BlueSci Issue 52 - Michaelmas 2021

Michaelmas 2021 Issue 52 www.bluesci.co.uk

Cambridge University science magazine

FOCUS Hidden Figures

Gay Genes . The Leaky Pipeline Objectivity . Maoist Science

your power for health

MiniCollect

®

for easy collection of small CAPILLARY BLOOD SAMPLES complimented by a range of LANCETS AND ACCESSORIES

ALSO LE I LAB AVA

VACUETTE

®

The evacuated system for the safe collection of venous samples

Contact us for more information

01453 825255 info.uk@gbo.com

Greiner Bio-One Ltd | Brunel Way | Stroudwater Business Park | Stonehouse | Glos | GL10 3SX

Contents

Cambridge University science magazine

Regulars

Features 6

On The Cover News Reviews

The Myth of Objectivity

Zak Lakota-Baldwin questions whether objective science is possible 8

FOCUS

What Have We Learned by Searching for ‘Gay Genes’?

Chay Graham argues that research into the DNA ancestry of gay sex erases the reality of sexuality 10

The ‘Leaky Pipeline’: Is Diverse Representation in STEM a Pipe Dream?

Lizzie Knight discusses the infamous metaphor for diversity in STEM careers 14

18

Science ‘Walks on Two Legs’ in Maoist China Eugene Chia uncovers a case study of the complex relationship between science and politics

12

3 4 5

Following the Science

HIDDEN FIGURES: THE ERASURE OF SCIENTIFIC LABOUR AND THE HOPE OF DECOLONISATION Gianamar Giovanetti-Singh, Rory Kent, and Swathi Nachiar Manivannan

Andrea Chlebikova asks what we mean by evidence-based decision making 22

Pavilion: Natural History Museum Daniel Lim showcases stories from the colonial origins of museum collections

24

26

Scientific Discovery, Imperialism, and the Geological Map

Octavia Rooks charts the role of mapping in colonialism

Clinical Trial Design May Perpetuate Health Inequalities

Lauren Lee argues for better representation in trials

BlueSci was established in 2004 to provide a student forum for science communication. As the longest running science magazine in Cambridge, BlueSci publishes the best science writing from across the University each term. We combine high quality writing with stunning images to provide fascinating yet accessible science to everyone.

But BlueSci does not stop there. At www.bluesci.co.uk, we have extra articles, regular news stories, podcasts and science films to inform and entertain between print issues. Produced entirely by members of the University, the diversity of expertise and talent combine to produce a unique science experience

Michaelmas 2021

The Popularisation of Science

28

Chloe Li weighs up views on disseminating scientific findings.

What Cooperation in Climate Conservation Looks Like

30

Weird and Wonderful

32

Donovan Sim discusses the need for unity for climate action Is ASMR Real?

Calutron Girls in the Atomic City It’s Getting Hot in Here, So Override Your Chromosomes

President: Leia Judge �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Judge �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� president@bluesci.co.uk Managing Editor: Sarah Lindsay..................................................

Lindsay........................................................managing-editor@bluesci.co.uk ......managing-editor@bluesci.co.uk Secretary: Tanvi Acharya.......................................... �������������������������������������� Acharya.......................................... ��������������������������������������enquiries@bluesci.co.uk enquiries@bluesci.co.uk Finance Officers: Juliana Cudini & Kate O’Flaherty.....................................finance@bluesci.co.uk Film Editors: Tanjakin Fu, Roxy Francombe �������������������������������������������������������� Francombe �������������������������������������������������������� film@bluesci.co.uk Podcast Editors: Ruby Coates & Simone Eizagirre.....................................podcast@bluesci.co.uk News Editors: Zak Lakota-Baldwin & Adiyant Lamba ������������������������������������ Lamba ������������������������������������news@bluesci.co.uk news@bluesci.co.uk Webmaster: Clifford Sia.............................................................................webmaster@bluesci.co.uk Communications Officer: Emma Soh............................................communications@bluesci.co.uk Art Editor: Pauline Kerekes.........................................................................art-editor@bluesci.co.uk

Contents

1

Issue 52: Michaelmas 2021 Issue Editor: Bethan Clark Managing Editor: Sarah Lindsay First Editors: Jin-Gyu Chang, Devahuti Chaliha, Jessica Corry, Grace Field, William Guo Shi Yu, Swastika Issar, Miriam Lisci, Maria Julia Maristany, Susanne Mesoy, Jake Rose, Bethan Clark, Andrew Smith, Hazel Walker, Bartek Witek, Gerogina Withers, Adriana Wolf, Alea Yang, Andrea Chlebikova, Tim Birkle Second editors: Mirlinda Ademi, Tim Birkle, Jin-Gyu Chang, Devahuti Chaliha, Siong Chen, William Guo Shi Yu, Swastika Issar, Adiyant Lamba, Miriam Lisci, Lauren McBurney, Hyojoo Park, Fran Seymour, Julie Tang, Georgina Withers, Tom Wilkins, Bingying Zhao, Laura Chilver, Natarnya Walcott-Burton, Denise Tran Art Editor: Pauline Kerekes News Team: Swastika Issar, Adiyant Lamba, Chloe Li, Tom Wilkins Reviews: Bethan Clark, Eleanor McCartney, Susanne Mesoy Feature Writers: Eugene Chia, Andrea Chlebikova, Chay Graham, Lizzie Knight, Zak Lakota-Baldwin, Lauren Lee, Chloe Li, Octavia Rooks, Donovan Sim Focus Team: Gianamar Giovanetti-Singh, Rory Kent, Swathi Nachiar Manivannan Pavilion: Daniel Lim Weird and Wonderful: Mirlinda Ademi, Sarah Lindsay, Denise Tran Production Team: Bethan Clark, Sarah Lindsay Caption Writer: Bethan Clark, Sarah Lindsay Copy Editors: Bethan Clark, Sarah Lindsay, Katie O’Flaherty, Hazel Walker Illustrators: Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn, Pauline Kerekes, Josh Langfield, Natalia Pacheco, Eva Pillai, Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova Cover Image: Leonora Martínez Núñez

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (unless marked by a ©, in which case the copyright remains with the original rights holder). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

2

Editorial

Science is Political We are taught in school that science is impartial and unprejudiced. Yet the fact that science has political influences and implications has always profoundly shaped research, and the past couple of years have brought this into focus more than ever. Sometimes in science communication there is a tendency to shy away from this, but it is becoming increasingly clear how important these conversations are for research to avoid perpetuating society’s biases.

In this issue, authors and artists have highlighted a wide-ranging selection of ways that science is, and historically has been, political (in the broad sense). How does society influence science and how does science influence society? What responsibilities do scientists have to tackle biases and inequity in research? What social forces have shaped how science is carried out today? How can science be better?

Beginning with a core principle of the scientific method, Zak Lakota-Baldwin discusses the impossibility of truly objective science. He argues that viewing this as a flaw to brush under the carpet damages the public’s relationship with research, and calls for more realistic and honest portrayals of science. For many people, this myth of objectivity extends to an idea of impartial choice of topics to research. Chay Graham takes aim at this idea by critiquing the relationship between social and political trends affecting LGBT+ people and recent research searching for ‘gay genes’. Taking a historical view, Eugene Chia considers science in Maoist China as a case study of how national political priorities shape scientific research. Moving onto the experiences of those studying and working in academic research, Lizzie Knight suggests an alternative metaphor for the notorious ‘leaky pipeline’ as a better fit for the phenomenon. During the pandemic, we have been subjected to catchphrases such as ‘following the science’, so Andrea Chlebikova points out the unavoidable role of values when making the leap from evidence to policy.

For this issue’s FOCUS article Gianamar Giovanetti-Singh, Rory Kent, and Swathi Nachiar Manivannan probe how and why the contributions of certain people to scientific achievements are erased. Through historical cases of lauded scientists, contemporary examples of research practices, and continuing patterns of bias and inequality, they argue that popular narratives about scientific achievements serve those who benefit from the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.

Given the far-reaching consequences of colonialism, there are many more aspects of its close relationship with Western science that are worth discussing. In the Pavilion, Daniel traces the colonialist roots of the Natural History Museum’s collections. Octavia Rooks highlights a historical example, exploring how colonialist efforts inspired and were aided by geological mapping. Following through to current health inequalities, Lauren Lee argues that more must be done to combat disparity in clinical trial representation. Turning to the question of disseminating scientific knowledge, Chloe Li explains that a simplistic view of a one-way flow of knowledge is insufficient. Finally, Donovan Sim details what is required of international politics for action to be taken on climate science.

It is, of course, impossible for a single magazine issue to address the full depth and breadth of this theme but I sincerely hope that this issue can light some sparks of curiosity, start some conversations, and spur some reflection and action. Science is political, and it is only by acknowledging this that we can engage with its consequences Bethan Clark Issue Editor #52

Michaelmas 2021

On the Cover The general artistic framework of this cover is a 3D illustration resembling a Globe sculpture made of wires. The hands gather ancient and indigenous knowledge, materialized by a series of different surrounding elements: watching birds, plants, insects, using mushrooms, looking at the stars. The hands are central in the picture to emphasize the critical influence of this ancient science in modern Western research approaches, both experimental and theoretical. Modern Western science is depicted with pills and antibodies contained in a shiny glass flask, and a reference to neuroscience and new emerging pathogens, with some targeted highlights on some of the features of this issue: a fragment of DNA in rainbow colors as a reference to the ‘gay genes’ article, and a ‘leaky pipeline’ using STEM as a plug. With the issue's central theme ‘Science is Political', communication is a vital consideration. I chose to use a symbol similar to the Nahuatl ideogram of dialogue/ language to represent better ways to convey science knowledge to the general public

Leonora Martínez Núñez Cover Artist

Michaelmas 2021

On the Cover

3

News

Check out www.bluesci.co.uk, our Facebook page, or @BlueSci on Twitter for regular science news and updates

Getting to the Heart of Covid-19

Patients with heart disease have a five times greater chance of dying from COVID-19 than their counterparts with healthy hearts.

Viral particles in autopsy cardiac tissue from COVID-19 patients suggest a negative impact on patients' hearts generally. In a paper from July this year, scientists from the University of Cambridge have started to tackle this, identifying two potentially cardioprotective drugs against COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, infects cells by using its ‘spike proteins’ to bind to ACE2, a protein present on many human cells. The study reports two drugs previously unused in this area which may have cardioprotective properties against SARS-CoV-2: DX600, which prevents the virus from entering the cell by blocking access to ACE2; and benztropine, a drug used to treat Parkinsonism, which prevents viral infection via a poorly understood mechanism. DX600 reduced SARS-CoV-2 infection of heart cells by around 40%, while benztropine reduced infection rates by 55.5%. These findings therefore represent a positive step towards developing new treatments for COVID-19. As expressed by Professor Anthony Davenport, one of the co-authors of the study, “we need to do further research on [DX600], but it could provide us with a new treatment to help reduce harm to the heart.” TW

Changing Climate Alters How Volcanic Eruptions Affect Our Planet Volcanic eruptions have long captured human

imagination as explosive transient phenomena. Yet, large eruptions can affect surface temperatures across the globe for over a year, by influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Eruptions spew great volumes of volcanic material such as ash and gaseous matter into the atmosphere. Depending on the magnitude of the eruption, haze created by them reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface on local or global scales. This can ultimately lead to a temporary cooling effect of as much as 0.5°C, lasting one or even several years. To put this in context, anthropogenic activities have resulted in a rise of a little over 1°C in global temperature since 1880.

New work from researchers in the Departments of Geography and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge suggests that our changing climate will dramatically impact the cooling effects of volcanoes. By theoretically modelling different climatic scenarios, researchers determined that, depending on the size of the explosion, the cooling effects of tropical volcanic eruptions will be differentially impacted.

For example, larger eruptions — those that cause volcanic plumes to reach higher layers of the atmosphere — were modelled to result in 15% more surface cooling as a result of climate change. This is because changes in circulation patterns and the vertical atmospheric profile result in changes to the optical properties of the plume (smaller particles) and the material rising even higher. This work highlights how climatic changes not only impact extreme weather events but can also alter effects of extreme geological phenomena on our planet. SI 4 News

AI Learns the Tell-tale Signs of Dementia

The staggering complexity of the human body has resulted in a shift in the medical landscape. Big data fields and machine learning are increasingly empowering a new, information-based medicine. Most recently, machine learning has infiltrated one of the most guarded mysteries of the mind’s pathologies — dementia.

