Immunities of the Herd in Peace, War, and COVID-19.

Intermittently, the concept of herd immunity has been a potent, if sometimes ambiguous and controversial, means of framing the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and envisaging its end. Realizing the full meaning of human herd immunity requires further attention to its connections after World War I with British social theory. Distracted by "obvious" yet unsubstantiated correspondences with veterinary research, historians of the concept have not engaged with the more proximate influence of discussions of social psychology and group dynamics on postwar epidemiology. Understanding the openness of early 20th century epidemiology to social thought deepens our appreciation of the significance of herd or population immunity, as well as suggests new avenues for exchange between public health and contemporary social sciences. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(10):1465-1470. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306931).

History and philosophy of science takes form.

During the past hundred years the strength of the amalgam of history and philosophy of science (HPS) has waxed and waned, while assuming multiple forms and acquiring different imprints. In the 1940s and 1950s, philosopher Gerd Buchdahl and colleagues in Melbourne, Australia, assembled a methodologically powerful version of HPS, drawing on their readings, with general historians, of the philosophical works of R.G. Collingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. Buchdahl later tried to export this pioneering conceptualization to Cambridge University, where he came to lead a new department of HPS. To appreciate the qualities and dimensions of the innovative mode of inquiry, it is necessary to understand the ecology of knowledge that promoted its emergence in an out-of-the-way settler colonial society, a productively marginal site where unanticipated filiations and alliances might be licensed to unsettled émigré scholars such as Buchdahl. Accordingly, this essay brushes off a forgotten genealogy of the relations of history and philosophy and science, thereby revealing a neglected past cognitive identity of HPS and suggesting a means to re-imagine its future.

Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine.

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent 'canonical icons', cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

Development of a physiologically based pharmacokinetic model of diisononyl phthalate (DiNP) in pregnant rat and human.

A physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model for di-isononyl phthalate (DiNP) was developed by adapting the existing models for di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) and di-butylphthalate (DBP). Both pregnant rat and human time-course plasma and urine data were used to address the hydrolysis of DiNP in intestinal tract, plasma, and liver as well as hepatic oxidative metabolism and conjugation of the monoester and primary oxidative metabolites. Data in both rats and humans were available to inform the uptake and disposition of mono-isononyl phthalate (MiNP) as well as the three primary oxidative metabolites including hydroxy (7-OH)-, oxo (7-OXO)-, and carboxy (7-COX)-monoisononyl phthalate in plasma and urine. The DiNP model was reliable over a wide range of exposure levels in the pregnant rat as well as the two low exposure levels in humans including capturing the nonlinear behavior in the pregnant rat after repeated 750 mg/kg/day dosing. The presented DiNP PBPK model in pregnant rat and human, based upon an extensive kinetic dataset in both species, may provide a basis for assessing human equivalent exposures based upon either rodent or in vitro points of departure.

International network of cancer genome projects.

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) was launched to coordinate large-scale cancer genome studies in tumours from 50 different cancer types and/or subtypes that are of clinical and societal importance across the globe. Systematic studies of more than 25,000 cancer genomes at the genomic, epigenomic and transcriptomic levels will reveal the repertoire of oncogenic mutations, uncover traces of the mutagenic influences, define clinically relevant subtypes for prognosis and therapeutic management, and enable the development of new cancer therapies.

Postcolonial Ecologies of Parasite and Host: Making Parasitism Cosmopolitan.

The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host-parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (1940), often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet's ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development to his reading of British theoretical biology, especially the work of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton, and regretted he did not study Theobald Smith's Parasitism and Disease (1934) until after he had formulated his ideas. Scholars also have adduced Burnet's fascination with natural history and the clinical and public health demands on his research effort, among other influences. I want to consider here additional contributions to Burnet's ecological thinking, focusing on his intellectual milieu, placing his research in a settler society with exceptional expertise in environmental studies and pest management. In part, an ''ecological turn'' in Australian science in the 1930s, derived to a degree from British colonial scientific investments, shaped Burnet's conceptual development. This raises the question of whether we might characterize, in postcolonial fashion, disease ecology, and other studies of parasitism, as successful settler colonial or dominion science.

A history of health and medical research in Australia.

Health and medical research has played an important role in improving the life of Australians since before the 20th century, with many Australian researchers contributing to important advances both locally and internationally. The establishment of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) to support research and to work to achieve the benefits of research for the community was significant. The NHMRC has also provided guidance in research and health ethics. Australian research has broadened to include basic biomedical science, clinical medicine and science, public health and health services. In October 2002, the NHMRC adopted Indigenous health research as a strategic priority. In 2013, government expenditure through the NHMRC was $852.9 million. This article highlights some important milestones in the history of health and medical research in Australia.

Hermannsburg, 1929: turning aboriginal "primitives" into modern psychological subjects.

In 1929, the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg (Ntaria), central Australia, became an extraordinary investigatory site, attracting an array of leading psychologists wishing to define the "primitive" mentality of the Arrernte, who became perhaps the most studied people in the British Empire and dominions. This is a story of how scientific knowledge derived from close encounters and fraught entanglements on the borderlands of the settler state. The investigators-Stanley D. Porteus, H. K. Fry, and Géza Róheim-represent the major styles of psychological inquiry in the early-twentieth century, and count among the vanguard of those dismantling rigid racial typologies and fixed hierarchies of human mentality. They wanted to evaluate "how natives think," yet inescapably they found themselves reflecting on white mentality too. They came to recognise the primitive as an influential and disturbing motif within the civilised mind-their own minds. These intense interactions in the central deserts show us how Aboriginal thinking could make whites think again about themselves-and forget, for a moment, that many of their research subjects were starving.

