Many years ago I read a paper about the geometry of clinical trials that made a big impression on me. Mapping out the comparison groups in treatment trials over the years could show some distinctive patterns.

Sometimes it became glaringly obvious that particular comparisons were preferred and others avoided – like, comparing a new drug to no treatment or an inferior old drug over and over again, while skirting around comparing it to a particular other drug that could make for less impressive results. When that happened, there could be a ton of evidence, but it wasn’t designed to enlighten us on which treatments were the best. The knowledge gaps were deliberate.

Monitoring the emerging research on next generation Covid vaccines keeps reminding me of that geometry. My July update had some pretty exciting news – including a new collaboration of heavy-hitters with a global pharma company entering the pancoronavirus vaccine arena, and some eye-opening preclinical results.

But you can watch some of that knowledge-gap geometry forming in real time, too, for various reasons. In one clinical trial I dig into in that post, for example, a vaccine adapted to be more variant-proof is being tested against Omicron variants – in comparison to a lower dose of the company’s previous vaccine, and to the original formulation of the BNT-Pfizer vaccine rather than its Omicron-adapted version. Frustrating.

When knowledge gaps are intentional, and when they are not, is a theme threading through the topics I concentrated on in the last few weeks. It got intense when I decided I’d quickly pump out a little Wikipedia page to help reduce the gender gap in bios. To find a suitable female scientist candidate, I went trawling through the Women in Red list.

The Women in Red are thousands of women without an English-language Wikipedia page, who may be eligible for one. My plan for a small bout of Wikipedia-editing escalated, though, when I found Elisabeth Wollman on the list. I had never heard of her. But the more I dug, the more shocked I became that I hadn’t. And all the while, I got to think about the reasons for her lack of visibility, wondering how many others there were like Elisabeth, and how to find them.

Elisabeth and her husband Eugène were scientific partners, too. They collaborated on pioneering experimental work for 20 years – until their lives were brutally cut short in Auschwitz in 1943 because they were Jewish. When a colleague, André Lwoff, picked up where they left off, the path would lead to him to a Nobel Prize in 1965.

The Wollmans’ work lay important groundwork for the field of molecular genetics, and our understanding of viruses, cancer, and HIV. The Pasteur Institute honored them and their son as pioneers of modern biology.

Nazis intended to erase the Wollmans absolutely. That’s all the more reason not to allow them, and their phenomenal legacy, to fall between the cracks. And there were cracks at several points along the way. Perhaps the biggest is English Wikipedians’ bias towards people in English-speaking countries.

There are other sources of cracks, too, especially whose stories make it across to the digital realm, and how easy it is to find people and details about them once they are there. In another post this week, I write about how this last part played out for Elisabeth, and the elements of the expanding Wikipedia universe that enabled me to come across her.

Her and her remarkable family’s story is fascinating. Do check out the Wikipedia page – and my thread on Mastodon has some copyrighted photos that can’t go into Wikipedia, including one of Elisabeth in 1908 when she was studying mathematics and physics at the University of Liège. (If you’re a Wikipedian looking for a project, Eugène still needs an English page.)

As usual, there are links to my recent posts, and some other things that caught my eye recently below. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a good week!

Hilda

• My pair of posts at Absolutely Maybe, mentioned above:
  • Next Generation Covid Vaccines Update (No 9): Major New Hat in the Ring Plus Important Results; and
  • Some Things I Like About the Expanding Wikipedia Universe.
• If you’re interested in the gender gap in biographies in Wikipedia, Andrew Gray’s new analysis of data across time on bios of living people is a must read. Some highlights: The bias towards more women’s stories being nominated for deletion stopped in 2017. And the gender skew in people born since the 1970s comes largely from pages about male athletes. What’s more, he writes, “among living non-athletes, born since 1990, the gender balance is over 50% female.” (He doesn’t specify, but it looks to me as though his analyses are for Wikipedia bios in English.)
• On a different kind of social bias, there’s so much to learn in this terrific personal essay on height by Robert Reich. I’ll be cringing from now on at language that relates being admirable to height – – – like, someone has stature, or, people look up to them… It’s really worth thinking about the thoughtless, careless prejudice behind this.
• “Telling academics they can achieve career success by using today’s algorithmic-driven platforms is like telling Millennials they could afford to buy a house by eating less avocado on toast. It’s a cruel lie because social media is a shit way to share your work now. Not a little bit shit either. Very shit.” From The Enshittification of Social Media by The Thesis Whisperer, with advice for academics on where to from here – like, build a mailing list.
• And in case you, like I, had never heard of this, meet Loose Ends. It’s a volunteer network, based in the US, with volunteers elsewhere too. They’re knitters, crocheters, quilters, and other garment crafters, who finish off projects someone who has died had begun. They take a submitted unfinished project that was “a gesture of love”, and try to find a volunteer who can finish it and “reconnect a bereaved individual with a garment or accessory that was begun for them by a loved one.” 💝