| Apr |
| 16 |
| 5:30 pm |
What is Happening:
Speaker: Dr Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital, Boston.
Biodiversity loss, namely a reduction in the variety of life on Earth, continues relatively unabated worldwide. Biodiversity loss represents far more than a loss to experience nature’s beauty or to benefit economically from nature. The simplification of the biosphere has profound and well-known consequences for human well-being. Biodiversity serves as a repository for new medicines and as a source of insights into human disease. It can provide a check up on the spread of infectious diseases and it also delivers a host of goods and services such as food, water and air purification, and regulation of climate.
In this lecture, Dr Bernstein will present examples, including evidence from recent emerging infectious diseases in Southeast Asia such as SARS and Nipah virus, that biodiversity is a public health matter. He will argue that human well-being is tied to the well-being of all species and that we must take care of biodiversity if we are to take care of ourselves.
Aaron Bernstein, MD, received his AB from Stanford University and medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He completed residency in the Boston Combined residency in Pediatrics of Harvard Medical School and the Boston University School of Medicine and has since joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston where he works as a pediatric hospitalist.
He is a lead author and co-editor of Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, the most comprehensive and accessible account available of the ties between human health and the natural world, and which has been named one of the best biology books of 2008 by the Library Journal.
In 2008 he was named a Harvard University Zuckerman Fellow.
Dr Aaron Bernstein’s speaking tour has been made possible by the Thomas Foundation Conservation Oration presented in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.
Presented by the Institute for Population Health, ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment.
Where is it On?:
Finkel Lecture Theatre, John Curtin School of Medical Research, 131 Garran Road, Australian National University, Acton, Canberra
RSVP?: No
Contact Details:
Ros Hales on 6125 5627, ANU Events on 6125 4144
