Between 1909 and 1914, imprisoned militant suffragettes undertook hunger strikes across Britain and Ireland. Public distaste for the practice of forcible feeding ultimately led to the passing of the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, or ‘the Cat and Mouse Act’ as it was more commonly known. The 25^th of April 2013 marks the 100^th anniversary of this Act, passed so that prison medical officers could discharge hunger-striking suffragettes from prisons if they fell ill from hunger.

“Torturing Women in Prison. Vote Against the Government.”  London: National Women’s Social and Political Union, ca. 1909.  Color Lithograph. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (117b)

My research revealed that contrasting perspectives existed on the purpose of forcible feeding: whether it was a therapeutic or coercive practice. The Home Office insisted that prison doctors performing the practice were preserving the life of prisoners who would otherwise starve. According to this perspective, forcible feeding was safe, humane, and ethically uncomplicated. In response, enraged suffragettes filled the pages of their newspaper Votes for Women with contradictory medical testimony claiming that forcible feeding risked producing an array of complaints including throat laceration, stomach damage, heart complaints, syncope, and septic pneumonia should food accidentally enter the lungs.

Medical opposition was rife. Suffragette doctor Louisa Garrett Anderson publicly insisted that forcible feeding was coercive. Physiologist Charles Mansell-Moullin asserted that ‘violence and brutality have no place in hospital’. Psychiatrist Lyttelton Forbes Winslow stated that so many risks were proven to accompany artificial feeding in clinical practice that he had long since abandoned the method, adding details of one case where the patient had allegedly bitten off his own tongue after it had become twisted behind the feeding tube.

The suffragettes left a rich array of autobiographical and printed resources which detail their problematic encounters with Edwardian prison doctors. For instance, in 1909, Laura Ainsworth wrote of her painful feeding through her nostrils with a tube. In addition, she described an alternative procedure which involved the prison medical officers pinning her down, her mouth being prised open with a steel instrument, and the insertion of a tube into her gullet which caused choking and intense nausea. Ainsworth continued to be fed twice daily in this manner until she was eventually moved to a hospital to be fed with a feeding cup. The following year, another female prisoner recalled how she had once overheard her doctor exclaiming that ‘this is like stuffing a turkey for Christmas’.

Artist/Photographer/Maker, Women’s Social and Political Union, David Allen. Date, 1914. Museum of London. Image Number 004152.

Between 1909 and 1914, opponents of forcible feeding strove to decisively prove its physical and psychological consequences. They raised fascinating ethical questions: did forcible feeding have adverse psychological effects? Did it cause illness or simply hasten pre-existing conditions? And was it ethically appropriate to forcibly feed mentally ill individuals? A particularly provocative case which I discovered was that of William Ball, subject to the procedure from Christmas Day 1911. By February, Ball believed that he was being tormented by electricity. Although his imaginary fears of electrical torture subsided, he began smashing his prison windows under a false illusion that a detective was waiting outside for him. Some weeks later, Ball announced to his prison officials that he no longer minded his electrical torture so much but objected vehemently to the needle torture that he was now being subjected to. In June 1912, Emily Davison threw herself on to the wire netting on the prison landing, and then dramatically flung herself through a gap in the netting, crashing onto a set of stone stairs. Davison later recounted this attempted act of suicide as resulting directly from the horrors of being forcibly fed.

Efforts to prove the harmful physical and psychological effects of forcible feeding became ever more refined following Ball’s case. In 1912, dermatologist Agnes Savill, Mansell-Moullin, and surgeon Victor Horsley published an extensive report intended to pressure the government into reassessing its policy. They delivered an extensive account of the physical and mental implications of forcible feeding that detailed a range of physical and emotional effects including cerebro-spinal neurasthenia and exaggerated knee reflexes and fatigue. The authors also identified the mental anguish produced by hearing the cries, choking, and struggles of their friends as psychologically damaging.

Pankhurst, Emmeline (1911). The Suffragette. New York: Sturgis & Walton Company. p. 433.

The issue of feeding patients who suffered from physical or mental debility also captured public attention. During 1913, the Home Office came to believe that militant suffragettes were encouraging “abnormal and neurotic” individuals to become imprisoned to increase the likelihood of martyrdom. It feared that militants were being specially selected to commit punishable crimes who were “weaklings suffering from physical defects in order to cause as much embarrassment as possible to the authorities.” Types believed to have been chosen ranged from people with histories of fits, those who had suffered a nervous breakdown, the “mentally unstable” and the “eccentric.” Margaret James was noted to be “a dwarf, an epileptic, and a cripple, and in weak physical condition.” Her medical officers feared that, if forcibly fed, epilepsy and mental excitement might ensue, firmly tipping James over the borderline to insanity. Royal assent was given to the Cat and Mouse Act on 25 April 2013 in response to public unease about, and medical opposition to, forcible feeding.

Ian Miller is a Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, University College Dublin. He is the author of “‘A Prostitution of the Profession’? Forcible Feeding, Prison Doctors, Suffrage and the British State, 1909–1914” in the latest issue of Social History of Medicine, which is available to read for free for a limited time. His first monograph, A Modern History of the Stomach: Gastric Illness, Medicine and British Society, 1800-1950 was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011. A second monograph, Reforming Food in Post-Famine Ireland: Medicine, Science and Improvement, 1845-1922, is in press with Manchester University Press. Read his food history blog Digesting the Medical Past and follow him on Twitter @IanMill33234498.

Social History of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.

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The front cover of Lady Ann Fanshawe’s manuscript recipe book (Wellcome MS 7113). Creative Commons by permission of Wellcome Images.

Early modern Britons even kept on hand instructions to make medicines to heal diseases like smallpox and the plague. They thought that householders should have knowledge of how to deal with all eventualities, even life-threatening ailments. In this era the most important site of healing was the home. When you fell ill, you would almost invariably begin your search for recovery at home, and even if you graduated to paying for outside medical care, healers would usually come to your home. The home therefore played an essential role in care, nursing, recovery, and in the end death.

We can get a vivid idea of the range of health problems people thought they might need to face at home from a unique and fascinating type of historical document, the manuscript recipe book. Many people who weren’t in any medical occupation nonetheless traded and collected recipes instructing them in how to make medicines at home. Some then gathered their recipes into handwritten volumes like the one pictured above, which belonged to the Lady Ann Fanshawe, wife of the Royalist, MP, diplomat, and writer Sir Richard Fanshawe. Lady Ann was herself a memoirist. Much like her, most collectors took down medical and cookery recipes as well as those for household supplies like ink, cosmetics, perfumes, and more. Hundreds of manuscript collections survive, though of course they were only compiled by those like Lady Ann with enough wealth to undertake such a project.

There was also a healthy trade in printed recipe collections. Here is the frontispiece and title page to one from 1655, Natura Exenterata. Creative Commons by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

A woman does the difficult work of distillation. From The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities (1691). Creative Commons by permission of Wellcome Images.

Medical recipes in these manuscripts run the gamut from simple, single-substance medicines (like one using just sheep’s skin) to complex concoctions with exotic and expensive ingredients. For example, another asks for unicorn horn and bezoar stone (a stone found in the digestive systems of animals and reputed to be a powerful poison antidote). Recipes could also be highly complex to follow. For instance, many involve distillation, an art requiring specialized training and equipment.

These collections were filled with directions for making medicines to use in the home, and they therefore tell us what compilers thought they might need to heal there. Domestic healers collected recipes for a broad array of ailments, including life-threatening ones. Clearly, they thought they might have to manage severe illnesses and injuries at home. Let’s look at a few examples.

Recipes for plague preventatives and cures are very common, both in print and manuscript collections. The title of this one from a collection owned by Mrs Anne Brumwich and Rhoda Hussey (wife of Baron Ferdinando Fairfax), claims that it was used to “help 600 in York,” and that “in one house where 8 were infected 2 of them drunk of it and lived, the others would not and died.” The recipe instructs readers in concocting a tisane from rue, marigold, featherfew, burnet, sorrel, and dragon root. These were all ingredients easily available from gardens or growing in the wild. Then sugar and a poison antidote (mithridate) are added. Both of these were available in apothecaries’ shops. This was an easy recipe to follow, and it promised a powerful cure for one of the diseases that most terrified people. It’s easy to see why someone might have added it to their collection.

“An excellent recipe for the plague.” From Anne Brumwich and others, Booke of Receipts, Wellcome MS 160, fol. 58r. Creative Commons by permission of the Wellcome Library.