Toward Planetary Health Ethics? Refiguring Bios in Bioethics.

In responding to perceived crises-such as the COVID-19 pandemic-in routinized ways, contemporary bioethics can make us prisoners of the proximate. Rather, we need bioethics to recognize and engage with complex configurations of global ecosystem degradation and collapse, thereby showing us paths toward co-inhabiting the planet securely and sustainably. Such a planetary health ethics might draw rewardingly on Indigenous knowledge practices or Indigenous philosophical ecologies. It will require ethicists, with other health professionals, to step up and become public advocates for environmental sustainability. The COVID-19 pandemic should be seen as opening a portal to planetary health ethics or ecologized bioethics.

The model crisis, or how to have critical promiscuity in the time of Covid-19.

During the past forty years, statistical modelling and simulation have come to frame perceptions of epidemic disease and to determine public health interventions that might limit or suppress the transmission of the causative agent. The influence of such formulaic disease modelling has pervaded public health policy and practice during the Covid-19 pandemic. The critical vocabulary of epidemiology, and now popular debate, thus includes R0, the basic reproduction number of the virus, 'flattening the curve', and epidemic 'waves'. How did this happen? What are the consequences of framing and foreseeing the pandemic in these modes? Focusing on historical and contemporary disease responses, primarily in Britain, I explore the emergence of statistical modelling as a 'crisis technology', a reductive mechanism for making rapid decisions or judgments under uncertain biological constraint. I consider how Covid-19 might be configured or assembled otherwise, constituted as a more heterogeneous object of knowledge, a different and more encompassing moment of truth - not simply as a measured telos directing us to a new normal. Drawing on earlier critical engagements with the AIDS pandemic, inquiries into how to have 'theory' and 'promiscuity' in a crisis, I seek to open up a space for greater ecological, sociological, and cultural complexity in the biopolitics of modelling, thereby attempting to validate a role for critique in the Covid-19 crisis.

The Whiteness of Bioethics.

A discussion of whiteness as an "ethos" or "relational category" in bioethics, drawing on examples from medical and historical research.

High-salt diet reveals the hypertensive and renal effects of reduced nephron endowment.

The extent to which a reduced nephron endowment contributes to hypertension and renal disease is confounded in models created by intrauterine insults that also demonstrate other phenotypes. Furthermore, recent data suggest that a reduced nephron endowment provides the "first hit" and simply increases the susceptibility to injurious stimuli. Thus we examined nephron number, glomerular volume, conscious mean arterial pressure (MAP), and renal function in a genetic model of reduced nephron endowment before and after a high-salt (5%) diet. One-yr-old glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor wild-type (WT) mice, heterozygous (HET) mice born with two kidneys (HET2K), and HET mice born with one kidney (HET1K) were used. Nephron number was 25% lower in HET2K and 65% lower in HET1K than WT mice. Glomeruli hypertrophied in both HET groups by 33%, resulting in total glomerular volumes that were similar between HET2K and WT mice but remained 50% lower in HET1K mice. On a normal-salt diet, 24-h MAP was not different between WT, HET2K, and HET1K mice (102 +/- 1, 103 +/- 1, and 102 +/- 2 mmHg). On a high-salt diet, MAP increased 9.1 +/- 1.9 mmHg in HET1K mice (P < 0.05) and 5.4 +/- 0.9 mmHg in HET2K mice (P < 0.05) and did not change significantly in WT mice. Creatinine clearance was 60% higher in WT mice but 30% lower in HET2K and HET1K mice fed a high-salt diet than in controls maintained on a normal-salt diet. Thus a reduction in nephron number (or total glomerular volume) alone does not lead to hypertension or kidney disease in aged mice, but exposure to high salt uncovers a hypertensive and renal phenotype.

Measurement of renal tissue oxygen tension: systematic differences between fluorescence optode and microelectrode recordings in anaesthetized rabbits.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: The validity of fluorescence optodes for measurement of renal cortical tissue oxygen tension was tested by comparison with Clark electrodes. METHODS: We varied renal blood flow and inspired O2 content in anaesthetized rabbits while simultaneously measuring cortical tissue oxygen tension. RESULTS: Cortical oxygen tension varied with inspired O2 content. Fluorescence optode measurements were more tightly distributed than those from a Clark electrode. Cumulative frequency distributions for fluorescence optodes were shifted to the left of those for Clark electrodes. The slope of the relationship between oxygen tension in arterial blood and cortical tissue was less for the fluorescence optode than the Clark electrode. Cortical tissue oxygen tension measurements by these two methods were correlated (r(2) = 0.32; p < 0.001), with no fixed bias but considerable proportional bias. Thus, the slope of the relationship between the two measurements was less than unity (0.57 [0.50-0.69]). CONCLUSION: Cortical oxygen tension values from fluorescence optodes are less variable but proportionally less than those from Clark electrodes. Theoretical considerations suggest that true interstitial oxygen tension lies somewhere between values provided by the two techniques. Nevertheless, the lesser variability of the fluorescence optode technique may aid detection of physiologically significant changes in intrarenal oxygenation.