Spotlight
Researchers at Harvard Medical School are developing Dr. CaBot as a medical education tool. The system, which operates in both presentation and written formats, shows how it reasons through a case, offering what’s called a differential diagnosis — a comprehensive list of possible conditions that explain what’s going on — and narrowing down the possibilities until it reaches a final diagnosis. Dr. CaBot’s ability to spell out its “thought process” rather than focusing solely on reaching an accurate answer distinguishes it from other AI diagnostic tools. It is also one of only a few models designed to tackle more complex medical cases. “We wanted to create an AI system that could generate a differential diagnosis and explain its detailed, nuanced reasoning at the level of an expert diagnostician,” said Arjun (Raj) Manrai, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS. Manrai created Dr. CaBot with Thomas Buckley, a Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin School of Arts and Sciences doctoral student and a member of the Manrai lab.
Brown University has announced the next cohort of students to receive the Blavatnik Family Graduate Fellowship in Biology and Medicine, which is made possible through a generous, multi-year donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The eight Blavatnik Family Fellows were selected based on outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated potential for producing original research that advances scientific knowledge and understanding in the basic and clinical life sciences. The fellows are doctoral candidates in the Brown Division of Biology and Medicine’s graduate programs. “It’s a great pleasure to welcome the new Blavatnik Family Fellows, selected for their achievements to date and exceptional future promise. We look forward to their continued success and innovative research in the years ahead,” said Len Blavatnik, founder of Access Industries and the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
Philip J. Kranzusch, Ph.D., Professor of Cancer Immunology and Virology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, was one of three scientists awarded top honors at the 2025 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, a significant prize for early-career researchers. Kranzusch, the Life Science Laureate, was recognized for discovering that human innate immunity evolved from ancient pathways in bacteria, explaining the molecular basis for how human cells defend against infections and cancer. Kranzusch is researching how human cells detect infection or cancer, thus deciding when to trigger an immune response – an essential function for diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease. Kranzusch said: “The Blavatnik Award is an incredible honor for our lab’s discovery of the origins of human innate immunity. We are excited to build on this new foundation to define universal rules that control immune signaling across all kingdoms of life.”
The co-directors of the new PBS series, Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, describe how they made a documentary about a war distant in time and shrouded in myth. On June 24, 1778, a total solar eclipse covered a wide swath of North America—from the Pacific Coast of Mexico to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The eclipse occurred just a few days before the Battle of Monmouth, when George Washington’s Continental Army engaged General Sir Henry Clinton’s British Army—a standoff that nevertheless allowed the Patriots to claim a much-needed victory. The British, meanwhile, continued their retreat from Philadelphia to New York City. We wanted to depict this eclipse for our series The American Revolution, and in this we had a stroke of luck: There would be a total solar eclipse across much of North America on April 8, 2024.
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The Blavatnik Archive is a nonprofit foundation dedicated to preserving and disseminating materials that contribute to the study of 20th-century Jewish and world history, with a special emphasis on World War I, World War II, and Soviet Russia.