Affecting 50 million worldwide, dementia causes the progressive loss of language, memory, problem-solving and thinking abilities. The early symptoms are subtle and the accumulation of abnormal protein structures in the brain associated with dementia takes years to occur, so diagnosis can take months or years. Trained machine algorithms, however, look elsewhere.

Machine learning models developed

by Professor Zoe Kourtzi’s team at the University of Cambridge and The Alan Turing Institute mine large-scale data on brain structure from neuroimaging scans of people living with Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease involves cognitive decline; however, this can range from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia. Using patterns of grey matter loss — a well-studied biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease — or performance scores on cognitive measurements, the algorithms could predict with over 80% accuracy whether patients will have stable or progressive MCI. Furthermore, an algorithm that combined these measurements could estimate the rate of future cognitive decline for individual patients.

“We’ve even been able to identify some patients who were not yet showing any symptoms, but went on to develop Alzheimer’s." Encouraged by the success of machine learning models, Professor Kourtzi is working to further identify different types of dementia by its characteristic patterns of grey matter loss. "In time, we hope to be able to identify patients as early as five to ten years before they show symptoms as part of a health check.”

Such early detection would open up new medical research opportunities, as well as allow preventative treatment and care that can make life-changing improvements to patients and their families. CL Artwork by Pauline Kerekes Michaelmas 2021

Reviews Letterbox Science - The Gurdon Institute

Letterbox Science is a public engagement project that

aims to connect the research work at the Gurdon Institute with people who are often left behind. Scientists tend to engage with people through digital and online resources, but this fails to reach the great number of individuals who do not have access to the internet. Digital exclusion is a major issue for older people, disabled people and those with financial barriers. This issue has been particularly evident during lockdown, when there has arguably never been a more important time for society to trust and connect with scientists.

The makers of Letterbox Science believe science should be influenced by, and indeed influence, all of society. To do this, the team collaborated with visual artist Ellie Shipman to create accessible postcards themed around the developmental biology interests of the Institute, such as cells, DNA, and mitochondria. The postcards are sent to schools, community centres and networks for older people, where participants are invited to think on the science, then reply to the researchers sharing what it means to them. The responses have been intelligent, deeply touching, and overwhelmingly creative.

Letterbox Science would love to hear from you if you know an organisation that might like to be involved. The project encourages researchers at Cambridge to consider the ‘public’ with a more nuanced understanding and help build trust in scientific research. EM

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Rebecca Skloot The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes the acquisition and distribution in the 1950s of the first immortal human cells to grow in a laboratory. Taken from Henrietta, an African-American woman, without her consent, these cancer cells completely revolutionised medical research The writing is vivid and evocative, and the descriptions of the science (Henrietta’s cancer treatment included temporarily sewing a tube of radium inside her cervix) are a striking reminder of both the pitfalls and progress of scientific research.

The scientists are a memorable cast, including a eugenicist researching organ transplantation to preserve the ‘superior white race’, scientists injecting prisoners with cancer cells to see if that would cause cancer (it did), and a doctor who patented and sold his patient’s cells for his own profit.

The book centres around Henrietta’s life and descendants, especially her daughter Deborah. Doctors and reporters would intermittently contact the family for blood samples or personal information, though the family gained little understanding of what had actually happened to Henrietta’s cells until decades later.

This gripping book gives a nuanced insight into the history of informed consent in medicine, researcher accountability, and the consequences of biological research unchecked by good policy. SM

The People in the Trees - Hanya Yanagihara Framed as a memoir written in prison by medical researcher Norton Perina — with interjections by his fawning colleague — this debut novel by by Hanya Yanagihara charts Perina’s rise to scientific success at the expense of a fictional Pacific island and its people. He basks in scientific fame until his abuse of his adopted children is uncovered. None of the above is a spoiler: the events are presented at the beginning as newspaper clippings, leaving the reader hooked on how it all played out.

In answering that question, Yanagihara paints an unflinching, unforgiving portrait of scientific egotism and neo-colonialism. All the more horrifying is the fact the plot is a fictionalised version of the life of Nobel Prize winner and convicted child molester Daniel Carleton Gajdusek — so true to source that I recommend reading about him after reading the book. Interwoven are echoes of other real research trends, such as anthropologists omitting observations that did not match their Western notions of sex and gender dynamics. Even the name of the book is reminiscent of classic anthropological works, The Forest People and The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull (critiqued by Cathryn Townsend in Aeon). With so many deeply important strands drawn together, People in the Trees is a stunningly compelling and devastating novel which is well worth a read. BC

Michaelmas 2021

Reviews 5

ehT htyM fo Obytiv tcej Zak Lakota-Baldwin questions whether objective science is possible, or even desirable

Good science is objective. This has long been the belief of scientists and non-scientists alike, at least since the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon outlined his vision of what we might now call the ‘scientific method’ in his influential 1620 work Novum Organum. Bacon argued that we should investigate nature through inductive reasoning, carefully observing the world while maintaining scepticism so as not to be misled by our own mental impediments. Over 250 years later, Charles Darwin described himself as having ‘worked on true Baconian principles and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale’. This view of science, as the disinterested accumulation of facts free from personal prejudice, has remained a persistent force through modern history — but how accurate, or even desirable, is it really?

Given that ‘objectivity’ is such a broad and nebulous term, there are many different things that people might mean when they claim that science is — or should be — objective.

For some, science is objective as long as it follows a rigorous empirical method which irons out idiosyncrasy and bias.

For others, objectivity is secured through the willingness of scientists to expose themselves to peer review and have their errors painstakingly scrutinized by anonymous experts. One prominent understanding of objectivity holds that scientists should refrain from making so-called ‘non-epistemic value judgements’ — in other words, they should simply focus on facts and truth, without letting social, political, or moral judgements influence their hypotheses.

This seemingly commonsensical maxim, often referred to as the ‘value-free ideal’, plays a significant role both in how scientists go about their work and in how the public perceives it. After all, it is the supposed objectivity of science that is responsible for widespread public trust in the findings of a discipline that most people do not really understand. We are generally happy to take scientists at their word, because we assume that non-epistemic values have not factored into their research. However, if you start looking for examples of truly ‘value-free’ science, things get a little more complicated.

To understand why, consider what happens when a scientist conducts some research and is faced with the choice to accept or reject their hypothesis. The scientist might be fairly confident in their findings, but certainty is impossible — there are no deductive means of determining whether hypotheses are true or false based on experimental evidence. This means that a scientist always runs the risk of accepting a false hypothesis, or rejecting a true one. Without any objective means of choosing, the scientist must make a judgement based on their relative distaste for false positives or false negatives. In simpler terms, the question is this: would you rather take a chance on a theory and be wrong, or err on the side of caution and miss out on something right?

This dilemma, which has received extensive attention from philosophers of science in recent decades, is known as the problem of inductive risk. The philosopher Heather Douglas has argued that choices such as these unavoidably require a turn to non-epistemic values, and indeed that scientists have a moral obligation to make these decisions themselves rather than leaving it up to policymakers, given the immense authority that scientists carry in our society and their important practical role in decision-making. This suggests that value-free science is neither a realistic model, nor even an appealing one.

If this seems somewhat abstract, then it might be helpful to consider the example of climate science, a field in which questions of objectivity and inductive risk have been actively debated and have real consequences. Climate scientists grapple with high levels of uncertainty and regularly face criticisms about a lack of objectivity. Despite uncertain findings and disputes over what to do about them, the stakes are so high and the need for action so urgent that scientists are often called on to provide testimony at a speed which outpaces the formation of consensus. This leads to a tension: climate scientists must report their findings in such a way that policymakers can act on them effectively and respond to the potentially devastating impacts of climate change, but they also need to be seen as

6

The Myth of Objectivity

Michaelmas 2021

objective and maintain their authority on matters of climate science so that policymakers will continue to consult them.

This requirement for climate scientists to appear objective can create problems, in cases where more emphatic endorsement of a particular policy or less convoluted jargon would be more helpful for policymakers and stakeholders. As the philosopher Torbjørn Gundersen found in his 2020 study interviewing a number of Norwegian climate scientists, many felt that their ‘hands were tied’ and they had to be overly cautious in their recommendations so as to be seen as objective. Reportedly, this led to the exclusion of potentially policy-relevant information from their reports. In addition, some expressed a feeling of personal conflict: although as scientists they recognised the need to be impartial and not take sides, they also felt a sense of responsibility to act as more vocal climate advocates, given their knowledge of the risks facing humanity.

A rigid adherence to unhelpful standards of objectivity might not be the best approach for scientists, but at present they are often constrained by public expectations. This can have seriously problematic consequences, when the public gets to peer behind the curtain and see how science really works. A famous example of this is the ‘Climategate’ controversy of 2009, in which hundreds of emails were leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Centre for Climate Change Research. Climate sceptics claimed that the emails revealed scientists to be engaging in improper, ‘non-scientific’ practices, such as the inference of causation from correlation or the refusal to include certain data sets in their analyses. However, in reality these were for the most part legitimate, respectable scientific practices. The problem stemmed from the public belief that scientists do not — and should not — usually act in this way.

Scandals such as these can be extremely harmful, leading people to withdraw their warranted trust in valid scientific claims when they learn of scientific practices which do not align with their expectations. As the philosopher Stephen John has argued, public trust in science can be fragile when it is based on a false ‘folk philosophy of science’, which assumes that scientists pursue the truth in an objective manner and are uninfluenced by non-epistemic values relating to social or political considerations.

A bit of disenchantment with the idea of science as objective might therefore be a good thing, both for scientists and for society. If we imagine that scientists are in the business of dispassionately investigating reality and uncovering facts in a value-free manner, we hold them Michaelmas 2021

to an impossibly high standard and are guaranteed to be disappointed when they inevitably fall short. In their book The Golem: What You Should Know about Science, the sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch argue that scientists are experts like any other, be they economists, weather forecasters or plumbers. Though none of these people are perfect, we do not expect them to be, and are still willing to rely on their expertise. As Collins and Pinch note, society is not rife with anti-plumbers because being anti-plumbing is not a choice available to us, and the alternative (‘plumbing as immaculately conceived’) is simply not realistic. If we can accept that the same is true for science, we might all be better off.

How could we achieve such a shift in the public perception of science and objectivity? As with so many things, the solution may begin with education — there are vast untapped opportunities to teach children about the role of science in society, and expose them to the messy reality of scientific practice. Science isn’t always objective in the way we think it is, but that’s part of what makes it so valuable Zak Lakota-Baldwin recently graduated from St John's College, having completed a master's in History and Philosophy of Science. Artwork by Josh Langfield.

The Myth of Objectivity 7

What Have We Learned by Searching for ‘Gay Genes’?

Chay Graham argues that research into the DNA ancestry of gay sex is really a study of the relationship between LGBT+ people, STEM, and profit An article published in Science two years ago aimed to estimate how likely someone might be to inherit same-sex behaviour from their biological parents, involving one of the largest data sets ever used to search for genes connected to samesex sexuality. The researchers and press claim that their findings are an important, progressive step in protecting LGBT+ people.

However, this study took fundamentally flawed approaches that endanger LGBT+ people.

The authors used nearly 500,000 DNA sequences from people in the UK, US, and Sweden, to perform a genome-wide association study (GWAS), a technique that links up genes with individual traits. Specifically, they scanned DNA sequences for any variation that correlated with the participant’s answer to the question ‘Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?’. Reducing queer sexuality to same-sex sex in majority white, Western countries is so lacking as a premise that their sweeping conclusions should be read with caution.

This study formulates itself as a response to the ‘gay gene’ hypothesis which grew out of a fluke result in the 90s that linked homosexuality to a single gene. This finding has never been replicated and has since been dismissed scientifically, but at the time gathered a lot of attention. This recent GWAS paper reconfirms that, like most behaviours, there are thousands of DNA sites that contribute to same-sex sex, rather than any one particular gene or cluster of genes. Furthermore, samesex sexuality is not fully explained by genetics — the authors estimate that genetic variation might contribute only 8-25% to the trait. By reconfirming that sexuality is genetically complex, the authors argue they are curtailing discrimination.

However, in today’s era of tech-driven surveillance, data like this will be (mis)used to identify LGBT+ people, with consequences ranging from scams and misinformation to social engineering and persecution by the state.

Shortly after the study was released, GenePlaza, a self-described ‘marketplace for genetic reports’, hosted an app called How Gay Are You? based on the study, with US entrepreneur Joel Bellenson charging $5.50 for quack diagnostic tests. This app was only removed after a month of campaigning by eminent LGBT+ geneticists and the rallying support of the science community.

Given that members of the consumer DNA-testing company 23andMe co-authored the study, it is hard to imagine they did not see this coming.