Rickets is another disease frequently addressed in manuscript recipe collections. We know rickets as a deficiency disease that remains a scourge of children in developing nations, but seventeenth-century people had no knowledge of vitamins or other modern nutritional concepts. They did, however, see rickets as a debilitating, indeed deadly, disease. The London Bills of Mortality, which listed causes of death in the capital, indicate particular prevalence in the seventeenth century. They record hundreds of deaths from the disease. Recipe collections show great fear of it; many contain multiple, often highly complex directions for treating rickets in children.

A rickets medicine. From the Lady Ann Fanshaw’s collection, Wellcome MS 7113, fol. 111r. Creative Commons by permission of the Wellcome Library.

This recipe from Lady Ann Fanshawe’s collection, attributed to Mrs Price, gives instructions for making a topical medicine and applying it to a child’s body. It’s another simple recipe, one we can easily imagine making in a seventeenth-century home. It asks for calves’ (“neats”) feet, some common plants, and wine, all prepared with some simple cooking procedures. It then tells us how to apply the medicine by rubbing it upwards on the child’s back from the backside to the lower torso, on the back of the thighs and calves, and on the wrists. Finally, you swathe the child’s wrists and ankles. Again, we can imagine why this would have appealed to a collector. Rickets was another terrifying disease, and this recipe offered parents a cheap and easy cure, guiding them through the entire process of preparation and application. The certainty of such a recipe, with the endorsement that came with its attribution, must have been comforting.

From our point of view it’s unlikely that these medicines could have done much for the ill. Indeed, it can be quite distressing to imagine what our own prospects and experiences would have been, long before (for instance) reliable anaesthetics or knowledge of antibiotics. Early modern people did not take a resigned attitude towards the dangers of their world, however. Nor were they entirely dependant on medical practitioners. They stockpiled directions for homemade cures for the full range of injuries and illnesses, right up to the deadliest and most dangerous.

DISCLAIMER: This post discusses medicines strictly in a historical context. It does not endorse the use of these medicines in any way. It should not be used as healthcare advice.

Seth Stein LeJacq is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation research deals with the history of the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail. His essay “The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England” in the Social History of Medicine won the Roy Porter Student Prize Essay 2013.

Social History of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.

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Too often patients feel like they’re in the passenger seat when entering the hospital. Even in the best of circumstances — such as planned admissions — patients often don’t feel in control of their own care.

Image credit: Photo by Jose Goulao, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

1. Let someone know if you are in pain. This may seem obvious, but patients often hesitate to question their doctor. Pain control during your hospital stay is not a luxury, and you need to know you have a right to pain control during your stay. If your doctor or nurse is not answering your questions regarding pain, ask to see pain specialist who will likely address your concerns as well as the concerns of the doctors and nurses taking care of you. Unfortunately when it comes to treating pain, not all doctors are trained equally.
2. Have a family member or good friend to act as your advocate. Have this individual get involved in your medical care and act on your behalf during your hospitalization.
3. Search for the right hospital for your medical condition. People end up at hospitals for a variety of reasons, but which hospital you go to for your care can make all of the difference. There are several websites that rate hospitals including Hospital Compare, HealthGrades, US News & World Report, and Consumer Reports. Many of these sites allow you to compare hospitals on a variety of criteria, including death rates for a variety of conditions — from heart attacks to pneumonia to surgeries. Hospital Compare, a website provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, even allows you to see how patients felt about how their pain was treated during their stay.
4. Ask questions. Many people are afraid to question their nurses and doctors. Don’t be. If a medication looks new or different, ask what it is and what it is for. As long as you are polite and respectful, your request should be met with acceptance. If you don’t understand something, always question about it. Be assertive.
5. Keep a notebook during your hospital stay, and know your medications and allergies. Record your daily progress, pain levels, medication names and dosages, procedures, treatments, and the names and contact information of your medical team. This way you know what is working well for you pain. Also take notes on conversations with doctors and nurses. Carry the most up-to-date list of your allergies with you, along with another list that contains information on all medications you are taking and the dosages.
6. Meet with your doctors and nurses. Ask your loved one to join you during doctors’ rounds so he or she can also make a list and help you go through your checklist. It’s handy to have someone there to ask questions you may have forgotten. Have your notebook handy. Prepare questions ahead of time about your diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Show appreciation to your primary nurse. The more good will you express to this professional, the more attention you will receive. More attention translates to the probability of fewer errors.
7. Avoid medical errors. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year in hospitals due to medical errors. Medication errors are among the most common medical errors, harming at least 1.5 million people every year. Write down your medications and dosages. List what the medication looks like, the shape and color of any pills, and the names on the labels of bottles or IV bags. Holidays, weekends, and nights have higher likelihood of medical errors, so ask your advocate to be with you as much as possible during these times to help avoid medical errors.
8. Once recovered, leave the hospital as soon as medically possible. While a hospital is the ideal place when you need lifesaving care, it can also create the perfect storm of risks to your health. Hospital-acquired infections, deadly blood clots, falls, and many other “complications” can result from your hospital stay. Every day that you stay in the hospital unnecessarily exposes you to these risks. Ask every person who comes in contact with you, including the physicians and nurses, to wash their hands or put on a fresh pair of disposable gloves before touching you.

Dr. Anita Gupta is a Board Certified Anesthesiologist, Pain Specialist, Pharmacist & Editor. She is an awarding winning physician and is currently an Associate Professor and Medical Director at Drexel College of Medicine in the Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology in Philadelphia, PA. She has completed the Wharton Total Leadership Program, an active member of the World Health Organization, founder of Women in Medicine, and has been featured on NBC for health topics related to treating pain. She has been a continuous recipient of the National Patients and Compassionate Physician Choice Award from 2010 to 2012, and author of top selling textbooks, Interventional Pain Medicine and Pharmacology in Anesthesia Practice.  She also completed the competitive media and medical advocacy fellowship with the Mayday Foundation in Washington DC.

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The night I saw The Avengers for the first time, I took the train back to my apartment and immediately dashed off the following email to a friend of mine:

“The Avengers was amazing, I can’t even describe it. Feeling strangely fearless about life, and my head is filled with too many intellectual thoughts about superheroes.”

A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, driven by excessive euphoria and a distinct lack of sleep, but all’s fair in the world of comics and “POW BAM KABLAM.” In some ways, that email is the most succinct explanation of my relationship with superheroes that I’ve ever offered to anyone.

Perhaps because I became a fan of comic-book superheroes relatively late in the game (I didn’t so much as pick up a graphic novel until my freshman year of college), my fascination with superheroes has always been a healthy mix of unadulterated love and academic curiosity. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with me knows I can rave for hours about the beauty of Matt Fraction’s new Hawkeye series. Anyone who spends more than ten minutes with me knows that I’ve also presented at an academic conference about Hawkeye and depictions of disability in comics—and about the importance of looking at popular culture through a critical as well as enthusiastic lens.

When I started as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press ten months ago, two of the first titles I began work on were Our Superheroes, Ourselves, edited by Robin Rosenberg, and What is a Superhero?, edited by Robin Rosenberg and Peter Coogan. They’ve been a learning experience in more ways than one. It’s been a fantastic opportunity to work on a project whose topic was so close to my heart. The books operate at a unique and brilliant intersection between enthusiastic love and academic inquiry—celebrating superheroes even as they ask why they remain such compelling and permanent fixtures in our cultural landscape. In preparing the manuscripts for production, corresponding with the volume editors, and reaching out to academics and comic-book writers alike for endorsements, I’ve had ample opportunity to reflect on the nature of superheroes and their meaning to fans and creators.

From my own personal perspective, there has always been something particularly joyous about not only being a fan of superheroes but also participating in the communities that have sprung up around them, especially when one considers the multitude of angles that people approach comics fandom. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more passionate group of people than superhero and science fiction fans—people who love these stories so much that they will devote hours of their creative energy into writing, drawing, and putting together costumes of their favorite superheroes. People love superheroes because they mean the world to them, for one reason or another, and to take part in such a collective passion will always be a ridiculously fun experience.

At the same time, I have always been an eager student of American history, and superheroes offer an important reflection not only on our current society but also on our own cultural history. As several contributors to What is a Superhero? point out, it’s no coincidence that the rise of the modern-day superhero occurred in 1930s America, in the depths of the Great Depression and on the eve of the second World War. Our same heroes have proven to be remarkably pliant and adaptable over the years (much like the ever-elastic Mr. Fantastic), molding to fit the country’s political and social climate. It’s quite telling, for example, that it took until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s for Marvel to create its first African-American superhero, the Black Panther, and that one of Ms. Magazine’s first covers was an image of Wonder Woman in 1972, heralding the second-wave feminist movement. More recently, I re-watched the 2008 Iron Man film and was struck by how dated it already is even five years later. It’s extremely attuned to the politics of the late Bush years, and strives to offer commentary on the United States’ wars abroad even as it delivers high-flying adventures with Tony Stark.

