Great to see @klarawanelik@Zen_of_Science paper on how ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and social background create barriers to academic career progression has now been published. Social origins under-represented in research and policies (.. cont/) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…
2/n perhaps partly due to social position obviously being influenced by educational trajectory. A possible measure would be whether parents left education at the minimum legal age of school leaving prevalent when and where they grew up. This would be calculable for many ...
3/n (but not all) people, is stable for most, and could be added to the IDE monitoring data routinely collected. Some agencies are (finally) beginning to collect at least some data on this. In the US "first generation" college students is used, but there is enormous ..
4/5 variation among them that minimum schooling for parents picks up (i.e. both 1st gen and minimum parental education years could be recorded). The proportion of people who thought these the same when I've raised this over many years illustrates the impact of social origins..
5/5 is perhaps under-appreciated. Of course collecting data is only the first step in the harder process of working out what can be done to improve what is certainly a high (and inadequately recognized by institutions and their members) source of inequity in academic careers
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1/n In 2019 @BMJ_latest published a non-linear Mendelian randomization (NLMR) paper with the conclusion that gaining weight would reduce mortality risk in many people. The NLMR method produces spurious findings MR's credibility calamity in this 🧵 bmj.com/content/364/bm…
2/n The sad story of NLMR and the delays in journals and authors in issuing retractions of clearly spurious papers containing damaging public health messages that include *literally impossible* findings is told here /cont
Just seen that @ucl have made Lyndsay Farrall's 1969 PhD "The origins and growth on the English Eugenics movement" easily found with new intro by @profjoecain It remains perhaps the best overview of the topic, and deflates some myths. The survey of /contucl.ac.uk/sts/sites/sts/…
2/n the well-known members of the "Eugenics Education Society" and a random sample show academics and medical doctors the most common professions, that leftists as well as conservatives well represented, that Lamarckian eugenics was a thing (so much for the bizarre notion /cont
3/4 that transgenerational epigenetics in its soft inheritance form is somehow more progressive than genetics), that biometricians were as common as Mendelians amongst the early eugenicists. Essentially the desire to stop the working class reproducing was ahead of racism /cont
A brilliant 1984 chapter in the "Encyclopaedia of Medical Ignorance" by Richard Peto anticipated much of the advances in understanding of cancer since then, and is now accessible in @SpringerNature European Journal of Epidemiology. A personal🧵on it/ cont link.springer.com/article/10.100…
1/n I first read this sitting on a stool in the HK Lewis medical bookshop on Gower Street soon after it came out; the book was outside my budget & the rest not so interesting. It felt like the 19th century in Lewis' anachronistic shop, there were hardly any customers /cont
@Lyonpaul @mrc_ieu @SpringerNature @The_MRC 2/n no one seemed to buy anything and the rumour was it was a front for an MI5 office. I was left alone reading away, and was entranced by the sparkling language but must admit I understood hardly any of it. I recalled it when reprinting another Richard Peto chapter in/cont
A twee story on tea by @TorstenBell in @guardian suggests increased consumption of tea (using boiled water) led to a fall in mortality in Britain. This might be true, but there is no mention of how this was linked to massively increased deaths in India 🧵 theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
1/n The academic paper @guardain story is based on suggests that growing tea consumption by the working class after 1784 in Britain led to a fall in mortality. It uses what it calls "The Tea and Windows Act of 1784" which led to a dramatic fall /cont repec.iza.org/dp15016.pdf
@guardain 2/n in taxation on tea. There was no such act, though the 1784 Commutation act did decrease tax on tea from over 100% to 12.5%, and tea imports went up. Why was this act introduced? It was introduced on the behest of Richard Twinning - of Twinning's tea that some vanity /cont
In 2018 we published a non-linear Mendelian randomisation (NLMR) study in @ObesitySociety and it is now clear the method we applied is deeply flawed, so in October we published a Perspective correcting it. A 🧵on the cautionary tale of NLMR onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…
2/n Naïve observational studies report J- or U- shaped upturns of mortality at lower levels of BMI. Our paper using UK Biobank (UKB; @uk_biobank) data suggested overall adverse effects of BMI on mortality, and (though very imprecisely estimated) the NLMR suggested a lower /cont
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are apparently the new poison, and a recent @bmj_latest report by @rebeccacoombes suggests conflicts of interests in the “expert” views presented @smc_london that weren’t enthusiastic enough in promoting this notion. /contbmj.com/content/383/bm…
2/n Opposing these @DoctorChrisVT says there is “overwhelming evidence” of UPFs being harmful. The prospective studies (contrary to the quote, these were not “trials”, where people were randomised to higher or lower UPF consumption) do not show UPFs cause harm / cont
@DoctorChrisVT 3/n Their use is strongly patterned by socioeconomic position, health behaviours and other factors that would generate non-causal associations in such studies. Nor does the fact the studies were done @imperialcollege or adjust for some covariates. An equally large body / cont