Critics Corner: OMLC Lecture Series Dr Sarah Ball
(Somerville College, 1974) Conservation Geneticist and retired Consultant Paediatric Haematologist
For individual links to the videos of the lectures, please visit: https://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/get-involved/ alumni/events-and-reunions/oxford-medicallecture-club and click onto each lecture title for access to the video. ‘Renal Anaemia: has EPO had its Day?’ Monday 31 January 2022 Professor Christopher Winearls, (Keble College, 1973), Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow and former Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Medicine at Jesus College. For this lunchtime talk, Professor Winearls cast himself as the modest narrator of the story of erythropoietin, and how it opened up the fascinating world of oxygenregulated pathways. This was presented in the format of a chronology of unfolding evidence rather than as a polished prepackaged exposition, in keeping with the speaker’s claim to have been strongly influenced in his career by the motto of the Royal Society – take nobody’s word for it. The story was inevitably familiar to many but not all of the audience (which was even more than usually eclectic and erudite), but
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to fill in the pieces of the puzzle in a discovery that met the Nobel Prize criterion
it was reeled out with zen-like calm in the face of numerous technological glitches, in a way that was always accessible and interesting. It was good to be reminded of the key roles of the different scientists and clinicians as their approaches converged to fill in the pieces of the puzzle in a discovery that met the Nobel Prize criterion of both changing the scientific paradigm and being of great benefit to humankind (as well as suggesting novel products for performance enhancement in competitive cycling …).
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The motives of the single HCP killers seem much simpler
30 Oxford Medicine | Spring/Summer 2022
‘Brain Fever: How Vaccines prevent Meningitis and other Killer Diseases’ Monday 28 February 2022 Professor Richard Moxon FRS, Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, former Action Research Professor of Paediatrics and the former director and founder of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford. This talk took us through the development of vaccines for bacterial meningitis, with an intriguing dip back into the history of the paradigm that specific organisms cause specific disease. In common with other impressive talks in this series, the essential close cooperation between scientist, clinician and pharma was evident in this talk, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Prof Moxon was the founder of the Oxford Vaccine Group. Overall this was a lovely talk, encompassing clinical paediatric infectious diseases and the evolution of the scientific design of vaccines from the early observation that the causative bacteria were in some way protected from being phagocytosed by neutrophils, to the systematic study of bacterial genomic sequences. Prof Moxon more than lived up to his introduction as the “archetype of a pioneering clinical scientist”. And do buy his book “Brain Fever”. Royalties are going to meningitis charities, highly apposite given that the development of the meningitis
archetype of a pioneering “ clinical scientist” vaccines were made possible by the extraordinarily generous financial support of the National Meningitis Trust, a charity founded by a family who had lost a child in a meningitis outbreak, a reminder of both the devastating impact of meningitis and the increasing participation of patient groups in medical research. ‘Kill or Cure - Medical Murderers’ Monday 28 March 2022 Dr Neil Snowise, (1974, Corpus Christi College), Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King’s College London. After an eclectic medical career to date, including anaesthetics and general practice, Dr Snowise is now Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London. But his talk, although entertaining and erudite, was not about the heroic treatment of devastating new diseases with exciting new drugs with a thrillingly knife-edge therapeutic margin. No. This was about true crime, specifically about murders committed by healthcare professionals, subdivided into serial and single killers. The means for these crimes are generally those easily on hand for HCPs, including insulin, opiates and air embolism. Tip: try glibenclamide rather than injected insulin, to reduce the risk of detection. The motives of HCP serial killers, we were told, “are the subject of much academic speculation”, but likely include Power and Control, Attention
