Event Details - Lecture by Dr. George Terry Sharrer

 Dr. George Terry Sharrer will give a talk about how technologies, or “big-science” and “big medicine,” should be applied to patients based on the physician-patient relationship, which is more of an art than a science. In particular, he will discuss the primary care facility for the special children of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites in Strasburg, PA, which he believes to be the best healthcare facility in the US or anywhere else. He suggests that this facility, with its trusting relationship between "artist" and “subject,” is the place where modern molecular medicine began, with the genetic studies of the Plain People that prompted the Human Genome Project. Dr. Sharrer, former curator at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution for 39 years, is the author of several monographs (most recently, “A Brief History of Measurement” in German, 2008) and the principal of a biomed consultancy. He was trained as a historian of American history and agricultural economy, but as a curator, he led several major exhibitions on health sciences at the Smithsonian and other institutions including the White House and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. As his interests and specialty have been shaped by new technologies for medical treatment such as gene therapy and gene editing, molecular diagnostics, liquid biopsy, and nano medicine, he is now working as an innovation consultant to health systems for organizations such as the Cancer Treatment Center for America.