8 What Have We Learned by Searching For ‘Gay Genes’?

Queer participants in this research probably never imagined their data would be used this way. The use of UK Biobank data was publicly criticised since participants only consented to ‘health-related’ research. The authors claim their research fits this criterion since LGBT+ people are disproportionately unhealthy, but this is widely accepted as due to the impact of social oppression, not genetics, making this claim dubious.

Ethics committees overlooked the flaws of releasing this sensitive information, perhaps due to the history of queer medicalisation: homosexuality was only formally de-listed as a psychiatric condition some 20 years ago, and conversion therapy, transmedicalism, and corrective hormone therapies for bisexuality and asexuality in particular are all still booming.

Accessing resources and funding to test whether queerness is biomedically diagnosable whilst claiming it is for the health of communities is an example of pinkwashing: where institutes display an outwardly queer-friendly image in order to distract from the ways they harm people and work towards capitalist interests. The authors repeatedly bring up how they consulted LGBT+ people and commissioned a sociologist to write a perspective piece about their study in their defence, posturing behind a blessing of sensitivity whilst ignoring the material reality that their work will be used by an unfair society. These researchers opened the floodgates for harmful agents with this study, whether by ignorance or intent, by testing if someone’s DNA sequence could be used to predict same-sex sexuality.

Importantly, this had only an estimated 1% success rate.

The fear of data like this being used to surveil queer people is not unfounded; this GWAS research is part of a wider trend. A recent study at Stanford used machine learning to estimate whether over 6,000 people were gay or straight by classifying a single photo of their face lifted from a dating app.

The AI program outperformed humans easily: whilst people could guess with up to 61% accuracy, the algorithm was 81% accurate and could improve to 91% when given a few more images. The authors then began interrogating which facial features the protocol had identified, work reminiscent of racist, pseudoscientific craniology from the 20th century.

THE POP-SCI ‘PROBLEM’ WITH GAY EVOLUTION | Real-world consequences notwithstanding, the academic justification for researching gay genes is also flawed.

Homosexuality is popularly framed as an evolutionary paradox under the assumption that gay people would reproduce less Michaelmas 2021

and therefore not pass on their genes, ultimately leading to the self-annihilation of gay genes. This paradox is usually resolved by scenarios involving heterosexual saviours; perhaps gay genes wire people towards caring for the children of their heterosexual siblings and can therefore sustain their families’ gay genes (a Darwinian idea known as ‘kin selection’), as suggested in the YouTube video ‘Does Everybody Have A Gay Gene?’ by the popsci channel AsapSCIENCE. This embeds the real-world social hierarchy of straightness over gayness in a scientific model by deciding that gay genes exist for the benefit of straight people.

The obvious scientific flaw with this idea is that gay people are not sterile. Moreover, the idea only exists when bisexuality is ignored. Overlooking, minimising or outright denying the existence or importance of bisexuality, a phenomenon termed bisexual erasure, is something found in every area of society and evolutionary genetics is no exception. Even if we humour the suggestion that homosexuality reduces reproduction, there is still no reason to imagine that bisexuality would be any less reproductive than heterosexuality. The reality is that the available evidence simply shows that same-sex sexuality is likely to be evolutionarily ancient — a suggestion already put forth by the abundant evidence of bisexuality across the animal kingdom, and reinforced by this study showing that associated variant sites are distributed widely across the human genome.

Together, the unethical use of personal data, the study playing into exploitative capitalist interests, and the shaky theoretical Michaelmas 2021

foundations premised in bi-erasure render this study, and others like it, disappointing and dangerous.

This approach to the genetics of sexuality has been influenced by a conflict in liberal LGBT+ movements. The mainstream movement wants to insinuate that sexuality is determined, ‘born this way’ so to speak, and therefore not a choice — a defence against homophobic violence such as conversion therapy. Writing for the Guardian on this GWAS study, gay rights activist Owen Jones wrote ‘such research is surely irrelevant’ and that ‘believing that LGBTQ people choose their sexuality belongs in the same bin as flat-Earthism and climate emergency denial’.

Aside from the harms of a ‘born this way’ hypothesis to queer people’s self-concept and politics, in science the ‘born this way’ hypothesis enables studies like this to pinkwash their material outcomes: dressing up their aims as looking for the genes that lead to LGBT+ people being ‘born this way’ whilst creating ways to surveil and restrict LGBT+ people. Scientists interested in sexual biology must face up to the complexity of this situation before ploughing ahead with harmful research, and in broader society we can work towards justice and queer liberation regardless of whether our sexuality is decided by birth, environment, or choice Chay Graham is a first year PhD student studying Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, having just graduated from Natural Sciences at Cambridge. Artwork by Eva Pillai.

What Have We Learned by Searching for ‘Gay Genes’? 9

Science ‘Walks on Two Legs’ in Maoist China Eugene Chia explains how the popular narrative of science under Mao brushes over a complex relationship between science and politics How did science in communist states like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao Zedong (1949–1976) differ from non-communist states like the US? A narrative we may hear is that communism ‘damaged’ science, because in communist states, scientific knowledge was deeply entangled with the states’ Marxist ideologies. While communism had a profound influence on scientific practice in Maoist China, two criticisms of this simplistic argument are evident: firstly, ‘politically-shaped science’ was not unique to communist nations, and secondly, this communist science was not necessarily ‘bad’ science. When Mao rose to power, he sought to validate his political ideology through emphasising that science must ‘walk on two legs’. As a result, scientific policies in Maoist China became a manifestation of Maoist thought, and reflected the political and geopolitical context of the PRC in the Cold War. WALKING ON TWO LEGS | Inspired by the ideologies of Karl Marx and Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, Mao sought to achieve a communist utopia through having peasants seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie (the middle classes).

However, Mao’s vision was distinct because he believed that the workers should themselves drive this workers’ revolution, rather than be led by party elites. This produced contrasting visions of scientific practice — Lenin cultivated a group of scientific elites, whereas Mao sought to empower the peasants.

Hence, Mao proposed that science should ‘walk on two legs’ (liangtiaojiao zoulu fangzhen, 两条脚走路方针) to bolster economic development. Here, experts formed one leg, while peasants formed the other, so science involved combining the elite knowledge of the scientists with the folk knowledge of the villagers. Scientific policies in the PRC therefore focused on blurring the knowledge gap between scientists and peasants.

BALANCING THE LEGS | For science to ‘walk’ properly, the two legs had to be balanced. For this, peasants needed active engagement with science. This vision was enacted through Mao’s ‘open-door schooling’ movement (kaimen bianxue, 开 门辩学). Under this policy, researchers welcomed peasants into universities and research institutions, promoting increased contact between the scientists and the peasants.

Additionally, scientific journals were also used to present science to the masses in digestible forms. The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP)’s Fossils magazine is an example. Fossils was designed for the peasants’ consumption, and they were further encouraged to contribute 10 Science ‘Walks on Two Legs’

articles to the magazine, making it a platform for knowledge exchange between scientists and peasants.

In Fossils, peasants scrutinised the arguments of IVPP scientists using their own scientific understanding that was shaped by Maoist thought. In one article, IVPP scientist Zhou Guoxing, addressed the question, ‘Can modern apes become human?’ Zhou argued that because human evolution occurred under conditions that no longer existed, modern apes could not evolve into humans.

To some peasants, Zhou’s evocation of the external environment undermined a key principle of Maoist thought: that labour was what made humans a distinct species. Therefore, his article triggered debates among peasants and scientists regarding ideas of human evolution.

Through these debates, fossils promoted intellectual equality between peasants and scientists, and

encouraged peasants to participate actively in the production of scientific knowledge.

MOVING TOGETHER | ‘Walking on two legs’ also meant that scientific knowledge in the PRC combined Western science with folk knowledge.

Seismology provides an insightful example. Peasants had superstitiously believed that earthquakes indicated the end of a political regime. Given the frequent earthquakes in the PRC, Mao valued seismology as a tool to protect his political power. To educate peasants on the science of earthquakes, Chinese seismologists would conduct public exhibitions Michaelmas 2021

in villages. Additionally, to enable peasants’ participation, Chinese seismologists also educated them on anomalous animal behaviours that could indicate an imminent earthquake. This collaboration with villagers was valuable as they were most sensitive to abnormal changes in the natural environment.

For instance, just before the 1975 Haicheng earthquake, farmers were puzzled to see snakes burrowing out of their hibernation holes during winter, only to freeze to death.

Following government protocol, these findings were reported to the local Office of Earthquakes. Scientists in the Office then drew connections between these observations and an imminent earthquake, and informed authorities to evacuate the village.

Workers were also vital in these ‘collective monitoring’ efforts.

For example, one account tells of workers in a tofu factory reporting that they could not make tofu on the eve of an earthquake, because the water

to engage with science, they could improve their own practices without state assistance. This model of ‘self-reliant science’ was exported to developing nations during the Cold War by the PRC government, demonstrating science’s utility as a tool for geopolitical influence. For instance, China sent experts to West Africa to show villagers how they could use animal manure as fertiliser. In another example, the TAZARA Railway which linked Tanzania and Zambia was built with China’s assistance and focused on training the skills of African workers, thereby promoting their self-reliance. Maoist China’s ‘self-reliant science’ appealed to the governments of the global South, as it reduced the citizens’ dependence on the government for resources and stoked anti-imperialist sentiments.

The geopolitical utility of ‘self-reliant science’ became pertinent after the Sino-Soviet split around 1960, which occurred after Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev (1953-1964) attempted to reverse the policies of Mao’s close ally, Joseph Stalin (Khruschev’s predecessor). With the PRC now aligned with neither the USSR nor the US, it sought to establish itself as an alternative superpower. Providing developing nations with a distinctively Chinese model of scientific development to progress towards economic prosperity, could bring these nations into the PRC’s sphere of influence. Parading ‘walking on two legs’ as a hallmark of socialist China enabled the PRC’s unique scientific model to become a weapon to win the Cold War power struggle.

CONCLUSION | What should we make out of this case study of science in Maoist China? Crucially, science is never done in a social or political vacuum. Because science and scientists are socially and politically situated, they embody specific social and political values. Unlike any other country in the Cold War, the citizen-scientist collaborations in the PRC specifically emphasised the citizen as an intellectual equal, and peasants became key stakeholders in producing and practicing science in Maoist China.

from their well was different. These observations aligned with the scientists’ beliefs that imminent earthquakes would change the chemistry of underground water.

Evidently, seismology in the PRC was a collaborative effort — peasants made macroscopic observations, and scientists legitimised these observations to save the peasants’ lives.

While Maoist science at times had disastrous consequences, Mao’s regime also produced a unique model which appreciated the ways in which modern ‘Western’ science could be combined with folk knowledge. Contrary to popular belief, communism could, and did, produce productive forms of scientific knowledge and practice. Recognising this can be a challenge given the vilification of communism in the Western world during the Cold War. Therefore, that ‘science is political’ is a given. It is more insightful to ask instead, ‘how is science political?’, so that we can discern the tacit political influences in scientific practice Eugene Chia recently graduated in History and Philosophy of Science from Fitzwilliam College. Artwork by Josh Langfield.

EXPORTING THE MODEL | ‘Walking on two legs’ generated a unique model of ‘self-reliant science’. By empowering peasants Michaelmas 2021

Science ‘Walks on Two Legs’ 11

The ‘Leaky Pipeline’: Is Diverse Representation in STEM a Pipe Dream?

Lizzie Knight discusses diversity in STEM and how the metaphor itself might perpetuate problems

Most people studying a STEM subject have probably heard of the ‘leaky pipeline’. This metaphor describes how women and people from minority groups are progressively lost from STEM subjects at each stage of the educational system. However, recent criticism has argued that this metaphor may actually perpetuate the very dilemma it is trying to address. Why do people leave STEM fields, and what are the problems with the pipeline metaphor? This article will discuss these issues, as well as some alternative metaphors and intervention strategies proposed to ‘plug the leaks’.

CONSTRUCTING THE PIPELINE | The concept of a ‘STEM pipeline’ first emerged in education policy in the 1970s, when Western countries became concerned about the number of qualified scientific professionals needed to keep pace with the technological advancements of other geopolitical powers. The metaphor describes how people can be funnelled through an education system which begins at primary school, progresses to university, and eventually drops them into a STEM career.

