“We have the misfortune that the virus struck us at a particular moment in our history. We have the highest levels of income inequality in a century, we have extreme levels of political polarization, and we have a number of macro trends that have thinned out our intellectual discourse that have made it very difficult for us to have a reasoned conversation about what we should do as a nation to confront this threat.”
Physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis is here. On the docket? Variants, viruses, epidemics, pandemics, and the toll— medical, physical, social, and emotional— that COVID-19 is taking on the country and the world. What could we have done better? What happened in Wuhan, China at the outset of this pandemic? Who were the early unsung heroes who sounded the alarm? Nicholas Christakis, recently out with his new book Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, is here to help us understand where we are in this pandemic, but also to offer historical context and perspective using previous plagues as his starting point. How much the human way of life has changed over the millennia pales in comparison to how much hasn’t when it comes to our ability to cope with, and our reactions, to a worldwide plague.
Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is a sociologist and physician who conducts research in the areas of social networks and biosocial science. He directs the Human Nature Lab. His current research is mainly focused on two topics: (1) the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“connection”), and (2) the social and biological implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (“contagion”).
His lab uses both observational and experimental methods to study these phenomena, exploiting techniques from sociology, computer science, biosocial science, demography, statistics, behavior genetics, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, and other fields. To the extent that diverse phenomena can spread within networks in intelligible ways, there are important policy implications since such spread can be exploited to improve the health or other desirable properties of groups (such as cooperation or innovation).
Hence, current work in the lab involves conducting field experiments: some work involves the use of large-scale, online network experiments; other work involves large-scale randomized controlled trials in the developing world where networks are painstakingly mapped. Finally, some work in the lab examines the biological determinants and consequences of social interactions and related phenomena, with a particular emphasis on the genetic origins and evolutionary implications of social networks. The author of several books and over 150 articles, Christakis was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and was made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010.
