kinetic energy is negative, and a particle incident on a barrier with enough kinetic energy to go over it has a nonzero probability to bounce back.