In later decades, however, it became obvious that not everyone who enters the pipeline makes it out the other end. In particular, women and people from minority groups become progressively under-represented in STEM fields as they move through the pipeline. For example, while the number of male and female students studying science at GCSE level is roughly equal, girls make up only 20% of students studying A Level Physics. Recent surveys by the Royal Society show that only 9% of STEM professors in the UK are female, and — shockingly — less than 0.1% of STEM professors are Black. While we focus here on barriers faced by women and ethnic minorities, there is also significant under-representation of people with disabilities, those who identify as LGBTQIA+, and those from low socio-economic backgrounds. Thus, the pipeline grows smaller and smaller, leaking people at every junction, eventually releasing a small trickle of people into a STEM career.

WHEN AND WHERE ARE THE LEAKS? | Do women and those from minority groups choose not to pursue a STEM career, or are they actively excluded from the system? As with most equality, diversity, and inclusivity issues, it is a bit of both. In early childhood, girls and boys are equally likely to be interested in science. In fact, 12

The ‘Leaky Pipeline’

girls routinely outperform boys in science GCSEs and A Levels. But interest and ability do not always translate into the belief that one can become a scientist. Children are often (wrongfully) taught that a true scientist must be ‘brilliant’, a ‘genius’. However, a study from NYU found that by the age of seven, girls are far less likely than boys to describe themselves or other girls as brilliant, and therefore do not see themselves as smart enough to pursue a STEM career. These misconceptions are clearly amplified by the Western media: compare the fame and recognition of prominent white male scientists like Brian Cox and David Attenborough to the brilliant but less famous Hannah Fry, Chris Jackson, and Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

For those who choose to study science at university, studies have repeatedly shown that if students do not see themselves represented at higher levels of academia, they are much less likely to continue in that field — we previously noted the lack of diversity in UK university faculty, which is echoed in most Western countries. Further barriers to progression in academia include the systematic bias against women in the success of grant applications, citation metrics, and recommendation letters: in one study of applicants for Earth Science positions at a US university, female applicants were only half as likely to receive ‘excellent’ recommendation letters versus ‘good’ letters, compared to male applicants.

HOW DO WE FIX THE LEAKS? | To recruit and retain women and other minority groups in STEM subjects, we should begin early in a child’s education, engaging the students in science by forming connections between the classroom, universities, and community organisations. A great example of this is Project Exploration in Chicago, a non-profit which targets Black and Latino secondary school students, particularly girls. Scientists run activities related to their work and share personal stories while building relationships with the students. The program provides extra-curricular engagement for the students and raises awareness of different science subjects and careers. A recent review found that 60% of Project Exploration’s alumni who graduated from university had a degree in a STEM-related field, compared to the US national average of 20%.

To retain under-represented groups in tertiary education and beyond, we need to create an environment in which everyone feels welcome, supported, and able to perform Michaelmas 2021

to the best of their abilities. One way to retain minoritised undergraduate and postgraduate students is to involve them in mentoring or peer network programs, which provide support structures while remaining separate from the formal hierarchy of academic research. For those at faculty level, universities must accommodate major life events by providing adequate maternity leave, part-time work, and opportunities to re-enter the academic community after pursuing other ventures.

If educational entities wish to diversify their STEM populations then they must also consider intervention as an intersectional issue: someone can have multiple identities (ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, for example) which place them in the minority. A recent report from Texas A&M University suggests that to create a better working environment for women of colour in STEM faculties, universities should enforce mandatory implicit bias training for all staff, diversify their hiring committees, and undertake targeted hiring of women of colour.

educational system which can be inclusive, responsive, and representative of transient modern careers.

There have been many great achievements in increasing representation in STEM over the last few decades: for example, female students now outnumber male students taking science subjects at A Level. But ultimately, to create a STEM environment which is inclusive and supportive of everyone, we must reconsider how we view the STEM educational system and workforce. Promoting a narrow and rigid pipeline will only continue to exclude the diversity of thought and experience which is so necessary for the advancement of science Lizzie Knight is a 2nd-year PhD student in Earth Sciences at Fitzwilliam College. Artwork by Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn.

THE PERPETUATING PIPELINE | The concept of the leaky pipeline has helped to highlight under-representation in STEM fields, but recent commentary has suggested that this metaphor may actually do more harm than good. For a start, the pipeline perpetuates the concept of a narrow and linear educational pathway, which excludes some and accelerates the careers of others. If people do not enter the STEM pipeline in childhood, should that stop them from pursuing a STEM career later in life? Secondly, the nature of modern STEM education and careers is much broader than it was in the 1970s. A 2014 study found that the trajectory expected by the pipeline (studying science at school, undergraduate, and often postgraduate level) failed to describe the experience for nearly half of those who became scientists in the US. Another issue is that anyone who “leaks” from the pipeline is seen to have been failed by the system. Angela Merkel obtained a doctorate in quantum chemistry before choosing to enter politics: would she be considered a failure of the STEM pipeline?

An alternative analogy, offered by a collective of US Earth Science academics, is to imagine the STEM educational system as a braided river. In nature, a braided river is a wide, shallow system made of interwoven and changeable channels. Over time, the movement of water changes the shape of the channels and supports ecosystems. Imagining the STEM system as a braided river shows us that there are multiple changeable pathways to a career, with unusual entry points, evolving career goals, and the opportunity to change pace and direction. This metaphor represents an alternative Michaelmas 2021

The ‘Leaky Pipeline’

13

Following the Science What do we mean by evidence-based decision making? Andrea Chlebikova misconceptions about the phrase We have heard this mantra, or its reincarnation in the form of ‘data not dates’, since the start of the pandemic. But this is not the first time that decision makers have sought to portray their approaches as objective in order to distance themselves from their judgement calls. Whenever you hear the term ‘evidence-based’, it is worth remembering that evidence in isolation never calls the shots. Most of us remember having to make a difficult decision, weighing up the pros and cons of several options. We may have tried to perform an objective analysis, but our subjective judgement inevitably contributes.

Even if we attempt entirely rational decision making, our set of values, how we weigh them up against each other and our attitude to risk need to feature in the consideration. Worse, these inputs are affected by how a given decision question is framed.

Say you are about to purchase a laptop and are weighing up whether to also buy insurance for it. You know you will most likely never have to make a claim, but think about the consequences of the laptop breaking at a crucial point in time when you would need a quick replacement. The price tag per month seems relatively low for additional peace of mind, but if you end up not needing it, you could have saved that money. How would your choice be affected if the insurance product was already selected by default at check-out, and you had to opt out rather than opt in? It is interesting that we often consider purchasing insurance a responsible action and purchasing a lottery ticket an irresponsible one when they both have an expected value that is a loss. For gadget insurance, if you are not prone to losing or breaking items and have the means to replace them if necessary (a condition unfortunately likely to reinforce existing inequalities), you may be better off self-insuring. But when more is at stake relative to what an individual can readily afford, loss aversion seems a sensible bias and purchasing insurance can save us from life-changing debt or worse, even if most people without insurance end up lucky most of the time. Once we know how events unfold, it can be hard to feel good about perfectly reasonable decisions which carefully considered the probabilities of future events and their consequences, but turned out to be poor choices in the scenario that materialised. It is also easy to retrospectively rationalise decisions that were careless but lucky.

QUANTITY, QUALITY AND INEQUALITIES | Moral dilemmas are commonly framed as trolley problems.

In one classic example, five people are tied to some train tracks, about to be hit and killed by an approaching trolley. You are given the option of pulling a lever and diverting the trolley 14 Following the Science

tackles

onto a side track containing only one person. We can ponder hypotheticals, but are in fact constantly faced with real-life trolley problems. They are, however, usually complicated further by containing many different side tracks and by the outcomes being uncertain (as opposed to the certain death of 1 or 5 people respectively). This is where scientific evidence can often come in: narrowing down the uncertainties and giving us, if certainty is impossible, at least quantitative probability estimates for what lies on the different tracks. Unfortunately, estimates generated by different research teams’ methodologies sometimes do not agree. Confidence intervals may not overlap, as sources of uncertainty are not always comprehensively accounted for, and the true error bars are often wider. Even where consensus exists, science itself still cannot make the decision of which, if any, levers to pull: ‘following the science’ is meaningless.

The roots of evidence-based practice can be found in evidence-based medicine. It might seem relatively simple to set objective values here: the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) which assesses medical interventions in the UK uses Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) when comparing the cost effectiveness of different treatments.

However, it is not easy to weigh the net benefits to some patients with the side effects experienced by others. There is also the opportunity cost of treatments: the resources could instead be spent on other interventions, helping people with other conditions, preventative care, or beneficial projects in other parts of society. Some have argued that medicalisation has hindered addressing social issues such as poverty that are sometimes the root cause of poor health by turning them into medical problems suffered by individuals.

NO EVIDENCE IS BIAS-FREE | Personalised approaches would ideally avoid administering a treatment to people for whom the harm of side effects outweighs the positives, while still allowing those overall helped by a treatment to benefit from it. Currently, this is tricky: the standard way of assessing the efficacy of treatments is a randomised, controlled trial (RCT), which compares the outcomes of groups, not individuals. RCTs will not generally show us whether some people got worse due to the treatment if a larger number got better. Stratification may be possible if sample sizes are large enough to see significant differences for subgroups, as has happened with the AstraZeneca vaccine recommendation depending on age. However, this updated advice only arose during real-life use, after the vaccine was administered to millions of people. RCTs are also expensive to run on Michaelmas 2021

the scales required, which means that potentially successful, innovative treatments with insufficient funding behind them are automatically ruled out. This highlights one of the challenges to objectivity of an evidence base requirement, as funding provision will be biased towards historically successful approaches and those backed by industry due to having potential for making profit. That leaves other potential approaches to slip through the net, unable to meet the necessary evidence base. Another problem is that the standards of evidence required can be gamed: p-hacking to achieve ‘significant’ outcomes is a known issue.

Furthermore, most meaningful outcomes are not assessable on short timescales, so proxies are commonly substituted without much scrutiny, for example reporting blood pressures rather than cardiovascular event incidence.

Reducing people’s conditions to a small number of measurements (or self-assessments) hides a lot of complexity in all but the simplest of cases. It presents a particular challenge when it comes to mental health, with each individual’s life events and experiences that shaped their mental state being different, and each client-therapist relationship being unique.

There should be no surprise that treatments with the same name may therefore look very different in practice, and will produce different outcomes. Ideally, everyone would be given a chance to explore and find a treatment that works well for them, but the funding model often favours approaches that are overall most cost-effective when applied to the average person rather than being individualised.

outcomes, but currently lies outside the Overton window. Any measures taken or not taken adversely affect some sections of society more than others, and it is up to politicians to weigh up the consequences. An additional complication is the timescale, as conflicts arise when considering short-, medium- or longterm outcomes in turn. This is readily apparent when we look at environmental problems such as climate change, where shortterm priorities have been slowing down progress even though the consequences for future generations are severe. It is also common to see sticking plaster solutions to social problems rather than addressing the root causes: prioritising long-term outcomes carries few rewards for politicians looking to get re-elected within a few years.

Returning to the trolley problem, what assumptions did you intuitively make about how likely it is for different people to end up on the various tracks? Always diverting to kill just one person may be the (short-term!) utilitarian answer, but given existing inequalities, it may not be an egalitarian one Andrea Chlebikova is a final year PhD student affiliated with St Catharine’s College, studying atmospheric chemistry. Artwork by Eva Pillai.

When it comes to social and political interventions, personalising incentives and penalties might also be optimal for

Michaelmas 2021

Following the Science 15

16 Focus

Michaelmas 2021

Hidden Figures Gianamar Giovanetti-Singh, Rory Kent, and Swathi Nachiar Manivannan discuss the erasure of scientific labour and the hope of decolonisation Who produces scientific knowledge? Popular science narratives often tell sensational stories of scientific discovery that focus on a surprisingly narrow cast of characters. We hear a lot about the Newtons, the Darwins, the Cricks and Watsons — but far less about the hidden figures who made their achievements possible.

MIND OVER MATTER? | Historians and, increasingly, philosophers of science have developed something close to a consensus around the view that scientific knowledge cannot be (or, at the very least, has not in fact been) produced without the interactions of various sorts of technical experts from a diversity of professional or cultural groups.

Perhaps the most familiar case of the appropriation and miscrediting of scientific knowledge is the attribution of the ‘discovery’ of the structure of DNA to Francis Crick and James Watson, erasing vital contributions made by Rosalind Franklin to our understanding of the molecule’s structure. Myths about who legitimately produces scientific knowledge, which suppress the important work of marginalised people, often have devastating knock-on effects for these groups’ representation in the sciences.

The Institute of Physics revealed that 44% of schools in Britain didn’t have any girls who went on to study physics at A-Level in 2018, and there were only 85 Black first-year physics undergraduates in British universities in 2016.

