Bigger babies? So what?

An abridged version of this article was published last month in Cherwell, the Oxford University student newspaper. You can read that version here.

In October 2016 a research paper prompted widespread news reports that caesarean sections are affecting human evolution by causing the size of newborns to increase. Larger babies which, in the past, would have died from obstructed labour, are now able to survive. The alleles—gene variants—that cause this obstructive ‘fetopelvic disproportion’ (FPD) are no longer selected against and are, it is claimed, becoming more prevalent in the human population. However, the story was massively over-hyped, as the researchers did not find solid evidence that this is actually happening.

Top 10 Popular Science Books 2016

I read a lot of popular science; this is a list of the 10 popular science books that I most enjoyed in 2016, in order. Click on each item to read a review, or scroll down to read them all. Apologies for the slightly clunky format of this post- I wanted to do it differently, but frustratingly that requires a paid version of WordPress, which I’m not willing to get.

1. Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, Randolph M Nesse and George C Williams, 1995.

2. Cuckoo, Nick Davies, 2015.

3. The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould, 1981.

4. Why Is Sex Fun? Jared Diamond, 1997.

5. Headstrong: 52 Women who Changed Science- and the World, Rachel Swaby, 2015.

6. The Triumph of Seeds, Thor Hanson, 2015.

7. The Birth of The Pill, Jonathan Eig, 2014.

8. Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, Michael Brooks, 2011.

9. The Drunkard’s Walk, Leonard Mlodinow, 2008.

10. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, Tim Marshall, 2015.

Reflections on typhoid fever; or, what it was like to be in a clinical trial

It is unfortunate but unavoidable that many advances in medical science must rely on experiments carried out on healthy human subjects. There is a long and rather grim history of people doing awful things to disadvantaged others in the name of science, from the 19^th century ‘father of gynaecology’ who carried out dozens of experimental surgeries on three un-anaesthetised female slaves, to the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which treatment for syphilis was deliberately withheld from poor black communities and which continued until 1972.

Thankfully, a lot has changed in recent decades, and researchers experimenting on human subjects are now held to very strict ethical standards. Luckily for me personally, actually, as this summer I enrolled on one such experiment being run by the Oxford Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine. In exchange for a large sum of money, I agreed to be infected with enteric fever (either typhoid or its milder cousin, paratyphoid- I wouldn’t know which) and be subjected to a variety of medical tests so that researchers could investigate how exactly my immune system responded. During this stage I would be monitored very closely and treated as soon as an infection was detected, so although enteric fever is a serious illness I was not really in any danger from it.  The aim of the study is to gain a better understanding of the interactions between the bacteria and the human immune system, so that better vaccines can be developed.

Here are some things I learned from the experience.

Alice Ball and the Fight against Leprosy

An article I wrote to mark Alice Ball Day in Hawaii for Bluestocking, an online journal investigating the academic and artistic contributions of women. Check it out! 🙂

Bluestocking Oxford

By Ellen Murray

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, has always carried a lot of stigma. Viewed as lost causes at best, and dangerous disease spreaders at worst, sufferers have long been treated as social pariahs. With a name coming from the Greek λέπρα, meaning ‘a disease that makes the skin scaly’ due to the highly unpleasant skin lesions it produces, advanced stages of leprosy can involve quite horrifying limb deformities, contributing to the associations of sin and uncleanliness that have surrounded the disease since biblical times. As a result, sufferers have variously been ostracised, barred from entering towns, and obliged to carry bells to warn others of their approach.

This was very much the situation in nineteenth century America where, with no effective cure, leprosy was
essentially a death sentence. At the first sign of infection, sufferers were exiled to places such as Kalaupapa, a Hawaiian island leper colony described…

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