No matter what the time period, superheroes will always mean something different to each individual fan, and everyone seems to have a different idea of what makes a superhero—not only that, everyone seems to have a different favorite, and a huge variety of reasons why. Some fans prefer their superheroes to be high above mere mortals, a flawless ideal to aspire to. Some prefer their superheroes to have their own weaknesses and flaws in personality, making for a more human, relatable hero. Luckily the genre has something for everyone—Superman fans will be getting their fill this summer with Man of Steel, while fans of the more flawed superhero cheered on genius billionaire playboy Tony Stark in Iron Man 3.

Personally, the superhero that has made the biggest difference in my life is Bruce Banner, aka The Incredible Hulk, particularly Mark Ruffalo’s rendition of the character in The Avengers last year. Banner’s quiet struggle with his inner demon that becomes the Hulk has resonated with me more than any superhero narrative I’d ever encountered. To see Banner quietly and eloquently work to overcome his demons, to master this worst part of himself and channel it into something heroic—something that could help save the world—meant more to me than I’ll ever be able to express.

Bruce Banner’s journey with the Incredible Hulk was the primary reason I wrote that email a year ago, why I said to my friend I was feeling strangely fearless about life. Superheroes can offer us limitless inspiration, whether it’s in the blatant smashing of the Hulk or in the joyous pursuit of flight seen in Kelly Sue DeConnick’s new Captain Marvel series.Our Superheroes, Ourselves, and What is a Superhero? have provided me with more than a few hours of deep thoughts, and I couldn’t be more excited to help bring them to the world.

Suzanne Walker works as an editorial assistant at OUP. She recently gave a presentation called “Deafening Outcry: Hawkeye, Transformative Works, and the Recreation of Disability,” at Syracuse University’s Disability Studies conference. When not at work she reads and blogs about comics. She tries to channel Bruce Banner more often than she tries to channel the Hulk.

Image credit: Photo by Suzanne Walker. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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The AMA Manual of Style is a must-have guide for anyone involved in medical and scientific publishing. Users can access the full-text of the print book, plus online only content including monthly quizzes, blog posts and updates. This is the go-to resource for producing articles and research papers that are well organized and authoritative.

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The recent revelations concerning widespread US government access to electronic communications data (including the PRISM system apparently run by the National Security Agency) leave many questions unanswered, and new facts are constantly emerging. Thoughtful commentators should be hesitant to make detailed pronouncements before it is clear what is actually going on.

Nevertheless, given the potential of these developments to fundamentally reshape the data protection and privacy landscape, I cannot resist drawing a few high-level, preliminary conclusions, from a European perspective:

Legal protection without political commitment is insufficient to protect privacy. In the regulation of data flows across national borders, trying to resolve conflicts between privacy regulation and government access requirements solely through legal means puts more pressure on the law than it can bear. In addition to strong legal measures, we need greater commitment to privacy protection at the political level, which unfortunately is lacking in many countries.

Government access to personal data is a global issue. International Data Privacy Law recently published a detailed legal analysis last year of systematic government access to private-sector data in nine countries (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, the UK, and the US), and concluded that a lack of adequate transparency and clear legal standards in this area is a global problem. Revelations about the US programs should not distract attention from issues regarding government access to data in other countries.

There should be more transparency around government data access. Governments have yet to learn one of the main lessons from data breach cases, namely that they need to be dealt with openly and transparently. It would have been preferable if there had been a reasoned public discussion about these law enforcement programs over the last few years, rather than having them explode in the press like a bombshell.

Penalizing discussion of the possibility of government data access is counterproductive. Laws that prohibit discussing the existence of government data access programs should be changed. How can we judge whether access is necessary and legally justified if we can’t even mention the fact that it is occurring? And I can’t believe that many terrorists nowadays are ignorant of the fact that their electronic communications may be subject to government surveillance.

The debate about the legality of these programs so far has been simplistic. Since news of these surveillance programs broke, some commentators have argued that all law enforcement surveillance is illegitimate, while others maintain that it is presumptively permissible as long as it is useful. Such a black-or-white approach is incorrect and unsatisfying. There is a need for a more sophisticated analysis, which could be based on well-established European legal concepts such as whether a particular surveillance program is proportionate, and whether it is necessary in a democratic society.

These revelations will cause embarrassment to European governments as well to the United States. The legal and political fallout will not be limited to the US. It is well-known that the US shares a good deal of intelligence with European countries, and awkward questions are already being raised about the extent to which European intelligence services may have accessed data collected by the US under PRISM and similar programs.

Distinguishing between privacy protection for nationals and foreigners is indefensible. On 7 June, President Obama attempted to reassure the American public by saying that access to Internet and e-mail data “does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States”. Such statements will only cause concern among the billions of Internet users outside the US. Having stressed the need for a global system of privacy protection in its February 2012 report on “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World”, it is inconsistent for the White House imply that US citizens should be given a higher level of privacy protection than non-citizens.

These developments will have major consequences for data protection and privacy law. The long-term effect of these developments on data protection and privacy law cannot yet be foreseen, but some consequences are already apparent. For instance, the EU General Data Protection Regulation proposed in 2012 by the European Commission, final approval of which has been hampered by political disagreement, may receive new impetus from the recent revelations, while the proposed EU-US Free Trade Agreement may suffer.

The effectiveness of data protection and privacy regulation is ultimately dependent on individuals having confidence in how their data are processed. This confidence has been severely shaken in recent days; it is important for both governments and the private sector to take steps to strengthen it, before it is too late.

Dr. Christopher Kuner is editor-in-chief of the journal International Data Privacy Law. He is author of European Data Protection Law: Corporate Compliance and Regulation, and the new book Transborder Data Flow Regulation and Data Privacy Law in which he elaborates some of the topics discussed here. Dr. Kuner is Senior Of Counsel at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Brussels, and an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for European Legal Studies, University of Cambridge.

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It’s the summer of the superhero here at Oxford University Press. We’re publishing two essay collections on the real powers superheroes hold — on our imagination and our understanding of the world. Our Superheroes, Ourselves, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, and What is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD and Peter Coogan, PhD, look at some of our greatest superheroes (and supervillains) and explore what exactly makes them “super”. We immediately think of the superhuman powers that our heroes use to save the day. But then again, superpowers can be used for good or evil…

What do you want for your superpower and why? Just as the powers and abilities of Batman and Superman reveal their personal history, your choice reveals a great deal about yourself. So in the spirit of revealing the truth about our superheroes — and ourselves — we are holding an essay contest to find out exactly what you’re made of. Simply follow the guidelines below on submitting your essay and you could be wearing Oxford lycra before you know it (wearing Oxford lyrca = holding an Oxford book). Entries will be judged by Oxford University Press superhero staff experts (costumes optional; secret identities to be protected and all).

Submission guidelines:

• One entry per person. If multiple entries are submitted, only the first will be considered and you will incur the wrath of your greatest nemesis.
• Entries must be no longer than 500 words. Longer entries will be zapped or kapowed.
• Email your submission to blog[at]oup[dot]com by midnight US Eastern time on 14 July 2013. Entries received after that time will not be considered and swallowed by a time vortex.
• Subject must read “OUP Superhero essay contest-(title)” (e.g., OUP Superhero essay contest-Power of Flight)
• Body of the email must include the title of the essay and your full name and contact information (street address, email, phone)
• The essay must be included in an attached document that does not include your name to facilitate blind judging. Title of the attachment must be the title of your essay.
• Be clear about whether the superpower is for good or evil, or the interpretation will be at the mercy of the judges.
• By entering the competition, you agree to these Terms and Conditions.

What the judges are looking for?

• Proper grammar, spelling, and style. Never forget the Oxford comma!
• The craftsmanship of a hero who has come on a long journey to fully realize their powers.
• Imaginative detail and creativity in your writing utility belt.
• What the entry reveals about the everyday hero behind the mask.

What will you win?

• A free copy of Our Superheroes, Ourselves, What is a Superhero?, and Classics and Comics (one of each).
• Two tickets to 92nd Street Y Tribeca event “What is a Superhero?” on 24 July 2013 (normally $15/ticket).
• The winning essay(s) will be published on the OUPblog on 19 July 2013.
• We reserve the right not to award a prize if we feel the submissions do not meet our criteria.

Go now, Braniacs, Black Widows, and Batmen, and use your creative powers to submit a piece! The fate of the world depends on it.

Robin S. Rosenberg is a clinical psychologist. In addition to running a private practice, she writes about superheroes and the psychological phenomena their stories reveal. She is editor of Psychology of Superheroes, Our Superheroes, Ourselves, and What is a Superhero?.

