No offense to medical schools, but students last fall liked taking “Anti-Medical School,” a new graduate seminar at Berkeley. Why?

Medical schools teach what is known in medicine, explains BioE associate professor Steve Conolly, who helped bring the course here from UCSF. Anti-Medical School explores what is unknown and unsolved in medicine, and that’s what the course’s 70 students, mainly first- and second-year bioengineering graduate students, found compelling.

At each weekly lecture, a UCSF medical doctor presents a problem in need of an engineering solution in hopes of engaging the students in solving thorny, real-world clinical challenges as part of their master’s or doctorate research. “While not all the clinical challenges will become projects that satisfy all the constraints of a Ph.D., the goal is to spark new grad students’ imaginations,” Conolly explains.

Course content included mechanical hearts and lungs, low back pain and affordable home-based health care, among others.

Last November, Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist and neuroscientist who specializes in the aging brain, discussed one of his field’s most pressing questions: how can we improve early detection of Alzheimer’s disease during the mild cognitive impairment phase? “We can’t stop the advance of Alzheimer’s, but if we catch it early enough, we’ll be able to slow it down with disease-modifying treatments that are on the horizon,” Gazzaley told the students.

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