Why are measles cases on the increase?

This episode of Incident Report will be available on BBC iPlayer until at least the end of January 2025

There are a flurry of news stories about a rise in numbers of cases of measles in the United Kingdom, and further afield, e.g. Why is measles making a comeback in the UK? , Measles outbreaks cause alarm: what the data say, and ‘Clusters’ of measles are appearing in three regions of the UK. It was against this backdrop that I watched the Measles outbreak: Why now? episode of Incident Room on iPlayer. I thought the 20 minute explainer was very helpful, and therefore that I’d flag it here. In the programme, health reporter Smitha Mundasad interviews three others for their insights into the current rise in measles cases.

25 years of the The Víctor Grífols i Lucas Foundation

I was delighted to be invited to contribute a chapter for Bioethics: A look into the future, a book published in October 2023 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Víctor Grífols i Lucas Foundation. The Foundation, started in 1998, is the nearest Catalan/Spanish equivalent to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK, serving as an independent voice on ethical and social implications of new developments in Biology and Medicine. In that time, Grífols have funded research in aspects of bioethics, and organised conferences, debates and seminars, alongside associated publications.

Although originally invited to write a chapter on Transhumanism, I was grateful when my colleague and erstwhile co-author Sal Macip was willing to swap topics to allow me to pick up the Genomics theme, which is something on which I’ve been doing more research in the past couple of years. A copy of my chapter (in English) is available here.

Spot the difference: The Spanish and Catalan versions of the Grifols 25th anniversary book

Sadly missed: A health news service we all desperately need

A recent Twitter exchange, initiated by Dr Andrew Steele (@statto), reminded me that one of the early losses during the pandemic in Spring 2020 was the NHS Choices Behind The Headlines service. I’m not sure whether or not the demise was triggered by Covid specifically, but the events of the past couple of years have served to show the need that we have for a reliable critique of heath stories reported in the mainstream media.

Behind The Headlines was a highly regarded service that critiqued the accuracy of media coverage of medicine and science breakthroughs

When NHS Choices was launched in 2007, a key pillar was intended to be Behind the Headlines, evidence-based analysis of healthcare-related news stories. Crucially, the analysis needed to be timely, available the same day that the news coverage was released. The stated aims of the service were:

The aims of Behind the Headlines (salvaged from the Institute for Government’s report Are our media threatening the public good?)

Discussing Ethics of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic

On Tuesday 7th December I had the honour to talk with 900 sixth form students in person, and a further several hundred online. The event was one of a series organised by Education in Action, and took place at the spectacular Emmanuel Centre in Central London.

An amazing venue at which to speak.
Photo courtesy of The Compton School

I’ve spoken at some of their meetings previously, and I’ve spoken about the Ethics of Direct-to-Consumer with postgraduate students before, but never this topic with this age range. I therefore did quite a bit of work in advance to not only simplify some aspects, but try to make the connections to their courses more overt. I put in four Slido polls – the first and the final one were paired, and asked the delegates if they’d consider having a DTC genetic test themselves. The middle two probed their a priori knowledge about the human genome. The action shot, above, catches me revealing the outcome of a poll which revealed that the majority of students knew how many base pairs there are in our chromosomes, but interestingly fewer knew that only a minute amount of our DNA actually codes for proteins.

The Education in Action team did a terrific job with the presentation practicalities; screens for the benefit of the speaker showed the live poll results coming in before they were revealed to the participants, and they were very efficient at toggling between different feeds at the right time. They also managed to get a live audience mike out at short notice and a prominent speaker clock helped keep everyone to time. If you ever get invited to present at one of these days then jump at the chance. And if you are a school teacher looking for some engaging para-curricular content for your students then I do recommend these days, as they’re great.

The POSTnote Assignment: Preparing a scientific report to Government as an authentic alternative to essay writing

I recently found time to write an outline of an activity I ran for a few years on a second year module. As an alternative to writing a traditional essay, students were asked to produce a POSTnote (my notes can be found here). POSTnotes are briefings for members of the UK House of Commons and/or House of Lords, produced by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

This was a nice task, an “authentic assessment” with real-world relevance, in which the students developed literature searching skills, an ability to write for a non-expert audience and an awareness of ways in which Government policy can be developed and informed.

Sadly, an increase in the number of students on the relevant module made the activity unsustainable. I am, however, aware of at least three UK HEIs that are now running a task based on this model, so I include the notes in the hope that they can be useful for colleagues at additional universities. Please feel free to contact me for more details.

See the detailed description of the task at
here

UPDATE (19th August): Thanks to a prompt from colleague Prof Graham Scott (Hull), I became aware of the new National Teaching Repository (housed at Edge Hill). I deposited this work there, snd ss a result it now has a DOI https://doi.org/10.25416/edgehill.12826526.v2

Thirteen take-home messages from the Nuffield webinar on fair and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines

On 5^th June 2020 I was privileged to be able to listen into the latest in a series of webinars on Covid-19 and ethics organised by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Sharing the benefits of research: facilitating fair and equitable access to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines. The meeting, held on Zoom and chaired by Nuffield Director Hugh Whittall featured contributions from four experts, followed by a Q&A session. The panelists were: Stefan Swartling Peterson (Chief of Health at UNICEF); Ellen ‘t Hoen (Director of Medicines Law & Policy, and founder of the Medicines Patent Pool); Achal Prabhala (Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa); and Sheuli Porkess (Executive Director for Research, Medical and Innovation at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)).

What follows are my initial reflections on a terrific and informative session. I offer the caveat that I have not listened back to a recording of the meeting (though I gather one will be made available shortly). I am therefore working just from my ‘live’ notes and these points are likely a blend of what was actual said, things where I might inadvertently have got the wrong end of the stick, plus tangents towards which my brain spiralled at the time and in preparing these notes.