The world is, after all, abundant and complex, and no single individual or cultural group has access to the prerequisite skills and knowledge to investigate it in its entirety. However, we can push some of these thoughts even further by asking not only whose work is foregrounded in the history of science, but what kinds of work have been interpreted as more or less central to scientific knowledge production; and we can ask how these two questions relate to one another. As in the case of Franklin’s crystallographic contributions to the discovery of the double helix, scientific labour is sometimes differentiated according to whether it is ‘intellectual’ or ‘manual’ — and, similarly, whether it is ‘theoretical’ or ‘experimental’, ‘cognitive’ or ‘embodied’, ‘conceptual’ or ‘practical’ — with the latter often getting assigned a lower centrality in our narratives of science.

The erasure of manual labour from scientific narratives commingles with the marginalisation of women and racialised people.

The history of science abounds with cases where the credit for producing knowledge has been misattributed, often contributing to pre-existing gender and racial injustices. But the problem goes deeper than the important issue of women and minority representation in the sciences.

Certain scientific labourers — such as lab technicians, factory workers who produce scientific instrumentation, and so-called “citizen scientist” data processors — many of whom are also marginalised by virtue of their race, gender, and class positions, have historically and contemporarily been ignored as legitimate participants in scientific activities and breakthroughs. This FOCUS article probes how and why certain people have had their contributions to the sciences erased and asks how we can start addressing the perpetuation of structural inequalities in and by the sciences.

HIDDEN HISTORIES | Let’s begin with one of modern science’s loftiest titans, Isaac Newton. Born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire in 1643, Newton joined Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661 as an undergraduate, a college to which he was elected a fellow in October 1667. Two years later, he became the master of Trinity, and in 1687 he published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which famously contained his laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation.

Racialisation In this article we use the term ‘racialised’ rather than ‘people of colour’ or ‘ethnic minorities.’ We do so because racialisation captures the process by which certain people were characterised as deviating from whiteness, which was considered the ‘norm.’

Scientific discoveries or practices We refer to scientific “practices” rather than to ‘discoveries’ in this article. This is because we can all agree that people involved in doing science are practising — they perform manual and intellectual labour. Discoveries, instead, are trickier to pin down. Throughout the history of the sciences, certain events, experiments, and episodes have been defined by society as ‘discoveries’ only after they take place.

Michaelmas 2021

Focus 17

Newton is an excellent example of how popular myths about science take shape; the natural philosopher is widely depicted as having been a cloistered, isolated genius, who unravelled the deepest mysteries of the universe from his study in Trinity College and from the famous apple orchard at his family’s manor in Lincolnshire. He didn’t travel much during his life, spending most of his time between Cambridge and London, where in 1699 he became Master of the Royal Mint and in 1703 was made President of the Royal Society. Despite carrying the name ‘universal’ gravitation, Newton’s physics appears, at first sight, to be exclusively English by origin, the product of a secluded and brilliant mind.

However, looking more closely at how Newton compiled the data to formulate his theory, we see just how dependent the natural philosopher was on Europe’s world-spanning colonial networks. As historian of science Simon Schaffer has shown, far from being a cloistered individual, Newton was situated in an array of different global networks, all of which fed crucial data that shaped his scientific work. For instance, measurements of the period of a pendulum made at different points on the Earth’s surface, which Newton used to put together his theory, took place at important nexuses in the Atlantic slave triangle, the trading route between Europe, the Americas and west Africa.

Were it not for the brutal slave trade, in whose key ports of Cayenne and Gorée data were collected, often by French travellers piggybacking on European slave-port networks, Newton’s theory may not have taken shape the way it did.

Thus, how ‘English’ or ‘Newtonian’ can we truly call the theory presented in the Principia? Despite bearing the natural philosopher’s name, Newton’s theories relied on a wealth of painstakingly-made observations, performed and reported by people operating far beyond the shores of the British Isles, who likely would not have found themselves there were it not for the transatlantic slave trade. It is important to stress, however, that the purpose of this case study is not to suggest that the development of Newton’s theories in any way justifies the existence of the transatlantic slave trade. On the authors’ views, there is no justifying the brutalisation, dehumanisation and massmurder engendered by slave trades. What we want to say is that the idea that the modern sciences owe their existence disproportionately to a single, English natural philosopher serves to obscure its deeply social and global origins; further, as we discuss below, it obscures the entanglement between modern sciences and colonial violence.

Another practice that would likely never have taken hold in the west without the transatlantic slave trade is the cultivation of rice in the Americas — an industry worth over 3 billion USD in 2020. In popular myths, the mastery of industrial-scale agriculture, like other modern sciences, is widely associated with the development of techniques traditionally attributed to Europeans, which supposedly ‘diffused’ to the rest of the world. However, as 18 Focus

geographer Judith Carney demonstrated in 2001, rather than rice cultivation having been “brought” to west Africa

by Portuguese sailors, there existed a long and continuous tradition of rice agriculture in the continent, mastered by generations by African women and transmitted orally and through embodied practice. Indeed, as Carney has shown, enslaved African women brought both the raw materials and technical expertise with them to the Carolinas in America — a fact acknowledged by slave owners who would pay as much for enslaved women who were agricultural experts as they would for enslaved men.

Such stories point to the indelibly global and colonial character of the sciences; people from vastly diverse cultural and geographical backgrounds, often brought together under conditions of extreme domination and coercion, exchanged practices and thus generated new scientific knowledge — the scientific knowledge that helped shape and was shaped by the emergent modern world. The examples of such encounters go on and on; historian of science Kapil Raj has explained how

between 1650 and 1900, South Asians were active albeit marginalised participants in the making of a vast range of modern scientific disciplines. For example, he has demonstrated that many of the technical practices still used in cartography and land surveying today were jointly developed by Indian travellers and surveyors and British colonial administrators, albeit with a deeply unequal relationship.

We can see how this erasure of the manual labour involved in scientific knowledge production works in some concrete cases. As alluded to in the introduction, a betterknown case of the appropriation of scientific credit is the debate over who ‘discovered’ the structure of DNA. A blue plaque commemorating Crick and Watson, who ‘announced their discovery of how DNA carries genetic information’ was unveiled outside the Eagle pub in April 2003 by Watson (who, it is worth noting, has a record of making deeply racist and misogynistic comments about women and racialised peoples’ cognitive abilities).

Philosopher of science Michelle Gibbons has explained that the retrospective crediting of DNA’s ‘discovery’ to Crick and Watson sheds an important light on how popular science narratives link ‘scientific breakthroughs’ to supposedly detached, immaterial cognitive leaps, rather than to the actual, material work that went in to generate knowledge. These stories about how science works portray discoveries as ‘Eureka!’ moments, not that differently from the point in a whodunnit when something clicks in the detective’s mind and everything falls into place.

Franklin was an X-ray crystallographer working on imaging DNA at the King’s College London lab led by Maurice Wilkins, a close friend of Crick and Watson.

Without her consent, Wilkins showed Crick and Watson an image — ‘Photo 51’ — showing what the pair later announced was DNA’s double helix structure, produced

by Franklin and her assistant graduate student, Raymond Gosling. When Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, neither Franklin nor Gosling were acknowledged as contributors to the scientific understanding of DNA. Whether or not Franklin and Gosling’s image was ‘necessary’ for Crick and Watson’s determination of DNA’s structure is not the point.

Rather, their work was appropriated, marginalised, and not credited; in part as a result of structural and individual misogyny in the sciences (Watson famously commented that ‘the best place for a feminist was in another person’s lab’) and also as a consequence of the consistent and classist privileging of ‘intellectual’ processes over ‘manual’ practices in popular narratives of science (of course, producing crystollographic photographs is a deeply intellectual practice, but the mythical binary still holds in the popular imaginary).

MAKING THE MODERN SCIENCES | The recent documentary Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, directed by historian and philosopher of science Peter Galison, highlights just to what extent practicing the sciences is a messy, collaborative endeavour. Following a team of astronomers working on the Event Horizon Telescope project — an effort to capture the first image of a black hole — at the Large Millimeter Telescope in the Sierra Negra in Mexico, Galison’s film reveals how scientists from entirely different scholarly cultures had to come together at a conference in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and decide on a final answer regarding what the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M85 looked like. As the documentary illustrates, there was disagreement, there was conflict, and scientists’ credibility was up for grabs at the event. Nonetheless, the diverse teams eventually settled on an image, which on 10th April 2019 did the rounds of the world’s media. The documentary’s authentic look into how scientific ‘discoveries’ are made — entailing messy moments where consensus is remarkably rare — sheds light on how far removed the myth of scientific individualism driving innovation is from reality.

Focus 19

Visualisation of international scientific collaborations. Note the Global North's dominance in the collaborations. The ratio of the lengths of each arrow correspond to the number of contributors from each state to the collaboration.

Source: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/collaboration-graph The preceding historical case-studies have, we hope, served to show that the received, popular myths about the origins of modern scientific discoveries erase the contributions of socially marginalised experts and obscure the sense in which scientific activity is irreducibly global and social. We can see a more intense process of the ‘invisibilisation’ of manual labour in our current moment as well, when we consider the contemporary global supply chains involved in modern scientific instrument manufacturing and operation. Almost all modern scientific research relies on such instruments at some stage in the experimental and observational processes (just as Galileo relied on the telescope). By extension, modern scientific research cannot operate without the maintenance of global supply chains for the commodities required in the manufacture and maintenance of instruments. To take one example: as is by now rather well known, lithium ion batteries are rechargeable batteries that are almost ubiquitous in their uses in electrical devices, from smartphones and solar panels to emergency medical equipment and, indeed, many scientific instruments. It is by no means a stretch to say, then, that much of the world’s contemporary research activity would be impossible without the manual labour of various workers acting within the supply chains for lithium ion batteries — not just those 20 Focus

working in the extraction and manufacturing processes, but also those in the logistics sector such as truck drivers, dock workers and administrators.

THE SPECTRE OF COLONIALISM | We can now turn to the following questions: who benefits from the popular narratives of science? Who benefits from a story of the history of science as the punctuated activity of individual geniuses (most of them wealthy European men) and a contemporary picture of scientific research in which millions of workers are made invisible?

Our hypothesis, alluded to throughout the article, is that the production of scientific knowledge is bound up with imperialism and the contemporary legacies of colonialism, and as such the beneficiaries of these myths are the same beneficiaries of those unjust systems. Though scientific knowledge is intended to be universally valid, its history is mythologised primarily through the white, European and patriarchal lens. The lack of credit afforded to workers as contributors to scientific knowledge, especially those exploited by imperialist arrangements, is not only inaccurate as the historical record of colonialism goes, but it also continues to sustain the perpetuation of misogynistic and racist prejudices and, by extension, underrepresentation Michaelmas 2021

of women and racialised groups in the sciences today. For example, AI technologies such as facial recognition are still heavily being trained on white faces and features, and there are pre-existing biases in the datasets and algorithms used to train such technologies. This has resulted in increased error rates when detecting racialised people, especially Black people, and a higher chance of misidentifying them as criminals. Additionally, Black people have been pathologised by Europeans at least as far back as the midseventeenth century, when the Italian physician Marcello Malpighi claimed to have discovered, by dissecting an African man, that Black people had a layer of dark mucus under their skins.

While many understand ‘official’ colonialism to have ended (though much of it continues in the form of overseas territories), the power imbalances between countries of the Global North and South still remain prevalent and persistent, and this is evident in the sciences. Ethnic minorities are often disproportionately represented in the upper echelons, and exploited economies are still perceived as dependent on financial aid and scientific expertise from the West.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? | Bringing all of the above together, it is clear that, as a bare minimum, some deep reflection in the sciences needs to take place. In our contemporary moment, there are deeply entrenched biases, prejudices and unjust power dynamics in the sciences that need to be unlearned, such that the equal participation and representation of women, racialised people and other marginalised groups can be addressed. To that end, our popular understanding of the history of science, its social, global, and indeed colonial character, must be brought to the fore. Is this sufficient to achieve ‘decolonisation’ in the sciences, as some have called for? At present, there is a lot of debate over how scientific decolonisation can and should be carried out, but current discourse can be broadly split into two camps.

On one view, decolonisation in the sciences might take the form of ‘Science must fall’. Inspired by the #RhodesMustFall campaign, this was first proposed by students at the University of Cape Town. The thought process behind ‘Science must fall’ is that current scientific knowledge is an entirely Western and thereby colonial entity, a product of Western modernity.

A major challenge to this approach, however, is that the world is already struggling with movements that mobilise distrust towards scientific knowledge, which are becoming increasingly vocal all over the world — and most of these movements are far from anti-colonial in their practice!

