Science Women. How to do science better.
Invite to Party. Thoughts on the paucity of women in science, law, economics... Saloni Dattani on how to make science better. Fall of FTX.
Me: Why Unconferences and Talent spotting
Marta Zlatic: Francis science prize
Carine Patry: Making Silk, UK law
I’m going to talk about women in science, how to do better science. Women in law. Women’s rights and women in narrative nonfiction. Plus you are still invited to party/meet-upon Nov 23, London. If you’d like to join the Slack group for themeet-up you can sign up here.
Much of my news feed this week is filled with COP27**, the fall of crypto exchange FTX* and US midterm elections (how the Republican red wave vibe failed to materialise). I am mostly not going to chat about that (Yes, I do end up mentioning those topics briefly at the end, couldn’t help myself quite).
My investing week was considering how valuable an experimental drug for obesity (currently finished phase I, so with a standard probability of success of 20 - 30% but in this case in a drug class that has been proven to a degree) really ought to be.
See my previous post here on how to think about biopharma drug forecasting.
We also held an update for our investing stakeholders about what we are thinking. This included an excellent chat with economist Stian Westlake on intangibles. See previous podcast with Stian here on this subject.
Much of the world has become intangible and much of what we “ESG”, environment, social, governance are really intangibles.
Pivoting away from fast news to the slow news. My friend Marta kindly invited me to her prize giving at the Royal Society this week. Marta was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture. (I bumped into previous podcast guest, David Spiegelhalter also winning an award).
This is Marta’s wiki page. “…Marta Zlatic was awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture and presented her lecture How we learn, predict and decide: the circuit basis of behaviour.”
It was astonishing to have such a broad glimpse of the frontier of science. From understanding modelling of the start of the universe, to epidemic modelling, structural biology, new materials for battery technology and so much more. Science is so astonishing and still, I sense, thriving (even if it might be costing us more to make new discoveries.)
Yet, I observed that women were under-represented. At the dinner, I heard many structural reasons (child care burdens, funding cycles giving limited allowance for pregnancy and maternity; to name two) for why this is the case, but the end result is still a disaster for science (and therefore human progress) and terrible for fairness and equality reasons.
Looking at the Crick award - it has been in existence since 2003 and focuses on under 40s scientists in biology. Out of the 19 winners since 2003, four have been women. This seems to be the approx 20% of prize winners overall in recent times.
Science lost me quite early (despite that Marta and I met in histology, examining cell structures and had a lot of fun) but I somehow had thought that science overall was not as unequal as finance was, or even what we are seeing in economics. I had not been paying enough attention.
At the dinner discussion I also heard a consensus view that quotas were not the likely fix as this was a structural and cultural problem. For instance, if you are given 5 year funding and have a baby over one year, mostly you are not extended and so will fall behind non-baby bearing colleagues. One part fix would be for funders to extend a year, another part fix would be more equal time out between parents and other fixes such as more child friendly hybrid working (as child care burdens still lean to women) or culturally a more equal child care burden. These challenges reflect what I see in other industries as well and roll into the debate on diversity in boards of public companies.
That bring me to celebrate another friend of mine, Carine Patry. She “made silk” this year. This, in the UK, means you have risen to the very top of the legal barrister profession.
I only have the data for 2020 but 116 made silk that year of which 40 were women. I’ve also calculated that since 2004 there have been 1669 KCs, and 404 are women, around 24%.
It seems a poor use of our collective minds if only 1 in 4 of our best legal brains and our best legal arguers are women. I know women have been making these observations forever, and I know I feel a poor ally and this rolls into many other ally positions such as in disability, race but it particularly struck me this week seeing Marta and so few women. And seeing Carine recently, and so few women…. Listening to Diane Coyle on my podcast speak about this in economics as well.
Here is a paper looking at how wmoen’s economic rights have evolved over the last 50 years.
Not only are women in science and women in law so great to have, I contend there is flourishing in women’s writing - often women writing from their life experience. Anoushka is constantly handing over to me book after book of wondrous life writing by women and I judge this writing is adding deeply to the art we have today.
Here is Anoushka with a recent review (she mainly reviews on her IG now):
“Lowborn by Kerry Hudson had been on my to-read list for ages. No doubt it was the current political climate that caused me to pluck it from the shelf.
