Upcoming events

Venus: Royal College of Physicians, London, UK

This new conference will provide a forum for the dissemination of results in the nutrition and cancer field and will examine how this knowledge can be utilised by policy-makers to inform thinking and help develop ways of preventing cancer.

Venue: Edinburgh

Workshop hosted by ESRC Genomics Forum.

Venue: St Hugh's College Oxford

The International Data Sharing Conference 2010, which will bring together key figures from academia, research ethics committees and clinical practice to discuss how the increase in biobanks, data storage and access are changing scientific practice, as well as raising a number of technological, legal, ethical and social challenges for people working in the field of medical research.

The conference will seek to address some of the challenges of data sharing - such as: How should data-generators be rewarded for their efforts to the scientific community? Can we promise anonymity of research participants when medical records, whole sequences and phenotypic data are being used for research purposes? What is the best way to harmonise different datasets collected for different purposes? Should participants be fed back individual findings? Are our national research governance systems adequate to cope with global data sharing? What new IT mechanisms exist to share data and samples that address some of these issues? What projects provide examples of good practice?

The conference will use a conversation format, using panels focussed on specific questions to generate insights into these issues. Our plenary sessions will focus on feedback, new technologies for data sharing, governance structures for research and safeguarding identifiability. Speakers and facilitators confirmed so far are: Anthony Brookes, Tim Caulfield, Ellen Wright Clayton, David Cox, Donna Dickenson, Kelly Fryer-Edwards, Jane Gitschier, Jennifer Harris, Nils Hoppe, Tim Hubbard, Barbara Koenig, Bartha Maria Knoppers, Amy McGuire, Moshe Pritsker, Brad Malin, Raj Ramesar, Paul Burton, Eric M. Meslin, Christine Wasunna and Jerome Singh. In addition to the plenary panel sessions, there will be break out sessions. Applications for abstracts for talks and posters are currently open and will close on the 11th of June 2010 (or 9am BST Monday the 14th of June)!!! http://helex.medsci.ox.ac.uk/events/data-sharing-international-conference-1/call-for-applications

 

Workshop 3: Explanation and Intervention

24 September 2010, 10.30–17.30

Registration is not yet open.

The currency of contemporary epidemiology is the risk factor. But what is a risk factor? The term arises in part from the focus of epidemiology, unusually (but not uniquely) among sciences, on intervention. This suggests interesting questions about the relation between explanation and successful intervention. How much do we need to understand before we can fruitfully intervene? Risk factors seem to offer a way to design interventions in circumstances of incomplete knowledge, either about the circumstances or the nature of the cases of illness in question. But (to put a modern spin on Jacob Henle) a physicist might identify as risk factors for falling the removal of boards and beams, the cutting of ropes, the opening up of holes, and so forth – and without coming any nearer to a theory of gravity. This objection appears to be born out by history: the most dramatically successful interventions have tended to be closely linked to improvements in our understanding. Is that historical claim correct? If so, it would seem that our ability to explain why illness occurs is linked to our ability to cure and prevent it. But how? Do risk factors encourage epidemiologists, and their colleagues studying functional genomics, knock-out models, and similar, to seek explanations? Or do they allow potentially dangerous misunderstandings about the scientific and practical import of the results they represent? Is it a naïve mistake to suggest that public health interventions might be best served by seeking general explanations on the model of the physical sciences? The answers to these questions bear directly on the future direction of epidemiology and how it can appropriately employ its conceptual tools.

Venue: Manchester