While the institution of science is heavily shaped by colonialism and imperialism, the scientific knowledge we have accrued thus far is of great value to human society today. This is especially so, when considering that one of the most disruptive pandemics in history is far from being Michaelmas 2021

completely over, and anthropogenic climate change is increasingly becoming a threat that we cannot avoid; both of which disproportionately endanger communities in the Global South. Yet, as the past few years, and in particular the past year, have shown, anti-vaccination and climate change non-believers have grown in number and become more vocal, casting doubt on the validity of empirical data conducted over the years. Therefore, an abolitionist movement like ‘Science must fall’ runs the risk of being hijacked by nationalists, religious fundamentalists, and other rightwing movements, who might use the pretext of ‘decolonisation’ to push forth their own reactionary agenda.

Others have proposed another way to decolonise the sciences; rather than abolishing existing scientific institutions and reconstructing them from scratch, this process would be relatively slower and involve a step-by-step reformation of these institutions into more cosmopolitan and inclusive ones.

Several academics and academic institutions have taken steps in this direction of decolonisation, particularly in wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained huge momentum globally last year. Diversity statements have been issued, campaigns highlighting women and racialised individuals in STEM have been initiated, and funding has been allocated to diversity and inclusion efforts and racialised academics. However, there is an underlying concern that most of the efforts undertaken thus far may be rather tokenistic in nature, and that little is being done to address deeper, structural, and material issues. For if the sciences are to be successfully decolonised, it cannot be achieved by simply removing a statue or a plaque, or by stating that a prominent scientist was also complicit in colonialism and imperialism.

SCIENCE AT THE CROSSROADS | Science is at a crossroads. On one hand, in this post-truth era, scientists increasingly find themselves having to defend against scientific misinformation and pseudoscience. Yet, at the same time, it is evident that science cannot simply be assumed to be a bastion of objectivity and universality when it is still dominated by Eurocentric narratives and biases shaped by imperialism and colonialism. Finding the right way to reform the sciences is difficult and these solutions cannot be implemented instantly. But what is clear is this: that the sciences, now more than ever, need to finally reckon with their past, so that their present and future can be better informed Gianamar Giovanetti-Singh is a third-year PhD student at St Edmund’s College studying the Histor y of Science. Ror y Kent is a second-year PhD student at King’s College studying Philosophy of Science. Swathi Nachiar Manivannan is a recent Natural Sciences (Genetics) graduate from Homer ton College.

Ar twork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

Focus 21

Pavilion: Decolonising Museums Daniel Lim showcases stories from the colonial origins of the Natural History Museum collections

When you first enter the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London through the Hintze Hall and look to the ceiling, you see the museum's 'Gilded Canopy'. It consists of 162 hand-decorated panels, depicting ornamental, commercial and medicinal plants from across the world.

around the world through gifts and exchanges. Upon his death, he instructed that his collection be stored in a free public museum, eventually becoming the foundation for the NHM. In this light, Sloane's actions seem almost egalitarian, but it cannot be overlooked that his botanising was reliant on Jamaican slavery.

One of these panels shows Quassia amara or bitter-ash, which became well-known for suppressing vomit and fever due to Linnaeus' publications. However, Linnaeus did not discover this plant himself, and in fact named it after its true discoverer, an enslaved Ghanian named Kwasimukamba or Graman Quassi.

Sloane was a physician on Jamaican slave plantations, where he recorded plant specimens that enslaved Ghanian men and women collected. He regarded the enslaved African population as a link to otherwise-lost knowledge of the indigenous Taino people, and sought their help in locating plants.

However, he disregarded their medical traditions and interpretations, believing they required wider knowledge to use such plants effectively. Though Sloane's views on slavery are unclear, given his employment on a plantation and subsequent marriage to a sugar heiress, his collection was certainly funded and facilitated by slavery. Today, his specimens are still on display at the NHM, but rarely with mention to how he gathered his extensive collection.

Kwasimukamba worked on sugar plantations in Dutchcontrolled Suriname, and was skilled in obeah, medical-spiritual knowledge. He became a healer and botanist, treating slaves and Europeans with his medicines.

He eventually sold his Quassiabased formula for medicinal tea to a student of Linnaeus. Today, Quassia is used in modern drugs for intestinal problems and malaria, and as a flavouring. Such applications are only possible due to the work of Kwasimukamba, but his name is scarcely mentioned in the NHM, making him just one of the countless enslaved peoples whose contributions to science have been overlooked.

A HISTORY OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS | The original intent of natural history museums was to showcase the collections of wealthy individuals, gathered from distant lands and displayed in a show of opulence and status. Invariably, these individuals acquired their wealth through slave labour and colonial exploitation, and it is not coincidental that specimens from European colonies are well represented in such collections.

One such collection is that of Hans Sloane. Sloane was a botanist, and amassed 334 volumes of plants from 22

Pavilion

Museums and their collections are thus direct products of colonial exploitation and slavery, and divorcing them from this context tells an incomplete story. Any effort to decolonise science must thus acknowledge the labour and knowledge of countless colonised people who were denied recognition in the scientific legacy they helped create.

COLONIALISM IN MUSEUMS TODAY | A 2018 ethnographic study showed that the sanitisation of colonialism in science history is obvious to people of colour that visit natural history museums, making them feel excluded from science communication. This exclusion is often centred around perceptions of cultural imperialism and powerlessness, where the culture and practices of the socially dominant appear universal, yet there are no avenues for the excluded to change the terms of their participation. This is helped by the lens of "hard science", which strips specimens and exhibits of their context.

The limitations of "hard science" means that certain stories are left untold, and audiences, especially marginalised audiences, are able to see what is left out. Colonialism in natural history museums is thus not just a historical anecdote, but a driving factor in structural inequalities in science. The exclusion felt

A current display on Hans Sloane

Michaelmas 2021

by marginalised people draws a divide between those engaged with science communication and those not in the conversation.

Recently, there have been more efforts to acknowledge gaps in colonial narratives presented by natural history museums. In 2018 during Black History Month in the United Kingdom, curator Miranda Lowe led a tour highlighting stories of indigenous and African people in the NHM. This is an important step in filling the gaps in museums, but it has its limits. Having this tour only during Black History Month runs the risk of it seeming tokenistic; in the words of one participant from the aforementioned study, "we're not invited the rest of the year!" For museums to bridge the gap to marginalised audiences, they need to introduce narratives involving those audiences into the museum exhibits, rather than just additional footnotes on existing exhibits.

GOING FORWARD | How should natural history museums move towards decolonising their halls? Drawing on the framework set by Laenui, decolonisation consists of five phases: rediscovery and recovery, mourning, dreaming, commitment and action. Colonised peoples rediscover lost history and identity, followed by mourning for past and present assaults on colonised peoples' cultures. In dreaming, they invoke indigenous worldviews and knowledge to imagine alternative possibilities. During commitment, different voices of dreaming coalesce into a clear statement of direction, culminating in action, where dreams and commitments become strategies for social transformation. Thus, to begin the process of decolonisation, we must start at rediscovery and recovery of African and indigenous history in natural history museums.

Often, this is difficult or almost impossible, because many colonised people were recorded as statistics rather than individuals. However, some have survived in the annals of history, whose stories we can share.

At the end of Hintze Hall sits the looming figure of Charles Darwin, indisputably history's most famous naturalist. Darwin's collections of birds and insects are still kept at the NHM, but less well known is the freed slave who taught him taxidermy. John Edmonstone Michaelmas 2021

learnt how to skin and stuff creatures from the naturalist Charles Waterton during trips to Guyana. After Edmonstone gained his freedom in 1817, he taught taxidermy at the University of Edinburgh.

It was there, in 1826, where the skilled taxidermist taught a young Darwin how to stuff all kinds of birds. Darwin used these skills on his voyage upon the HMS Beagle, creating finch specimens crucial for his theory of evolution through natural selection, likewise his later breeding work. The foundation of modern biology was thus reliant on the teachings of a freed slave, whose contributions were only acknowledged as recently as 2009.

Edmonstone's story is just one of many that have been overlooked by natural history museums, and by telling stories such as his, we start acknowledging the role of colonised people in museums, beginning the process of decolonisation. In 2019, Grant Museum opened Displays of Power, an exhibit presenting the museum's collection with information about their Darwin's stuffed breeding pidgeons colonialist origins. Such exhibits bring the role of colonialism in collections to the forefront, recognising that such collections are inextricably part of the colonial contexts that produced them.

This clear and demonstrable change is easier in smaller museums such as the Grant Museum, but for the NHM in London, such exhibits could take years or even decades. Miranda Lowe does not believe the museum can ever be fully decolonised. Yet, she writes, "Museums, originally established as colonial tools, are well-situated to do the work of public acknowledgment because their collections ... relate directly to that colonial history".

Natural history museums owe much to colonised people, and acknowledgement of their efforts is just the first step in repaying this debt Daniel Lim is a first-year undergraduate at St. Catharine’s College studying Biological Natural Sciences. Photographs taken by Katie O'Flaherty.

Pavilion

23

Scientific Discovery, Imperialism and the Geological Map Octavia Rooks charts the concept of discovery and the role of mapping in colonialism

In Francis Bacon’s manifesto Novum Organum published in 1620, he called for an active scientific method by which the natural world must be observed, explored and questioned, thereby laying out the foundations of Western scientific practice.

The title page depicts a ship passing through the mythical Pillars of Hercules, prepared and ready to explore uncharted waters, imagery that links the notions of scientific discovery and territorial discovery. The Latin at the base of the pillars, “Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia”, translates to “many will travel and knowledge will be increased”.

Baconian natural philosophy created the culture and outlook for the interest in exploration and systemisation of knowledge.

These ideas fundamental to a Western notion of scientific discovery both justified and exploited the imperialistic endeavours of the empire. This article will explore one of the clearest intersections of scientific discovery and imperial exploration exemplified in the practice of geology and, specifically, geological mapping.

2003, reported that in research conducted by the most industrialised countries in the least developed countries, 70% of papers do not have local research institutes as co-authors.

Resource extraction is a physically, economically and intellectually labourintensive task requiring vast amounts of

As David Turnball writes in his 2003 book Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, “...the processes of science and mapping are jointly embedded in the concept of ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’. Territorial discovery and scientific discovery are both conflated with, and mediated by, maps…”

A map is a way of representing relationships between elements in space. The famous underground tube map exemplifies the power of a cleverly constructed map. Geological maps are less commonly encountered and depict the geological features of an area, for example, faults, or stratigraphic rock units. Earth scientists and geologists undertake mapping to learn about the geological history of an area. This data is used in palaeontology and can illuminate past geological history and climate. Although the data that comprise them are physical, these maps are still highly political. The generation and collection of the data require the geologist to visit the area of interest physically. It is, therefore, only possible under certain political conditions, as such work involves liaisons with the government, local people and researchers. Even so, a paper by Dahdouh-Guebas et al., in 24 Scientific Discovery, Imperialism and the Geological Map

technical knowledge specific to the resource being extracted. For instance, in petroleum extraction, the historian Katayoun Shafiee coins this as ‘petroknowledge’. Geological maps are precious as they can help identify possible areas of resource exploration Michaelmas 2021

and therefore reduce the financial risk in undertaking such large scale tasks. The geological mapping process requires geologists to visit the site of potential resources, identify the rock outcrops (rocks visible at the surface) and mark them on a map. Using this information, they can then produce a cross-section and interpretation of the area’s geological history. Therefore, geology increased the efficiency of resource extraction and was employed by the British Empire to sustain its expansion. Geology was quickly recognised as not only valuable to the natural philosopher but the business man and British Empire.

The East India Company saw the commercial value of geology and established The Geological Survey of India in 1851. The primary objective of this survey was for hunting coal fields and iron deposits to supply the railways. The economic utility of geology meant that these large-scale operations were prioritised and funded, which increased the scope and prestige of geology as a science and consolidated the link between scientific research and commercial application.

Geological mapping also served to justify the Empire by furthering the power and prestige of British imperial science, thus cementing British control over their Empire. Many of the names used in the geological time scale, such as the Silurian and Cambrian, originate from British Geology. The historian of science Robert Stafford, in 1998 argued the “International prestige of British geology and the territorial extension of his own stratigraphic nomenclature across the world’s emerging geological maps as a scientific corollary of British imperial and commercial expansion.”

Geological mapping was yet another way the British Empire could exert influence in even the language and terminology used within the international scientific community.

people in awe of the scope and power possessed by the Empire.