Having grown up on a council estate in a single parent family and without much money, I thought I would know a little of her story (the shame of the free school meals token) but Hudson’s chaotic and itinerant upbringing in conditions of poverty was nothing like my own. Poverty is a spectrum, and intersectional. I was loved and lucky.
Hudson’s childhood was particularly restless, volatile and fundamentally lacking in love and care with compounding issues at play. What this book makes absolutely clear is that poverty is a bear trap and Hudson’s escape (because she *did* escape) is testament to her resilience and strength of mind.
But this is not a misery memoir. Although the facts of Hudson’s life make for hard reading, there is a spirit of genuine and curious enquiry; of reconciling who she was with who she is now, and of looking outward and trying to understand the bigger picture. Hudson is a warm guide through this terrain and I loved her writing. She handles her material lightly, knowing the stark facts will speak for themselves. And they do.”
I’d like to continue to speak to more smart women and smart women in science on my podcast… Thus, it pleases me greatly to speak to Saloni Dattani on my podcast as an example of smart women in science. She strikes me as very smart and in addition a great science communicator via her blogs, social media and article writing. Saloni also has thoughtful ideas on how to improve science which was the core of our discussion (plus, for example, what esoteric things she likes).
Saloni Dattani is a founding editor at Works in Progress, a researcher at Our World in Data and a commissioning editor at Stripe Press. She has recently been profiled by Vox as part of the Future Perfect 50. Saloni is an excellent thinker on progress and science with recent articles for Wired (on making science better) and Guardian (on challenge trials). Her substack is here and twitter here.
Saloni tells me what are the most important questions in science that we should be working on.
We discuss making science better and thinking around challenge trials, making science more open source, reforming peer review and thinking around experimental clinical trial design.
We talk about vaccines, why Saloni might have room for optimism and what risks and opportunities around science she is thinking about.
…there are two points that I have that I think about when it comes to optimism. The first is that we already have lots of tools that can make the world better that just aren't being used as much as they could be. Global health is a really good example of that. So we have lots of vaccines and treatments that have huge benefits to people who take them, but much of the world doesn't take them yet. One example is influenza vaccines which have varying efficacy, but they're usually quite effective and yet most countries don't routinely give them out to people even though they could massively reduce the burden of hospitalizations and respiratory disease and so on. There are many other examples of treatments like that where we already have these things but they're just not implemented widely. That gives you some optimism but also makes me a bit cynical about why we aren't even using what we have.
Then the second part is more about the frontier and having new technology developed. I think on that it's kind of difficult to predict how much progress is possible on those areas, but it's also useful to see how things have changed over time. So genome sequencing is one example where the cost of sequencing is dropped from millions of dollars in the early two thousands to now just a few hundred. What that means is that we can collect much more data than we could in the past. We can understand things that we couldn't before. Sequencing is hugely important for understanding how our cells work but also how viruses and bacteria work.
It just means that we have much more scope to make progress on treatments and vaccines than we did in the past. So that's something that I'm hopeful about. So there's various technology that drives the ability of researchers to make advances in these fields. But I also kind of avoid taking any stance on whether I'm an optimist or not. I think it's helpful to just see how things are, see how things have been, and treat everything as potentially different from other examples and just look at the facts of what's happening in that particular area. Sometimes there's room for optimism and sometimes there isn't…
Borrowing from Tyler Cowen, I ask:
How ambitious are you ?
Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?”
What is something esoteric you do ?
We play over rated / under rated on:
Substack
Misinformation
Doing a PhD
Women in Science
Vaccines and Drugs
We end on Saloni’s current projects and advice. Transcript/Podcast here.
**I am going to mention one thing relating to FTX. This is going to cause pain and damage to the effective altruism community. On one direct level because the amount of funding available to EA has dramatically dropped. On another level the reputational hit from having such a prominent person and business in the EA community having such a disaster. It’s really interesting to see how that unfolds. I have some draft thoughts on trust and expected value here. But will save a longer thought here for next week. Idon’t know if this permanently damages the influence of the movement. Mighty things are done by small-ish groups. My blog on it here.
This is my COP27 thought:
On climate tail risks… this paper argues under studied contra median paper.
My thoughts on why hold unconferences and noting how Tyler Cowen uses this to detect talent….