Thread by @WomenInStat

👋 @LucyStats here! It's been a very exciting week for folks in Causal Inference with the Nobel Prize announcements, I thought it'd be neat to dive back in history to hear about a previous Nobel winner, Ronald Ross

1/

This topic is fun because it spans a whole myriad of my interests!
✔️We've got stats!
✔️We've got poetry!
✔️We've got infectious disease epidemiology!

Much of what I'll chat about today I learned from this article: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12762435/

2/

Ronald Ross won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 "for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it."

nobelprize.org/prizes/medicin…
3/

This was based on a discovery about malaria and mosquitoes. Somewhat famously, after making this discovery this polymath wrote a poem!

I love hearing about quantitative folks living out loud with their humanities talents!

4/

Then Ross turned to trying to predict the magnitude of malaria outbreaks. He came up with a mechanistic model that predicted the number of new infections per month based current epi parameters 👇

[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12762435/]
5/

This led Ross to come up with the "critical mosquito density" to show when the malaria epidemic would die out. Previously, folks thought that only *complete* elimination of mosquitos would stop the spread.

6/

[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12762435/]

Turns out his theory seemed to work! If they could get the mosquito density down to fewer than 40 mosquitoes per person in the population, malaria cases decreased

6/
[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12762435/]

Something I ❤️ about this example is the combination of mechanistic modeling and statistics! Ross hypothesized a mechanistic relationship (via the original equations) and used these to inform "policy". He then used statistics to collect data & confirm whether it worked

7/

This led to using differential equations to represent disease dynamics.

Does this sound familiar?! The concept of the basic reproductive number is equivalent to Ross’s "critical mosquito density"!

8/

If you'd like to know more about mechanistic models (and how to quantify uncertainty in them!), check out this paper @khgrantz, @EpiEllie, & I wrote:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33475686/

9/

So there you have it! A bit of history about a previous Nobel winner. You could maybe even consider him a *biostatistician* 🏆, his biographers did (see next tweet!)

10/

"If Ross had been born 100 years later he could have become an eminent biostatistician. His thinking in this area was well ahead of his time and perhaps did not achieve the recognition it deserved until much later." -Nye and Gibson (1997, p. 279)
[pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12762435/]

11/