They also provided a systematic and rich source of specimens for geologists (useful for geological education and therefore the efficiency in resource extraction) and all manner of scientists to conduct research; however, this was only for the benefit of British scientists. For example, in her 2016 thesis, Aja Tolman talks about how Britain was careful to keep a monopoly on museums making sure only the duplicate of specimens were held in India.

These displays of knowledge were for the benefit of Britain only.

This article scratches the surface of the intersection between mapping, scientific discovery and imperialism. Scientific discovery through the means of mapping during the British Empire was both a consequence and driver of the British Empire’s insatiable need for resources. The British Empire saw these maps as a display of power and by extension, the Empire’s power and control over the natural world and, therefore, the people who inhabit it Octavia Rooks is a 4th Year Natural Sciences student at Jesus College studying Earth Science . Artwork by Natalia Pacheco.

With mapping also came the collections of specimens such as fossils and minerals. We only have to look at museums, such as the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge (which is currently undergoing a process of decolonisation), which display many artefacts from around the world collected by the British Empire. These museums were designed to put Michaelmas 2021

Scientific Discovery, Imperialism and the Geological Map 25

Clinical Trial Design May Perpetuate Health Inequalities Differences in immunological responses between disparate human populations are welldocumented. Lauren Lee considers that inadequate representation of some groups in clinical trials omits the study of the genetic and environmental factors relevant to those populations It is thought that the majority of medicines available today are only effective in a minority of people. The efficacy of therapies such as vaccines or medicines can be influenced by interactions between the drug and an individual’s genetics or environmental factors (such as HIV status). To address this, medical practice is evolving away from the traditional ‘one-size fits all’ approach, towards more individualistic treatments known as ‘personalised’ or ‘precision medicine.’

Precision medicine aims to use treatments that take into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle.

Clinical trials help physicians to identify which groups of people respond to a new treatment and which don’t. Yet despite this growing appreciation for the interactions between genetics and medicine, there is evidence of ongoing disparity in the representation of some ethnic groups in both international and UK clinical trials. This lack of representation could lead to the safety and effectiveness of new therapies being incorrectly estimated for the underrepresented groups.

I clinical trials, a few dozen people are given the therapy to test its safety in humans. In phase II trials the therapy is tested in hundreds of people to further investigate the physiological response to the drug. Phase III trials involve thousands of people and aim to measure the efficacy of the therapy compared with current standard therapy or a placebo. If the preliminary data suggest that the therapy is safe and effective, authorisation may be provided for roll-out in the wider population. However, recipients will continue to be monitored carefully for adverse side effects.

Blinded, randomised and controlled clinical trials are used to determine the safety and efficacy of any new vaccine or medicine. Clinical trials involve several phases which usually take years to complete. Prior to human trials, a drug is tested in animals to see if it produces the expected response. In phase 26 Clinical Trial Design May Perpetuate Health Inequalities

Michaelmas 2021

Small variations in our DNA, called polymorphisms, can have a dramatic effect on the way our body responds to drugs. Polymorphisms in genes encoding enzymes involved in drug metabolism, such as P450 enzymes, can change how quickly a drug is metabolised by an individual and hence their risk of side effects. While most genetic variation in humans occurs between individuals rather than between individuals of different ethnicities, certain polymorphisms are associated with populations from certain geographies and ethnic groups.

Importantly, differences in physiological responses to drugs between people of different ethnicities have been observed, highlighting the need to include people from diverse genetic backgrounds in all drug and vaccine trials.

Clinical trials are notoriously expensive and consequently, the market is dominated by a small number of pharmaceutical giants. Low-income countries are less likely to be chosen by funders to host clinical trials. Despite around 16% of the world’s population inhabiting the African continent, only 2% of vaccine trials take place in African nations. This means that for many new vaccines and medicines, genetic and environmental factors relevant to populations living in low-income countries are not being considered.

The non-profit AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine was developed with global equity of access in mind; however, early phase I and phase II trial cohorts may have an underrepresentation of some non-white ethnicities.

Of the four trials being conducted by AstraZeneca (in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa), the interim trial report for the UK and Brazil trials revealed that 82.7% of the cohort were white. These cohorts with 23 848 participants were significantly larger than the South Africa trial cohort which consisted of 70.5% blackAfrican, 14.9% mixed-race and 12.8% white but had just 2,026 participants. A bias towards running larger trials in certain countries is likely contributing to the under-representation of certain groups in global trial data.

In the United Kingdom, there is also evidence of under-representation of some ethnicities among clinical trial cohorts. A recent review found that in the UK, despite South Asians representing just over 11% of the type-2 diabetes population, only 5% out of 12 trial cohorts was of South Asian descent. This problem is compounded by a pervasive lack of ethnicity recording in medical research. Despite early data suggesting that COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting non-white ethnicities in Western countries, a review of the literature found that of 1,106 COVID-19 research papers and pre-prints only 51 included information about ethnicity in their reports. The link between early COVID-19 hospitalisations and patient ethnicity was later attributed Michaelmas 2021

to factors such as disproportionately working in publicfacing roles and a higher prevalence of co-morbidities such as type-2 diabetes in these populations. Insights such as these are crucial for directing public health policy, yet this analysis was impeded by the lack of ethnicity recording in research publications. Unlike in the US, there is currently no legal obligation to record ethnicity in research studies in the UK. Some of these issues are starting to be addressed by the Innovations in Clinical Trial Design and Delivery project for disadvantaged groups (INCLUDE) from the UK’s National Institute for Health Research. This project aims to widen the inclusion of many under-served groups, including certain ethnic groups, in the field of research.

Reasons for the under-representation of certain groups in UK trials are multi-faceted. Some communities lack access to nearby hospitals that are running trials. Others may face cultural barriers such as trial information only being available in English. A lack of trust between certain communities and the medical profession may also be playing a role.

Mistrust in the medical community stems from both historic and ongoing mistreatment of people by the medical profession. The most famous example is the Tuskegee experiment between the 1930s-70s, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were denied life-saving penicillin treatment in the name of medical research. Another is that in the 1960’s Puerto Rican women were exploited in the testing of the oral contraceptive pill and were subject to compulsory surgical sterilisation. Incidents of unethical practices by the medical profession continue to harm certain communities more recently. In 2012, American doctors pretended to give hepatitis-B vaccinations to people in Pakistan in a ploy to obtain the DNA of relatives to Osama bin Laden. In 2020, the World Health Organization was criticised for the lack of consent in its pilot study of a malaria vaccine which was linked to a 10-fold increase in meningitis cases among recipients. Ongoing incidents such as these fail to assert a healthy exchange of honesty and trust between communities and the Western medical profession. As such, there may be an understandable lack of trust from some communities.

In order to achieve control of infectious diseases, we need equitable access to vaccines and medicines globally.

Researchers and research funders need to focus on addressing the psychosocial barriers to the recruitment of ethnically diverse cohorts both globally and in the UK. Having cohorts that reflect our communities is the first step in ensuring that everyone can benefit from new therapies Lauren Lee is a third-year PhD student at Lucy Cavendish .

College studying tubercolsis pathogenesis. Artwork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

Clinical Trial Design May Perpetuate Health Inequalities 27

The Popularisation of Science Chloe Li weighs up the implications of differing views about simplifying and disseminating scientific findings If progress in science has provided a rich jungle of tools for understanding the world, what still lies before us is the wasteland between its history of development and our history of culture.

From journals to textbooks to Science Parks, the metamorphosis of scientific to public knowledge is becoming more difficult and abstruse as research specialises. Meanwhile, the potentials of popularising science are ever widening with the leaps in quality of our best theories. Whilst much of modern Western thinking is still dominated by Darwinism and Newtonianism, quantum uncertainty nibbles at the periphery of our intellectual assurance.

The dominant view of popularisation is twofold: scientists create scientific knowledge, then popularisers disseminate it.

This is, however, grossly simplified. The process of popularisation — which includes the exchange, translation, and rejection of ideas — is recursive and cannot be gleaned from developments in science alone. Models for understanding popularisation are inseparable from beliefs about what knowledge is and how it is created. The very idea of studying ‘the popularisation of science’, for instance, emphasises the division between spheres of public

28 The Popularisation of Science

and scientific knowledge and the transformation that must occur between.

Immediately problematic is the blurry distinction between popular and ‘genuine’ knowledge. Most will recognise the difference between a Nature journal and television news. But if they were to precisely locate the boundary between where scientific knowledge ends and popularised depiction starts, the task becomes increasingly muddled by the fact that knowledge is constantly re-embodied from its creation to spread, each time undergoing some change of unknown significance. This resembles the classic philosophical puzzle of the ship of Theseus, which imagines a ship with its components gradually replaced and questions whether its identity changes. Popularisation is comparable to the replacement of technical jargon, complex statistics and methodological details. As the precision of a statement varies continuously, one can make many cases for whether, when or how the meaning of a scientific statement is affected by the loss of precision.

Michaelmas 2021

At one extreme, one can argue that genuine scientific knowledge only exists at creation, like in journals, and all downstream representations are popularised. From this stems the pervasive diffusionist model of popularisation, which treats knowledge as something that is created by an elite group of scholars and becomes diluted as it trickles down into public consumption. To borrow Swift’s satire on ‘the aping of elites’ as historians Cooter and Pumfrey have, scientific culture is ‘like fashions… always descending from those of Quality to the middle sort, and thence to the vulgar, where at length they are dropped and vanish’.

Fundamentally, such elitism is based on the view that producing scientific knowledge requires special training and should be protected from the untrained public, who can only add disturbances. Scientific vigour should thank and demand that science is an esoteric practice. This view perhaps finds consolation in regarding knowledge as the models we conjecture that happen to coincide with the implicit models in nature: these rare congruences can be taught to the minds of the public but only conceived by trained minds of scholars. Science, as the product of this exercise, is therefore boxed off to academia wherein the real source of productivity lies.

This view grants scientists a particular authority over knowledge. Hilgartner compared it to the right to print money.

Scientists behold the exclusive ‘gold standard’ for producing genuine knowledge. The idea of appropriate simplification also gives them a right to authorise a ‘currency’ of simplified knowledge for public consumption. When this goes astray, scientists may appeal to the notion of distortion to deem mutants as ‘counterfeits’. The distinction between scientific and popular knowledge therefore gives scientists tools, both conceptual and rhetoric, to control the use of scientific knowledge in public and political discourse. This seems sensible given that we believe in their expertise. Often, policymakers headline their cause with a simplified statistic, thus adding false certainty to a tentative scientific conclusion. This becomes harder to correct the more it circulates as such presentations are designed to be pithy and memorable. A scientist can only report misrepresentations and reassert the uncertainty that stems from methodological weaknesses, of which only scientists are painfully aware.

Undoubtedly, it would also be naïve to assume that scientists are impartial in this choreography. ‘Appropriate simplification’ often fits conveniently into some commercial pitch, political stance, or grant proposal.

A more poignant objection to the diffusionist rejection of popularisation is that science is cultural. The diffusionist view capitalises on the belief that creating scientific knowledge is selfcontained within academia. This is scarcely probable. Popularised knowledge inevitably feeds back into research, for one because it is hard to define a boundary within what is known. Moreover, science’s take-off depends on a suite of values being in place like respect for evidence, rational incredulity, wariness of authority as well as connections that link scientific communities with its allies and audiences. The scientific revolution occurred once under very particular climates at the end of the Renaissance.

Michaelmas 2021

It is a major goal of historians of science to understand its catalysing interplays. Cooter and Pumfrey suggested that both the permissiveness of elites and receptiveness of the public towards science were indispensable. The latter underlines the significance of popularisation.

Above is perhaps still a weaker appeal of examining science in culture as opposed to the stronger interpretation of science as culture. This broadens science to a mode of thinking. ‘We live inside the world built for us by science’, said philosopher Bruno Latour, a comment less about the engineering value of science than its cognitive transformation. Latour proposed that scientific knowledge is constructed through the collective transformation of statements rather than any singular discovery. This echoes the precursor concept of a thought collective from bacteriologist Ludwik Fleck, who proposed it in the 1930s as an attempt to situate the birthplace of scientific facts. To Fleck, a scientific fact is inextricably linked to the social context and existing ideas and practices saturated in it, popularised or not, as they provide the bed of connections through which scientists can ascertain and articulate new knowledge. Consequently, pre-existing knowledge belonging to the collective also limits the kind of thoughts scientists can have — it shapes the scientific thought style. A thought style defines the creative headspace of a period and is unavoidably shaped by the most prominent and popular ideas.