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Image credit: Hugh Jackman X-Men Origins Wolverine gif, creative commons license via Perez Hilton.

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The research that went into my monograph was, like most academic scholarship, very specific: it focused on the ways in which Victorian poets drew on, contributed to, and resisted the development of the scientific discipline of psychology in the mid-nineteenth century. However, as is invariably the case with even the most recondite research, it also addressed larger issues. In this case, different ways literature and psychological science represent the mind, and the relationship between artistic and scientific approaches to human experience more generally. These issues are however necessarily subordinated to the detailed textual and critical analysis that forms the basis of academic literary study.

After The Poet’s Mind was published, and as I continued to research the intersections between literature and science in the nineteenth century, I kept thinking about how to combine detailed academic research with a consideration of the broader questions raised by that research. Hopeful that those questions would be of interest to a wide audience, I applied to the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinkers initiative, which offers humanities researchers in the early stages of their careers the opportunity to discuss their research on Radio 3’s Night Waves programme and at the BBC’s annual Free Thinking Festival. In May I was announced as one of the New Generation Thinkers for 2013.

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to share my research with non-academic audiences, but now that the initial thrill of excitement has subsided and I’m starting to think about my first broadcast, I find myself asking questions about the relationship between academic scholarship and public engagement. How can I share the ideas behind my research, clearly and engagingly, with a broad audience, without losing sight of the difficult intellectual problems which drew me to my subject in the first place? How can I reconcile the complex details and the big ideas which I see as equally vital to academic research?

Image credit: the 2013 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers, with Gregory Tate second from left, back row; provided by the BBC.

Shahidha Bari, one of the New Generation Thinkers for 2011, has examined the same issues. ‘Difficulty is what academics deal in,’ Bari writes, and she argues powerfully against the notion that this difficulty needs to be reduced to something more accessible in order for it to be palatable to a non-academic audience. The division between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility’, Bari suggests, is a false one; the difficulty must be retained if the research is to make any substantive contribution to public debates. I support Bari’s comments resolutely, but there remains the practical issue that academic forms for disseminating research (monographs, journal articles, conference papers) and forms of public engagement (radio programmes, blogs) address different audiences, using different styles of language and speaking from and to different frames of reference.Bari’s piece highlights the difficulties of translating between these forms, but, nonetheless, a type of translation is perhaps what is required.Bari’s key point, though, remains unassailable: the process of translating academic research into public engagement cannot dispense with intellectual complexity, which is the essence of the research itself.

Forums in which academics can share their ideas with the public are proliferating at the moment: the launch in May of The Conversation, a news website written by academic researchers, is just one of the latest examples. The heightened focus on public engagement is a challenge for scholars committed to preserving the academic standards and intellectual integrity of their research, but it’s also an opportunity for us to demonstrate how our complex and original work can confront preconceptions, communicate new knowledge and new perspectives, and inform public debates. It’s an opportunity which humanities researchers, who perhaps have been less effective than scientists in publicly advocating the significance of their work, need to embrace while retaining their open-minded scepticism and determination to interrogate assumptions. Academics are skilled in communicating and discussing their ideas in the classroom, and we now need to continue the discussion outside universities as well.

My research on the complex links between literature, science, and psychology in the nineteenth century draws on an impressive body of work by a range of scholars. I strive to meet the high standards of rigour and attention to detail which characterise this work and academic research on literature more generally. I also hope, though, that my close analysis of nineteenth-century literature, and my consideration of its links to science, will be of interest to a non-academic audience, both in itself and because I’m convinced that an awareness of nineteenth-century views of the relation between literature and science can inform current debates about the place of the humanities and the sciences in education and culture. The question of how to combine these two aspects of research, the scholarly and the public, is a difficult one, but it’s also pressing and needs to be addressed. Luckily, academics are not shy about tackling difficult questions.

Gregory Tate is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. His book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870, is published by Oxford University Press. You can follow him on Twitter @drgregorytate.

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Federal law in the United States requires restaurants with at least 20 locations nationally to list calorie information next to menu items on menus or menu boards. This law includes the prominent placement of a statement concerning suggested daily caloric intake on the menu. While national menu labeling has not been implemented, some fast food and chain restaurants have begun to post this information voluntarily. Thus, we wanted to know if kids actually use calorie information when it is available and we wanted to know what sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics were associated with using this information.

How was the study conducted?

American youth 9-18 years old were asked in an online survey whether they used calorie information when ordering at fast food or chain restaurants and how frequently they visited a fast food or chain restaurant each week. Youth were also asked to report their height and weight from which we calculated weight status (e.g. healthy weight and obesity). The youth’s parents were questioned in a similar survey to see if their race/ethnicity, household income, marital status, and geographical region of residence were associated with youth’s use of calorie information. The study included 721 kids and excluded those who said that they never eat at fast food or chain restaurants (about 8%) and those who said they never noticed calorie information (about 20%).

What were the findings of this study?

We found that of kids who visited fast food or chain restaurants, over 40% reported using calorie information at least sometimes, when it was available. We also found that girls were more likely than boys and youth who were obese were more likely than those of a healthy weight to use calorie information. We also found that youth who eat at a fast food or chain restaurant twice a week or more were about half as likely to report using calorie compared to kids who go once a week or less. This adds to other information about kid’s eating habits.

Why are these findings important for healthy weight in youth?

Our findings are important given the prevalence of obesity among youth and the adverse health effects associated with obesity. We are encouraged that a large number of youth, particularly those who are obese, are using the calorie information to inform their ordering selections. This finding implies that calorie labeling on menus and menu boards may potentially to lead to improved food choices as a way for obese youth to manage weight. More research is needed to assess whether youth know how many calories they should consume in a day given their activity level. Further research is also needed to understand the differences in motivation to use calorie labeling between boys and girls. Public health practitioners, school nutrition services, retailers, and other interested groups can implement education programs in various venues to assist development of this understanding as a way to improve health literacy.

Holly Wethington, PhD, is a Behavioral Scientist in the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her work focuses on evaluating public health interventions and researching health behaviors related to obesity. She is the author of the article, “Use of calorie information at fast food and chain restaurants among US youth aged 9–18 years, 2010″ which is available to read for free for a limited time.

The Journal of Public Health invites submission of papers on any aspect of public health research and practice. We welcome papers on the theory and practice of the whole spectrum of public health across the domains of health improvement, health protection and service improvement, with a particular focus on the translation of science into action. Papers on the role of public health ethics and law are welcome.

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Tomorrow is World Oceans Day.  To celebrate, the author of Marine Biology: A Very Short Introduction, Philip Mladenov, has written this piece on seamount fisheries.

By Philip Mladenov

Seamounts are distinctive and dramatic features of ocean basins. They are typically extinct volcanoes that rise abruptly above the surrounding deep-ocean floor but do not reach the surface of the ocean. The Global Ocean contains some 100,000 or so seamounts that rise at least 1,000 metres above the ocean floor.

Seamounts represent a very special kind of biological hotspot in the deep ocean. A prolific group of suspension feeding animals dominate the summit and flanks of seamounts, creating dense thicket-like communities comprising cold water stony corals, sea fans, black corals, and sponges that create habitat for a host of other animals including dense aggregations of fish. Many of the corals associated with seamounts show extreme longevity. For example, a type of black coral, Leiopathes, sampled from a seamount in the Pacific Ocean, was shown using radiocarbon dating to be about 4,200 years of age, making it one of the world’s longest living animals.

Seamounts support a great diversity of fish species; the latest census reveals close to 800 species have been recorded living around seamounts. In the 1960s deep sea trawling vessels looking for new stocks of fish began to trawl seamounts and discovered large aggregations of commercially important species. This triggered the creation of new deep-ocean fisheries focused on seamounts. Heavily built bottom trawls are towed from the summit down the flanks of seamounts to capture the fish. Commercial fish species that are targeted include orange roughy, oreos, alfonsinos, grenadiers, and toothfish. These fish are not generally permanent residents of seamounts, but aggregate at seamounts at certain times of the year to spawn, to feed on squid and small fishes, or simply to rest. They are very slow-growing and long-lived and mature at a late age, and thus have a low reproductive potential. A good example of this is the orange roughy, which is known to live for more than a hundred years and reaches maturity at around thirty years of age, with the females producing relatively small numbers of eggs. Such a life history is typical of many deep-ocean fish species.

Seamount fisheries have often been described as mining operations rather than sustainable fisheries. They typically collapse within a few years of the start of fishing and the trawlers then move on to other unexploited seamounts to maintain the fishery. The recovery of localised fisheries will inevitably be very slow, if at all, because of the low reproductive potential of these deep-ocean fish species.