Analysis of Broadcast Science as a Capstone Project

For a number of years I have been offering final year projects for undergraduate bioscientists at Leicester in which they examine the science (and sometimes the ethics) of broadcast media coverage on a topic of their choosing. The key tools that facilitate this work are Learning on Screen’s archive of screened media BoB (sometimes called Box of Broadcasts) and the related Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT). I was delighted on many levels to be invited to give a presentation on Analysis of Broadcast Science as a Capstone Project for the second #DryLabsRealScience network. Slides here.

Firstly, I think the #DryLabsRealScience initiative is a brilliant example of grassroots collaboration across different institutions at a time of unprecedented change [it would be great if University top brass were pulling together in the same manner, but I digress]. Here are academics helping each other to help their present and future students have the most valuable university experience possible, regardless of whether or not social distancing measures restrict some aspects of traditional teaching.

Secondly, I’m always delighted to talk about the potential of BoB and TRILT as resources for both teaching, and I suggest, research in a University context. These are fabulous tools and they really deserve be more widely known and used across many disciplines in the UK HE sector.

Finally, the invitation was a chance to pull together some of my thinking on this type of project – it will hopefully prove the catalyst to finally write up this work in a more formal way. Systematic analysis of print media (using tools such as Nexis and Factiva) is a well-established research model in many disciplines and BoB now offers the scope to conduct similar studies on a boundaried collection of TV and Radio resources.

New…not New

I discovered relatively recently that a fourth edition of the QAA’s Subject Benchmark Statement for Biosciences was released in October 2019. Professionally I owe a lot to the existence of the QAA Benchmark statements. It was the first version, published in 2002, that placed strong emphasis on all graduates from Bioscience programmes having an awareness of the societal and ethical implications of developments within their discipline. This led the Subject Centre of the Learning and Teaching Support Network (as it then was; halcyon days) to set up the Special Interest Group in Teaching Ethics to Bioscience Students. Three of us applied for the advertised role to head up the SIG. The folks at the Subject Centre had the prescience to suggest we shared the role, and so was born  fruitful collaborations that have outlived the LTSN and even the HEA into which it was subsequently folded.

Ruminating on my ruminations

As the articles for the December 2019 issue of The Biochemist start to loiter in my inbox, I realise that we must therefore approaching the second anniversary of my taking over as Science Editor for the magazine. Doesn’t time fly when you are having fun!

It is a huge honour to have a big hand in production of this Biochemical Society publication. The Biochemist is intentionally a magazine, as opposed to a journal, and this influences the style and depth of the contents. It is hoped that all of the pieces are accessible to an undergraduate biochemist but with content that will be of interest to more seasoned academics, possibly introducing them to sub-fields of molecular bioscience that are outside their usual area of expertise. Each issue has themed features in the “front half”. In the past couple of years we’ve looked at:

• Biomaterials;
• Molecular Motors;
• Fertility;
• Food Production;
• Molecular Biology of the Brain;
• Immunology;
• Biophysics;
• Synthetic Biology;
• Elements in Biochemistry;
• Artificial Intelligence (forthcoming);
• Venoms and Toxins (forthcoming)

Those who have done a quick tally will recognise that this equates to six issues per year, which represents quite an undertaking. My role as Science Editor includes: chairing the Editorial Board which, amongst other things, decides on the themes for the year’s issues; suggesting potential authors; reviewing and editing papers.

When a PhD doesn’t lead into “academia”

Tucked away toward the back on each issue of the journal Nature is a regular column offering diverse views on Career development. It is often an interesting read. In the 2nd August 2018 edition, the focus was on the thorny topic of attitudes towards PhD students who do not follow the traditional route into postdoctoral research and (potentially) a lectureship.

In his article, Philipp Kruger, an Oxford research student in the latter stages of his Immunology PhD, challenged the persisting notion that a decision to pursue alternative career paths after completion of a PhD was tantamount to “failure” (interestingly the original title, still the title for the PDF version, was You are not a failed scientist which has been altered to the slightly less accusatory Why it is not a ‘failure’ to leave academia for the online version).

Kruger was keen both to challenge supervisors who send out the message that completion of a doctoral degree was about “academia or bust”, and to promote opportunities for PhD students to develop a broader range of skills and experiences. Some of this will be about greater awareness of the transferable skills that are naturally being accumulated during the course of one’s research. These likely include:

• Teamwork
• Time-management
• Project management (including prioritisation of tasks)
• Written and oral communication skills
• An ability to evaluate evidence
• Resilience

These are skills that would be welcomed and appreciated by a broad range of potential employers.

On top of this, enterprising and pro-active students have the opportunity to garner a broader range of experiences, for example organising a small-scale conference, blogging or taking part in other public engagement activities. There are also more formal internships and placements, such as three month fellowships with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) or with the BBC.

Supervisors are encouraged not to stand against their students taking up these opportunities, but rather to actively encourage and facilitate them to do so. A “pure” research careers is not for all (not least because there are fewer postdoc positions than there are graduating PhD students).

During a decade of running careers talks for undergraduate bioscientists, I have regularly included examples of alumni who have found fulfilling roles in “Careers from Science” as well as “Careers in Science”. Several of these have actually completed a PhD between their original degree and their current role. A consistent theme has been the fact that they enjoy their present work, despite in many cases not initially envisage this being where they would be focusing their labours. Flexibility and adaptability are important skills. Kruger would encourage supervisors to engender an atmosphere where students can push on different doors and see what might open up for them.