Schrödinger makes a remarkably optimistic and humane case for why science depends on the public. The Austrian physicist and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize propelled for the universality of human understanding — a belief that scientific truths can be appreciated by any thinking person and gain maximal meaning when reverberated most widely. Popularisation when at its best “[multiplies] the subjective experience of ‘discovery’”.

To popularise is not only for science, but also for the scientist.

Schrödinger believed that a scientist did not truly understand a concept until they could explain it to a layperson. Not only that, the scientist often cannot help but uncover and recover their original motivation in the process. As Schrödinger put it, ‘You will try to defend the reason why you are interested … And you will become aware of the fact that only now, in your discussion with your colleague, have you reached those aspects of the subject that are, so to speak, nearest your heart’ Chloe Li is a second-year undergraduate at Emmanuel College studying Neurobiology and the History and Philosophy of Science.

Artwork by Biliana Tchavdarova Todorova.

The Popularisation of Science 29

What Cooperation in Climate Conservation Looks Like

Donovan Sim discusses the need for scientific and political unity for climate action

People of the world are divided on climate consciousness; some even believe climate change is a hoax. Despite this, the vast majority of climate scientists and experts agree that climate change is largely due to factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and irresponsible livestock farming as a result of increased human activity.

Indeed, there are many individuals from laymen to policy-makers who disagree with science and policy objectives. Without unity outside of the scientific community, cooperation in climate conservation is impossible. To deal with climate change the international community must be united regarding climate: agenda, policy, and justice.

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF SCIENTIFIC UNITY | Many individuals outside the scientific community have yet to come into agreement with current science. Perhaps, this is simply because of the nature of scientific language. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) qualifies its statements and assertions with words such as ‘likely’, ‘very likely’, and ‘virtually certain’. It also holds some climate-change deniers as expert members who are in disagreement with their peers. As a result, predictions and claims by the IPCC appear, to non-experts, as uncertain and ambiguous.

Hence, it is understandable that those who take this as a sign that climate change is not an officially recognised phenomenon would find it unnecessary to address it in the first place. The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement is one example of refusal to deal with climate change due to this misconception.

Such events could have more unfortunate outcomes. In 2019 while the US was absent from the Paris Agreement, the Climate Action Tracker projected that ‘US greenhouse gas emissions [will be] at least 3% higher in 2030’ than if it does not withdraw from 30 What Cooperation in Climate Conservation Looks Like

the Paris Agreement. The US’s absence from the Paris Agreement could compromise public pressure on other nations to honour their commitments, encourage other countries to withdraw, or even render the Paris Agreement ineffective, given that the US is the world’s second-largest emitter of CO2. Other US policies taken in defiance of the scientific community include the rollbacks of 50 climate-related goals.

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNITY IN INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE FRAMEWORK | Unified international climate policy is necessary but there is often great disparity in the extent to which different countries are committed to addressing climate change. This may be because of their unique domestic situations. In general, policies addressing climate change are associated with considerable short-run costs; and benefits which are only noticeable in the long-run. Understandably, policy-makers, especially those with regular and short election cycles, find these short-term costs difficult to justify. Also, the international endeavour of dealing with climate change cannot be divorced from the free-rider problem, and the fear that other countries would not take commensurate climate action. This means that there is every chance that, by addressing climate change, one’s own state would be putting itself at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other states.

Consider the example of the Kyoto Protocol. This agreement was signed in 1997, and called for industrialised countries to lower global CO2 emissions by 5% relative to 1990 standards. However, the agreement utterly failed and CO2 emission levels increased by 40%. Such international conventions, like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), fail because they cannot govern or even monitor states’ commitments. Hence, Michaelmas 2021

states are unaccountable and free to pursue policies which would avoid the free rider problem. Moreover, the agreement failed to even make signatories of the world’s two largest emitters, the US and China. In the US, president Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol agreement, but failed to convince the US Senate to ratify it. Among the reasons cited by the senate were damages to the economy, especially when developing countries like India and China were not bound by what the senate saw as economy-stifling regulations. This example illustrates the influence that the fear of being put at a disadvantage vis-à-vis other states can have over international climate policy. Hence, to tackle climate change, states’ agendas must transcend domestic, short-term interests.

Unfortunately, disagreements about how policy should be crafted to best address climate change has prevented the international community from making progress. For example, there is disagreement over whether or not some countries should be allowed to emit CO2 if they are still developing while other more developed countries that have already contributed immense levels of CO2 emissions should bear the brunt of restrictions. According to the Global Carbon Project, the US has cumulatively emitted 25% of all emissions while India has only contributed 3% as of 2019.

Countries may also disagree on the rigour of climate change policy because they are not equally vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Consider the Paris Agreement, which is an international accord where countries have made voluntary commitments to reduce their emissions and limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees (UNFCCC, 2021). Signatories to the Paris Agreement originally committed to ensuring increases in global average temperature are limited to 2 degrees Celsius. However, following opposition from the low-lying, vulnerable islands-nations of the Pacific, this was reduced to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

There are also those who criticise the Paris Agreement for infringing on national sovereignty. In fact, this was one of the reasons provided by Trump for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. Ambiguity in the terms of the Paris Agreement is another manifestation of the disconnect between countries. For example, Article 4(1) calls upon signatories ‘to reach global peaking greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible’. Not only is ‘global peaking’ not explicated in detail, there is also no clear timetable by which signatories are expected to abide. Since policies stipulated in the Paris Agreement must come to the best compromise between signatories with starkly contrasting policy objectives, any policies codified are only the lowest common denominator. The Paris Agreement is an example of what happens when there is disunity in policy. A 2020 paper by Raiser et al. argues that its effectiveness in pursuing its largest goal of limiting global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees celsius is debatable because countries’ pledges are inadequate.

Moreover, many countries are not on track to fulfill their own pledges.

As of 2017, the journal Nature reported that no major industrialised country was implementing pledged policies or achieving pledged carbon emission reductions, thus, they are insufficient in dealing with climate change. Furthermore, in 2018 experts writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned that even if signatories are successful in limiting global increases in average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, risk that cascading feedbacks will push our ecosystem into a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway would still not be eliminated.

UNITY IN CLIMATE JUSTICE | Putting up a comprehensive global effort against climate change might also require addressing issues of climate justice, which refers to the way the ravages of climate change are distributed inequitably. According to UN Secretary-General Michaelmas 2021

Guterres, ‘the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit.’

For example, according to the NAACP and American Lung Association, ethnic minorities are often more vulnerable to air pollution.

There are many reasons why this might be the case. A 2020 study

by Nardonne et al. provides evidence that many years of residential segregation (such as red-lining in the USA) has increased the probability of ethnic minorities to live in areas more-likely to be exposed to air pollution. This includes population-dense cities, and industrial areas.

Another example is the case of indigenous communities, especially those living in floodplains. Consider the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, which includes approximately 100 families. Writing in Yale Climate Connections in 2016, Bud Ward described how the people of this tribe generally grow crops, fish, and hunt on a subsistence basis.

They live in the Isles de Jean Charles in Louisiana. Being a low-lying coastal area, residents have long been threatened by coastal erosion.

In fact, every year, the state of Louisiana has been losing land mass equivalent to the size of Manhattan, according to journalist Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times Magazine. When engineers of the US Army looked into the issue faced by the tribe, they determined that tribal lands could not be protected without great cost, and instead offered money to relocate the community to higher ground. This demonstrates the injustice of climate change — communities which contribute minimally to it can often be forced to bear the brunt of its effects.

Another commonly-debated issue of climate justice is with regard to the distribution of burdens between countries. While the West has been industrialising for over 200 years, all the while detrimentally extracting resources from colonies, many developing countries are still dependent on the prospect of industrialisation for economic development.

Moreover, the wealthiest one billion individuals, mostly found in EuroAmerican societies, are responsible for 60% of greenhouse gases, while the poorest 50% of people are only responsible for 5%. This creates various ethical problems. Should developing countries be allowed to continue industrialising and shoulder less of the burden in the fight against climate change? To what extent should we treat the climate sustainably, and in so doing pursue the welfare of future generations at the expense of the 783,000,000 who live in poverty today? Such ethical questions are acknowledged by the accumulation of the Green Climate Fund and the institution of the Global Environment Facility, which are tasked with aiding developing countries to bear the costs of climate action. However, even these measures are limited. According to the World Bank, these funds are short of the US$ 700-1000 billion required. Therefore, though efforts have been made to address issues of climate justice, climate justice has yet to be served.

Until political systems begin to be accountable to the marginalised, it is likely that it will continue turning a blind eye towards those who suffer from climate change the most. Without governmental attention, it is unlikely that a comprehensive, concerted effort will be taken to address climate-related issues plaguing marginalised communities. Until marginalised communities are able to address climate-related issues too, society as a whole cannot say it has comprehensively dealt with climate change. Even if there is agreement within the majority of the scientific community, climate change cannot be addressed until there is unity in climate change agenda, policy, and justice Donovan Sim is a second-year student studying Economics at Robinson College. Artwork by Josh Langfield.

What Cooperation in Climate Conservation Looks Like 31

Weird and Wonderful Is ASMR Real?

“Tingling in the scalp, almost like a head orgasm but there’s nothing sexual to it.” — in 2007, a discussion was started on a message board called ‘SteadyHealth’ about a ‘weird sensation that feels good’.

This feeling, which happens randomly but most frequently when listening to soft voices, has since been coined ‘ASMR’ — Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Dr Giulia Poerio at the University of Essex has found ASMR to have both emotionally arousing and relaxing effects, including improving moods and relieving chronic pain.

However, not everyone seems to experience ASMR, making scientists wonder whether ASMR is even real.

Although uncertainty remains, a 2018 fMRI-based study by Bryson Lochte and colleagues indicates that oxytocin and other neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and endorphins may be involved in ASMR. Variation between individuals in the number and sensitivity of receptors for those neurotransmitters could explain why some people never experience the sensation. In a 2015 paper by Dr. Nick Davis and Dr. Emma Barratt at Swansea University, people suffering from depression seem to experience a stronger boost from ASMR, suggesting that the effect might harbour therapeutic potential.

Therefore, ASMR, despite facing skepticism, may well be real, and might even be beneficial for individuals who experience it. DT

Calutron Girls in the Atomic City

A secretive town hidden from maps, radioactive substances, and a bunch of clueless high school girls helping build a nuclear weapon.

What may sound like the beginning of a Marvel film, happened to be reality in a small American town called Oak Ridge during WWII. Far away from the coast and any enemies that could discover its mission, Oak Ridge was built from scratch in 1942, serving the enrichment of the fuel needed to produce the first atomic bomb.

With many men drafted overseas, local authorities had to do “the unthinkable”: employ a group of women that had just graduated from high school to take over an engineer’s job. No questions about the whys and wherefores were allowed. Much to the men’s dislike, the new workers did their job exceptionally well, operating huge machines called Calutrons (CALifornia University CycloTRONS).

These were u-shaped electromagnetic devices helping to produce the relevant type, or isotope, of uranium needed for the bomb. Within two years the Calutron girls produced about 140 pounds of U-235.

While following instructions and working diligently, the women were oblivious to the fact that they significantly contributed to the development of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima over 75 years ago. MA

It’s Getting Hot in Here, so Override Your Chromosomes

Scientists have known for decades that the sex of the developing embryo of reptiles and fish can be influenced by environmental cues such as temperature. The question challenging scientists is exactly what biochemical changes occur after heat exposure that cause a male embryo to develop ovaries instead of testes?

Using bearded dragon embryos as a model, Sarah Whiteley and Arthur Georges from University of Canberra, were able to identify possible clues as to how this phenomenon can be explained.

Upon exposing male bearded dragon embryos to high temperatures, two main events were observed simultaneously.

Firstly, an ion channel (known as transient receptor potential channel) responded by increasing the number of calcium ions travelling into the cells of the embryo. Next, the mitochondria of embryonic cells metabolised at a faster rate, increasing the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS are a normal by-product of aerobic respiration but at high levels can become toxic, placing cells into oxidative stress. The combination of calcium influx and oxidative stress results in gene expression changes of the developing embryo, leading to the development of ovaries instead of testes.

Furthermore, there are key differences in gene expression between the females defined by their chromosomes, compared to temperature-originated females, showing that there are two distinct pathways that determine sex in bearded dragons.

This is a fascinating find that makes you wonder about the future: as our planet continues to heat up, female reptiles may dominate leading to questions about how these species will survive. SL 32 Weird and Wonderful

Artwork by Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn

Michaelmas 2021

Develop your scientific career with our support

Search for your new role quickly by discipline, country, salary and more on naturecareers.com

A96349