The destruction of fish stocks is not the only concern associated with seamount fishing. The trawling of seamounts causes extensive damage to the fragile coral communities, with the trawls bringing up not only fish, but large numbers of corals and other benthic animals associated with the corals. The intensity of trawling on seamounts can be very high, with many hundreds to thousands of trawls often carried out on the same seamount over time. Tens of tons of coral can be brought up in a single trawl and in one new seamount fishery it was estimated that almost one-third of the total catch consisted of coral by-catch. Comparisons of “fished” and “unfished” seamounts have clearly shown the extent of habitat damage and loss of species diversity brought about by trawl fishing, with the dense coral habitats reduced to rubble over much of the area investigated.

Not surprisingly, seamount-based fisheries have become very controversial. An increasing number of countries have begun to close some of the seamounts present in their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) to fishing. Unfortunately, most seamounts exist in areas beyond national jurisdiction which makes it very difficult to regulate fishing activities on them, although some efforts are underway to establish international treaties to better manage and protect seamount ecosystems.

It appears that the future for seamount ecosystems lies in a delicate balance between protecting some from fishing altogether while allowing fishing on others under some form of regulation. What sort of balance is achieved remains to be seen in the face of declining fish stocks globally versus an unrelenting growing world demand for fish protein. Let’s hope that legislators, fisheries managers, and marine conservationists can work together to ensure that a good proportion of these remarkable seamount ecosystems will be preserved in an intact state as part of a more general effort to sustainably manage our ocean resources.

Philip V. Mladenov is the Director of Seven Seas Consulting Ltd and Chief Executive of the Fertiliser Association of New Zealand. He has more than 35 years of professional experience in marine biological research, teaching, and exploration. He is the author of Marine Biology: A Very Short Introduction and  some 80 scientific papers and a broad range of popular articles, consulting reports, and government reviews.

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Image credit: By NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Biologists since Aristotle have puzzled over the reasons for mass strandings of whales and dolphins, in which large groups of up to several hundred individuals drive themselves up onto a beach. To date, efforts to understand mass strandings have largely focused on the role of presumably causal environmental factors, such as climatic events, bathymetric features or geomagnetic topography. But while these studies provide valuable information on the spatial and temporal variation of strandings, they give little insight into the social mechanisms that compels the whales to follow their counterparts to an almost certain death (at least without human intervention).

So how can we go further in our understanding of these enigmatic events? We believe that deciphering the relationship of the whales and their behavior at the time immediately before and during the stranding is the key. Indeed, social behavior appears to play a critical role in these events as suggested by several accounts of group cohesion during mass strandings; the most striking example of this being the intentional restranding of whales after being refloated during rescue efforts. Yet, previous attempts to describe mass stranding have largely failed to consider these social and behavioral aspects.

That’s where our own interests in mass stranding began. Our idea was to define a testable framework in which we could investigate how social relationships play into the dynamics of the strandings. Our starting point was a long-standing hypothesis regarding the reason for strandings, in which “care-giving behaviors” are mediated by family relationships. In this scenario, the stranding of one or a few whales, because of sickness or some kind of disorientation, triggers a chain reaction in which other healthy individuals are drawn into the shallows in an effort to support their family members. We draw two predictions from this scenario: first, that the whales in a stranding event should all be related to each other through a single ancestral female or matriarch. Second, that close relatives, especially mothers and calves, should be found in close proximity to each other when they end up on the beach during a stranding event.

Long-finned pilot whale spyhopping in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Over 400 genetic samples were used to describe the kinship of individual long-finned pilot whales involved in 12 different mass strandings. Our investigation revealed that stranded groups are not necessarily members of a single extended family, which challenges the notion that mass strandings are driven primarily by kinship-based behavior. To test the second prediction, we needed to assess whether the individuals found near each other when strandings occur were kin related. To do so, we were lucky enough to have the position of whales stranded on the shore for two large mass strandings. To our surprise, no correlation was found between spatial distribution and kinship. Even mothers and nursing calves were not necessarily together when the whales drove themselves up onto the shore, and in many cases no identifiable mother of stranded unweaned calves was found among the beached whales. We called them the “missing mothers”. We believe that several scenarios could account for this lack of spatial cohesion, including the disruption of social bonds among kin before the actual strandings. It is even possible that the separation of related whales might actually be a contributing factor in the strandings.

Whatever the exact reason for this pattern, the results of this study have important implications for rescue efforts aimed at “refloating” stranded whales. Often, stranded calves are refloated with the nearest mature females, under the assumption that this is the mother. Well-intentioned rescuers hope that refloating a mother and calf together will prevent re-stranding. Unfortunately, the nearest female might not be the mother of the calf. Our results caution against making rescue decisions based only on these assumptions as the refloating of a juvenile and unrelated female could increase the tendency to restrand after rescue, as those individuals seek their still-stranded kin.

Many questions remain unanswered. For instance, where are the “missing mothers”? To answer this, we should make sure that genetic samples are collected from all whales involved in future mass strandings, including from those individuals who do eventually make it back to sea. We also need to know more about the genetic relationship among groups in the open ocean, for comparison to the composition of stranded groups. It seems likely that some form of social disruption takes place prior to strandings, but it remains unknown whether this is simple a consequence of the stranding or is actually a causal force, perhaps due to competitive or even aggressive interactions between multiple social groups.

Marc Oremus is a marine mammal biologist that earned his PhD at the University of Auckland, working on the population and social structure of several species of dolphins. Most of his work is based on a combination of molecular and demographic approaches; he is a member of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium and IUCN Cetacean Specialist Group. Marc Oremus and C. Scott Baker are co-authors of the paper ‘Genetic Evidence of Multiple Matrilines and Spatial Disruption of Kinship Bonds in Mass Strandings of Long-finned Pilot Whales, Globicephala melas’, which appears in the Journal of Heredity.

The Journal of Heredity covers organismal genetics: conservation genetics of endangered species, population structure and phylogeography, molecular evolution and speciation, molecular genetics of disease resistance in plants and animals, genetic biodiversity and relevant computer programs. The journal is published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Genetic Association.

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Image credit: Long-finned pilot whale spyhopping in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. Photo by Barney Moss [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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With as little thought as combing our hair or brushing our teeth, we tweet, engage with family and friends on Facebook, write blogs, and give our opinions on social media sites. On the major streets of all major cities in the world, children, teenagers, professionals, the unemployed, and pensioners alike take calls and send texts without a second thought. Technology is so much a part of our day to day lives that we can barely remember how we could have managed without it. It is also rapidly advancing and taking us along with it. New inventions are rapidly assimilated into our lives and adopted by the vast majority of society.

The human genome was deciphered in 2003. For most people the Human Genome Project has not made even a ripple in the sea of their lives. Yet this advance is at least as significant as anything developed for connecting society. Unfortunately, the genomic revolution has failed to have any real impact on the lives of the average person on the street — that is, until Angelina Jolie’s announcement. She had recently undergone a double mastectomy because she carries the defective gene BRCA1 and I can’t help but wonder what this might do for society’s familiarity with genomics.

There are very few people that can draw global attention to an issue like Angelina Jolie. From her effective and compassionate action on behalf of the victims of rape in war zones, to bringing light to the plight of orphans in the Third World, she is one of the greatest advocates and ambassadors on substantive causes of her generation. The only other woman that possibly had a greater impact and global reach was the late Princess Diana. Now that Angelina Jolie has brought attention and light to her genomic dilemma and plight, one can’t help but hope that this may be what genomics has needed to bring this substantive, complex, and ethereal subject down to street level, to the technological conversant generation.

BRCA1 and BRCA2 are now registering in many people’s consciousness. BRCA1 is a regulator gene in the human cell that controls cell growth. When this gene is defective, cells multiply in an uncontrolled manner, causing cancer. People that carry the defective gene have a higher probability of developing breast, ovarian, and other cancers than people without the defect. Many such women have already watched other close female relatives in their families die from one or both of these cancers. Angelina Jolie lost her mother to ovarian cancer at the young age of 56.

This needed publicity also helps to shine light on other aspects of genomics, including the patenting of genes. BRCA1 genes were patented by Myriad Genetics in 1997. The Supreme Court is considering the legality of the patenting of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The legal outcome will be available in June 2013. Of course, the investment of time and effort to determine the importance of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes should be financially rewarded. In this case, it seems inappropriate to allow a firm, any firm, to patent a gene that it did not create. Sadly, BRCA1 and BRCA2 are only the tip of the iceberg. Approximately more than 20% of the human genome has been patented.

