Theresa MacPhail

From hay fever to eczema to peanuts, either you have an allergy or you know someone who does. In this engaging talk, Theresa MacPhail guides you on a journey to answer some of the most pressing questions about the global epidemic of allergic diseases: what they are, why we have them, and what that might mean about the fate of humanity in a rapidly changing world. Because understanding what is irritating us and why will help us to craft better environments in the future—so we can all breathe easier.

Tuberculosis. Zika. Polio. Influenza. HIV. Ebola. Cholera. West Nile. Each of these diseases has been, in their turn, at the center of collective public worry and public health responses. To anyone paying attention to the news headlines, it seems we are constantly in a battle with a different virus or bacteria. And yet, we never seem to stay focused on any public health threat for long. The news cycle moves on and the disease of the day fades into the background – even when the epidemic is still ongoing. MacPhail explores how and why we often forget about epidemics and what they might be able to teach us about the practice of public health. The price we might pay for forgetting what we’ve learned is too high to ignore.

Over the past decade, Theresa MacPhail noticed that her students, the majority of whom were STEM majors, were more and more anxious and stressed out about their futures. After a spate of suicides rocked her university, she designed an experimental course—“Failure 101”—to teach students about the concept of failure – how we define it, what it looks like in different fields, how it is experienced in day-to-day living, and how to learn to welcome it as a necessity for a successful and fulfilling life. In this talk, Dr. MacPhail offers insights from her experiences teaching college students how to fail and why she believes learning how to fail is more important than learning how to be happy. In the end, she argues that accepting failure may be the ultimate antidote to anxiety.

In February 2020, American healthcare officials urged Americans to stop buying masks, arguing they were unnecessary for anyone not working in healthcare or taking care of someone sick at home. After weeks of pressing this message – that masks did not help to prevent illness – the U.S. CDC finally changed its recommendations, imploring everyone over the age of 2 to start wearing masks in public spaces to contain the virus. Many people reacted poorly to this reversal and wondered how much they could actually trust scientists and epidemiologists. It was the first, but not the last, time that scientific knowledge would be openly questioned throughout the pandemic.

In this talk, medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail explains how science – especially biomedical science – has been a victim of its past successes. Vaccines, antibiotics, and a bevy of new medical treatments have highlighted just how much we know about our biology and the natural world. But as scientific research progresses, the number of things we don’t know will increase at the same pace as what we do. The 21st century will require us to embrace un-knowledge as a necessary part of our quest for scientific understanding.