Myriad Genetics is the only firm that can test for the mutation in the United States, giving Myriad Genetics an effective monopoly. The cost of the test is approximately $3000. This is prohibitively expensive for many women who would take the test if they could. Not only is the test expensive, but the cost of any preventive surgery is also prohibitively expensive for many women.

It is my hope that the Supreme Court will make the right decision in this case. Ordinary women who do not have the access to the resources that Angelina Jolie has should be able to be tested for their BRCA1 and BRCA2 status if they so wish, especially if they are from high risk families. At some point the ethics of earning huge profits in the face of inaccessibility to potentially life-saving tests must be questioned. The economics of greater access to the test may make the test profitable at lower cost rates. Regardless of potentially reduced costs, it has to be asked if it is ethical and responsible for Myriad Genetics to continue to keep the cost of the test as high as it is.

Dr. Lorna Speid is the author of Clinical Trials: What Patients and Healthy Volunteers Need to Know. She is the president of Speid and Associates, Inc., a regulatory affairs and drug development consultancy and has worked for the international pharmaceutical industry since the late 1980s.

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Image credit: Pink ribbon with word ‘Care’ surrounded by female paperdoll. © Rudyanto Wijaya via iStockphoto.

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Our memories, in many ways, define who we are as an individual or at least who we think we are. In the recent documentary, Stories We Tell, filmmaker Sarah Polley presents her own tale of the search for her biological father. Through interviews with relative and friends, snapshots, and re-enactments of pertinent events that look like old home movies, the documentary moves like a real-life Rashomon, wherein bits of the “truth” are revealed from various points of views. The stories revolve around Sarah’s mother, Diane Polley, a stage actress who died of cancer when Sarah was 11 years old. The “seminal” event, if you will, took place nine months before Sarah’s birth, when Diane took an extended leave and moved hundreds of miles away from home and family to perform in a play in Montreal. As such, there was opportunity and several prime suspects in the mystery of Sarah’s biological father.

Sarah Polley in Stories We Tell.

During family gatherings, jokes were often made that Sarah didn’t really look like anyone else in the family, particularly Michael, Sarah’s putative father. Michael, however, never questioned his paternity as he did visit Diane in Montreal during her time away. Much of the film is presented from Michael’s perspective, though we very soon appreciate the disparity of interpretations through other players, including Sarah’s biological father (part of the fun is the revelation of who this man is, and I won’t spoil the fun). With Sarah’s mother unable to provide her own recollections, we are left with Michael’s story, the biological father’s story (which has its own depth and poignancy), and Sarah’s perspective as defined by what she decided to portray in the re-enactments and how she decided to edit the interviews. Indeed, an essential and wonderfully pertinent aspect of the movie is the way Polley shows how memories are reconstructed “stories” built from true experiences plastered with fictional additions and modifications.

Memory researchers have long viewed recollections as stories that are reconstituted each time we tell them. As we replay our memories, we add to and color the past. In a chilling retelling of a life event, New York Times columnist and former drug addict David Carr documented his recollection of a day twenty years earlier when he was fired from a job (Carr, 2008, The Night of the Gun, see interview). He remembers going to a bar with an old college buddy, Donald, to “celebrate” his firing. Spiked with pills, booze, and cocaine, Carr’s behavior was so erratic that he was asked to leave the bar. While outside the premises, Donald complained about Carr’s behavior, which led to him being pushed by Carr against his own Ford LTD. Carr remembers Donald driving off without him but later phoning his friend at home to tell him “I’m coming over” in a rather menacing tone. His friend advises against it and says he has a gun. Ignoring the admonition, Carr arrives at Donald’s door and confronts his friend who has “a handgun at his side.” An altercation breaks out with Carr smashing a window with his fist, Donald calling the cops and saying: “You should leave. They’re coming right now.” Twenty years later, Carr discussed his recollections with Donald, who confirmed much of Carr’s recollection of the day, except for a critical feature—it wasn’t he who had the gun.

The preeminent psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has conducted ingenious experiments about the malleability of our memories and how life events can interfere with each other and blend across time. She has shown that our recollections are indeed reconstructions that are partly true and partly fiction. She has even managed to convince individuals of remembering that they were once lost in a shopping mall, though the “memory” was planted by Loftus in cahoots with a family member. Brain scientists have shown that when we have a strong recollection of a past event (even if it’s a false memory), the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is particularly active. This brain region has been viewed as a convergence zone or integrative area. That is, pieces of an event are stored in various parts of the brain—such as visual ones stored along paths emanating from the back of the brain (V1)—and become linked together as we reconstruct the past. When we try to retrieve a past experience, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) helps guide and search for the stray pieces, and the PPC glues the pieces together as an encapsulated memory, such as remembering a particularly good meal with friends at a new restaurant (figure from Shimamura, 2013).

(c) Arthur P. Shimamura.

Whenever we reminisce about the past, we build stories based on “re-collecting” details of prior events. Movies act as a powerful means of visually narrating our life stories, and Polley’s film offers both a documentation of a personal experience and a lesson in how the telling of our past can be colored. During the movie, one realizes that what looks like footage from home movies from a shaky Super 8 camera are actually re-enactments, the kind of dramatizations often presented in cheesy history documentaries seen on TV. I tend to dislike such portrayals, yet in Polley’s film these re-creations foster the notion that our own memories are reconstructions of the past. One moral of Stories We Tell is that we may never fully know how we got to where we are today. As David Carr has said about his own recollections: “You can’t know the whole truth, but if there is one it lies in the space between people.”

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies (ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, Psychocinematics: Cognition at the Movies.

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For the past 25 years, the World Health Organisation and its partners have marked World No Tobacco Day. This day provides an opportunity to assess the impact of the world’s leading cause of preventable death — responsible for one in ten deaths globally — and to advocate for effective action to end tobacco smoking. This year, the WHO has selected the theme of banning tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship.

Why does this matter?  Some still believe that active smoking is an adult choice and that the tobacco industry should be able to promote its products in the same way as the producers of other consumer goods. Yet research has shown us that the vast majority of the world’s smokers begin using tobacco as children and that advertising influences uptake as well as continued smoking. Removing all forms of tobacco promotion is a key component of effective tobacco control. For this reason, Article 13 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world’s first global public health treaty, requires the 176 jurisdictions that are currently party to the Treaty to introduce comprehensive bans.

What can advertising bans achieve? First, by removing advertising from television, billboards and magazines, for example, we know that the tobacco industry’s ability to deceive consumers about the attractiveness of its product and the ‘health’ benefits of particular forms of tobacco (such as low tar cigarettes or hand-rolled tobacco) is restricted. Secondly, advertising bans (including removing sports sponsorship and point of sale displays) protect children from tobacco marketing, which is important. Although the industry will claim that its marketing is aimed at adults, studies in a number of countries have demonstrated the relationship between exposure to tobacco advertising and smoking in children, with dose effects related to frequency and type of exposure. Finally, research that has examined the impact of voluntary codes to limit tobacco promotion and partial advertising bans has found these to be ineffective. There is no such thing as ‘responsible’ tobacco advertising.

Yet even in developed countries where most forms or tobacco advertising, including point of sale displays, are now banned, one pernicious form of promotion remains. This is tobacco packaging. As government action has removed the ability of the tobacco industry to spend its generous marketing budgets on traditional forms of advertising, companies such as Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco, and Japan International Tobacco have invested in increasingly innovative, attractive, and tailored (aimed at girls and young women, for example) packs. A recent systematic review found 37 studies that examined the potential impact of removing the promotion that branded packaging provides and replacing it with plain or standardised packaging. The studies in the review show that plain packaging would: reduce the appeal of smoking; increase the noticeability of health warnings and messages; and reduce the use of packaging design techniques that mislead consumers about the harmfulness of tobacco products. Some of this research was influential in persuading the Australian government to introduce plain packaging in December 2012, and despite the tobacco industry’s best efforts to derail its introduction through litigation, this policy is now under active consideration in a number of other countries.

Despite the progress made in ending tobacco promotion in some countries, there is still some way to go, particularly in low and middle income countries where smoking rates are still rising.  Today just 6% of the world’s population live in countries where comprehensive tobacco advertising bans are in place. Action is needed to persuade governments who have not yet introduced restrictions — or only have partial bans in place — to end tobacco promotion in their country. A good starting place is to ensure that policymakers understand the weight of evidence underpinning Article 13 of the FCTC, including the role of tobacco packaging in promotion. The research community needs to work with advocates and policy makers to ensure that this evidence is understood and used. It has a powerful role to play in counteracting the ongoing efforts of the tobacco industry to promote a product that kills.

Linda Bauld is Professor of Health Policy at the University of Stirling. She is Deputy Editor of the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Chair of Cancer Research UK’s Tobacco Advisory Group, a visiting professor at the University of Bath and Chair of the NICE Tobacco Harm Reduction Programme Development Group.

To mark this year’s WHO theme of banning tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, the Nicotine and Tobacco Research’s Editor has selected five articles for further reading. They can be read in full and for free on the journal’s website:

1. Implementation and Research Priorities for FCTC Articles 13 and 16: Tobacco Advertising, Promotion, and Sponsorship and Sales to and by Minors
2. Perceptions of Plain and Branded Cigarette Packaging Among Norwegian Youth and Adults: A Focus Group Study
3. Germany SimSmoke: The Effect of Tobacco Control Policies on Future Smoking Prevalence and Smoking-Attributable Deaths in Germany
4. The Association Between Point-of-Sale Displays and Youth Smoking Susceptibility
5. The Effect of Graphic Cigarette Warning Labels on Smoking Behavior: Evidence from the Canadian Experience

Nicotine & Tobacco Research is one of the world’s few peer-reviewed journals devoted exclusively to the study of nicotine and tobacco. It aims to provide a forum for empirical findings, critical reviews, and conceptual papers on the many aspects of nicotine and tobacco, including research from the biobehavioral, neurobiological, molecular biologic, epidemiological, prevention, and treatment arenas. The journal is published by OUP on behalf of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco.

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Image credit: Cigarettes. Photo by robeo, iStockphoto.

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By Thomas Dixon

The story of Doubting Thomas is a wonderful philosophical parable about seeing and believing, but what exactly is the intended moral? And what light does it shed on the relationship between science and religion?

The standard view portrays Doubting Thomas as a scientific hero demanding evidence and refusing to succumb to blind faith. Richard Dawkins has popularised this version since the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. Last September he tweeted, “If there’s evidence, it isn’t faith. Doubting Thomas, patron saint of scientists, wanted evidence. Other disciples praised for not doing so.”

But this is not an entirely convincing interpretation either of the bible or of the nature of scientific knowledge.

In John’s gospel, the other disciples tell Thomas: “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas is not convinced: ”Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A week later Jesus appears to all the disciples, and addresses Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas now believes, and Jesus comments: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Now, remember that according to Dawkins the story is told so that we should admire not Thomas, but the other disciples, “whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence.” What is wrong with that? Well, first of all, the other disciples believed in the resurrection not through blind faith, but because they saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes.

Dawkins is right that we are not supposed to admire Thomas’s refusal to believe, but he is wrong about the reason. Thomas’s behaviour really is a little irrational. What better basis for belief could he have had than the testimony of his most trusted friends? We all have to rely on testimony rather than first-hand experience for the vast majority of our knowledge.

Thomas’s sin was the refusal to believe reliable testimony. The English natural philosopher and theologian John Wilkins wrote about the Doubting Thomas story in the seventeenth century. Jesus’s saying ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ signified, for Wilkins, that it was ‘a more excellent, commendable and blessed thing for a man to yield his assent, upon such evidence as is in itself sufficient, without insisting upon more.’ The testimony of the other disciples should have been in itself sufficient for Thomas; and yet he insisted upon more.

Communal observation and testimony are central to both religion and science. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (c. 1601-2) depicts a collective act of witnessing. Should we, perhaps, even think of Thomas’s finger here as a rudimentary scientific instrument? Is he making a digital measurement? Are the other disciples there to corroborate his observations? Rembrandt’s slightly later painting of an anatomy lesson (1632) can be seen as a transposition of this model to a scientific setting. In both cases, the body of an executed criminal is being probed — in the case of Rembrandt’s image, with forceps rather than just a finger — in front of a group of witnesses, and with the aim of producing knowledge.

The key point here is that these images depict acts of communal knowledge-production. Scientific knowledge, like religious belief, is produced by collaborative acts of observation which, in turn, rely on the observations, testimony and inferences of others.

Richard Dawkins suggests that Doubting Thomas should be the patron saint of scientists. In fact he is patron saint of the blind, which is perhaps more fitting. If Thomas does stand for the view that the true basis of knowledge is unaided individual sense perception, then his is indeed an unscientific world and a world of blindness — a world where, in a phrase of Galileo’s, “one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.” Galileo admired those who believed in the sun-centred system before the advent of the telescope: “They have by sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sense experience plainly showed them to be the case.” Blessed, you might say, are those who have not seen and yet believe.

Returning to Caravaggio’s painting, we see Thomas, his hand being taken by Christ and placed in the wound in his side. Thomas’s eyes are dark, glazed, blank; he is gazing straight ahead, not at the wound. This is indeed a depiction of a blind man – a man being led by the hand towards something he cannot see. Caravaggio seems to say that the man who seeks to base all his knowledge on individual sense experience will see nothing. In both religion and science, the most important beliefs rest on a kind of seeing that cannot be done by an individual alone, that cannot be done with unaided human eyes, and that cannot be done without belief in an unseen realm.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, which won the BSHS Dingle Prize in 2009. You can find him on Twitter at @thomasdixon2013 .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Caravaggio [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Rembrandt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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I have been an oncologist for thirty years, intimately involved in patient care and in the development of novel anti-cancer therapies. Over that time I have seen the average survival for patients with advanced and metastatic colorectal cancer (my particular field of study) improve from six months without treatment, to around two years with the full panoply of currently available medicines. This has been achieved by a series of incremental steps, extending life by about six months for every increase in the complexity of treatment (from supportive care to single agent, to double agent combination, to doublet chemotherapy plus a biological agent). Although there is a relatively linear relationship between clinical outcome and the number of drugs used in combination, the cost of treatment rises exponentially.

Although drug expenditure accounts for approximately 10% of the total costs of cancer treatment, it seems to dominate the public cancer debate. Usually the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) is in the firing line for failing to approve some new drug which does not meet the incremental cost-effective criteria by which they judge all innovative medical technologies. More recently, the government’s Cancer Drug Fund, established as an election promise by David Cameron, has found itself in the headlines, mainly due to lobbyists urging the government to continue this fund.

Interestingly, oddly even, I have had a hand in the establishment of both of these outfits. I was a founding Commissioner for Health Improvement, tasked with supporting implementation of NICE policy — remember that NICE was introduced as an antidote to the postcode prescribing prevalent throughout the NHS — and I was Health Adviser to David Cameron and Andrew Lansley in the run up to the last election and supported the creation of the Cancer Drug Fund and the associated commitment to get the UK’s cancer survival figures up among the best in Europe. The initial idea around the Fund was to make anticancer drugs available for rare cancers for which the evidence base underpinning their use would be more difficult to assemble.

This all begs the question: why do cancer drugs cost so much for so relatively little benefit — months rather than years of added life? There is a mystery in this: an element of ‘what the market will bear’; an element of pricing for failure as the majority of anticancer drugs don’t make it to the clinic; an element of spiraling development costs and regulatory bureaucracy. What there is not in common with so many industries is a direct relationship between cost of manufacture and price. When patents expire and the cancer drug becomes generic, meaning that it can be manufactured by anyone with the appropriate environment and skills, the price can reduce overnight by 85%.

How might we make cancer drugs more affordable? I say ‘we’, because it will require a multisectoral approach to solve the problem. The current model of anticancer drug development may be broken and will need industry, academia, funders of research and government to work together to come up with new ways of increasing  efficiency and likelihood of success. Colleagues of mine in Oxford have started to promulgate the idea of open access science and how we might apply this to developing better cancer drugs, especially in the early discovery phase, and we are considering how we might match  with open access clinical trials linked to real time reporting of side effects and tumour volume.

In the interim, we need to rationalise NICE and the Cancer Drugs Fund. It would be logical to consult widely on the utility of the Fund, on how it has been used, and on its future. It seems illogical and even unfair, that cancer be considered separate from all other diseases. NICE is supposed to provide a unified means of comparing the relative value of interventions across all of medicine, so perhaps the societal debate about the affordability of new drugs should encompass all medical specialties, rather than cancer as a special case.

David Kerr is a Professor of Cancer Medicine at University of Oxford, UK and Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Weill-Cornell College of Medicine, New York, USA. He is one of the editors of Drugs in Cancer Care, a medical text in the Drugs in… series.

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Image credit: cancer cell – closeup. Image by Eraxion, iStockphoto.

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Climbing K2 and unravelling geological history

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How one small rock can reveal the origins of Everest

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Mike Searle has worked for the last 30 years on the geology of the Himalaya, Karakoram, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. He combines geological field investigations with mountaineering expeditions to the greater ranges, and has published more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Colliding Continents: A geological exploration of the Himalaya, Karakoram, and Tibet; Geology and Tectonics of the Karakoram Mountains (1991); and has co-edited four books for the Geological Society of London. He has published a Geological Map of the Mount Everest region, Nepal and South Tibet (2003, 2007) and has given numerous talks about the region.

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The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Frank Close will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Friday 31 May 2013 at 5:30 p.m. to speak about Nothing. More information and tickets.

By Frank Close

I want to say something about Nothing. Specifically, not just the book but the part that no one, or very few, read carefully: the dedication. Nothing originally appeared in hardback in 2007 titled The Void, and was dedicated thus: “For Lizzie and John”.

Back then, Lizzie, my daughter, was engaged to John. At their wedding the following year, the chaplain of Exeter College said it was the first time that she had married two people who had had a book about nothing dedicated to them. Afterwards, I explained the real meaning: The Void was dedicated “for” and not “to” the couple. This is why.

The inspiration for Nothing was an enigma that has troubled me since childhood. If you take away the Earth, Moon, stars, everything material, what remains? Before making the trivial response – “nothing” – consider that in the process we too have been removed, so there is no one to be aware that there is nothing. Is the result a universe that is like some form of empty container, or by having removed conscious awareness, has the container also gone, the concept of universe itself been done away with? In what sense does the universe exist, if full of inert matter, with no one to be aware of the fact? Does the universe still exist for us after we die?

Now this question leads into labyrinths of possibilities concerning religious opinion, so in the book I posed it another way: did the universe exist for me in 1066? For me it didn’t but for William the Conqueror it did. Go back deeper into the past. Ten billion years ago there were no conscious beings aware of the universe, and gravity’s dance played on with no one being aware. Although this epoch of “pre-consciousness” contained no life, and must have been like some grand extension of my egocentric pre-1945 universe, nonetheless the same atoms that existed back then are what we are made of today, enabling us to view evidence for that past by means of telescopes looking deep across space, and back in time.

An individual atom cannot think, yet a large number, when configured in a highly ordered and unlikely combination, can believe that they are you. The same atoms configured in countless numbers of other ways will have no such consciousness. Richard Dawkins once said “we are the lucky ones for we shall die,” reminding us that there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness. What is the universe for the never-to-be-born or for those not yet alive?

The book itself deals with the quest to understand the nature of nothing – the search for the vacuum, and the mysterious insights that have emerged about it. Empty space is not empty, but full of things, such as gravitation, and quantum particle of matter and antimatter bubbling in and out of existence. During 2012 physicists found the Higgs boson, the proof that the cosmos is full of a mysterious ether, known as the Higgs field. “Nothing” is definitely filled with something, though we are still trying to understand quite what this stuff is.

But back to my dedication. In 2007 I mused whether I would ever have grandchildren. If I did, their atoms already existed, somewhere in the earth, air, and water of our planet. By the miracles of biology, two machines, collections of atoms that call themselves Lizzie and John, might one day combine some of those atoms and fuel them, eventually enabling them to burst into life. So the dedication was “for” them, in the hope that they might turn some inert atoms into living something.

The miracle has happened. Today I watch Max and Jack, who run, shout, and wear T-shirts from CERN proclaiming the equations of the Higgs field and the standard model of particles and forces. As yet, they understand nothing of this. In some future their conscious atoms may create concepts that no one yet has realised. Atoms can be creative, which is yet another profound mystery.

My most recent book, published in 2012, was titled The Infinity Puzzle. It deals with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, and the ideas about the all-pervading essence – the Higgs field. The “Infinity” referred to a mathematical conundrum, that existed 50 years ago, and which was eventually solved thanks in part to the work of Peter Higgs. But the dedication alludes to that most profound mystery, and brings our tale to a close: “For Max and Jack, whose emergence out of The Void is an Infinite Puzzle”.

Frank Close is Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and former head of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. During his career he has worked closely with CERN, home of the LHC. He is the author of Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, and his other recent books include The Infinity Puzzle,  Neutrino, and Antimatter. Follow Frank Close on Twitter: @CloseFrank.

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Image credits: (1) ‘The Void/Nothing dedication’  and (2) ‘The Infinity Puzzle dedication’ by Nicola Burton via Instagram. 

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We’re planning to make several changes to the OUPblog this year to improve the site and your reading experience. Some of the first changes will be taking place over the next couple weeks.

We will change some of our navigation and categorization on the blog based on reader behavior: deleting, adding, shifting, and renaming several categories. For example, our current ‘dictionaries’ category will be renamed ‘language’ and sub-categories will better reflect the full range of our language publishing from lexicography to linguistics.

We will also migrate away from Feedburner, which currently delivers our RSS and email, to a new service. Feedburner has been unreliable and we believe Google is getting ready to shut down this service after they shut down Google Reader on 1 July 2013. If all goes well, your email and RSS notifications will not change. If not, please check back here and re-subscribe.

Remember you can find the raw RSS feeds on our Follow page.

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We know a few of the problems the site is experiencing and have great plans for improving it over the coming months. We of course welcome your feedback too and appreciate any comments that can be left in the box below.

Thank you for your loyal readership,

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Why have you decided to launch a new journal of survey research?

Well, we thought the field of survey research needed a flagship journal and, fortunately for us, the two largest professional organizations for survey researchers — the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) — shared our view. These organizations have agreed to sponsor the new journal. AAPOR will make the journal available to its more than 2,000 members as part of their annual dues — that is, at no added cost to them. And ASA will offer a similar deal to the 1,000+ members of its Survey Research Methods Section.

Isn’t there a danger of journal overload? How did you make such considerations?

Articles on survey statistics and methodology have traditionally been scattered across journals that focus primarily on statistics, sociology, political science, communications, epidemiology, demography, and a range of other disciplines. We thought it was time to have a journal that would focus only on survey statistics and methodology. Of course, there are now journals devoted mainly to survey topics, such as the Journal of Official Statistics and Survey Methodology. However, as valuable as these journals are, they are sponsored by government agencies and we believe that the flagship journal for the field should have the backing of the largest, most prestigious professional organizations for survey researchers. Hence, the new journal.

How has the field changed in the last 25 years?

The field has grown up. In the United States, three programs — at the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and the University of Nebraska — now offer doctoral degrees in survey methodology. There are also academic programs in survey methodology in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. In the United States alone, more than forty doctorates in survey methodology have been awarded.  There are now textbooks covering every aspect of survey statistics and methodology. Survey statistics and methodology has become a fully-fledged discipline and we believe the time is ripe for it to have a journal that reflects that status.

What are some of the latest developments in survey research?

This may be a pivotal time for surveys. Survey costs are spiraling upward, response rates are falling, and many of the government agencies that sponsor surveys are likely to face serious budget cuts in the coming years. Moreover, partly in response to these problems, some researchers are giving up on probability sampling, a mainstay for survey research for the last sixty years. At the same time, everyone seems to want estimates based on survey data, often for ever-smaller areas or subgroups, and to make policy decisions based on these estimates.

Despite all these worrisome developments, surveys still seem to give accurate results. Whatever their problems, the polls were able forecast the outcome of the 2012 elections with almost uncanny accuracy. Similarly, according to Census Bureau evaluations, the 2010 census may have been the most accurate census ever done.

What do you hope to see in the coming years from both the field and the journal?

We hope that authors will surprise us with articles describing good work in areas we had not anticipated and we promise to be open to such work. Most of all, we hope that journal becomes a fount of high quality research in all areas of survey statistics and methodology.

Joseph Sedransk is Professor Emeritus of Statistics at Case Western Reserve University. Roger Tourangeau is a Vice President at Westat. Before going to Westat, he headed the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland for nearly 10 years; during this time, he was also a Research Professor in the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. Joseph Sedransk is the editor for statistical papers and Roger Tourangeau the editor for the methodological papers for the new Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.

The Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, sponsored by AAPOR and the American Statistical Association, will begin publishing in 2013. Its objective is to publish cutting edge scholarly articles on statistical and methodological issues for sample surveys, censuses, administrative record systems, and other related data. It aims to be the flagship journal for research on survey statistics and methodology.

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Image credit: Check mark. Composición 3D. Mostrando un concepto de selección. Image by ricardoinfante, iStockphoto.

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Where did the HIV virus originate?

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How did the HIV virus become global?

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Dorothy H. Crawford has been Assistant Principal for Public Understanding of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh since 2007. She is the author of Virus Hunt: The search for the origin of HIV, The Invisible Enemy, Deadly Companions, and Viruses: A Very Short Introduction. She was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001, and awarded an OBE for services to medicine and higher education in 2005.

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