Chapter 7
‘Towards a genomics-informed, real-time, global pathogen surveillance system’ by Jennifer Gardy and Nick Loman (Nature Reviews Genetics, 2018) reviews how sequencing tools can be used to diagnose and track diseases. ’Outbreak analytics: a developing data science for informing the response to emerging pathogens’ (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2019) explores the uses of data science during outbreaks, as well as areas for improvement.
Anthony Tockar’s original two Neustar blog posts, ‘Differential Privacy: The Basics’ and ‘Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset’, are worth reading for a more detailed description of the New York Taxi analysis and its implications (available from: https://research.neustar.biz). Bit By Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age by Matthew Salganik (Princeton University Press, 2018) provides a thoughtful overview of the ethical and logical issues involved in modern social behaviour research.
Chapter 8
David Sumpter’s book Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-bubbles (Bloomsbury, 2018) assesses the statistical plausibility of claims about online algorithms, with a particular focus on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Getting to Zero: A Doctor and a Diplomat on the Ebola Frontline by Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson (Zed Books, 2018) gives a first-hand account of the politics, logistics and human cost involved in responding to the West Africa Ebola epidemic.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to share their expertise and experience with me while researching this book: Lucy Aplin, Nim Arinaminpathy, Wendy Barclay, Barbara Casu, Nicholas Christakis, Toby Davies, Dean Eckles, Paul Fine, Jemma Geoghegan, Andy Haldane, Heidi Larson, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Kristian Lum, Brendan Nyhan, Andrew Odlyzko, Whitney Phillips, John Potterat, Charlie Romford, Gary Slutkin, Briony Swire-Thompson, Jamie Tehrani, Melissa Tracy, Alex Vespignani, Charlotte Watts, and Duncan Watts. Thanks also to those who helped source historical data and documents: Victoria Cranna and Alison Forsey at the LSHTM Library & Archives Service, Liina Hultgren at the Royal Institution, and Peter Vinten-Johansen at the John Snow Archive and Research Companion. If there are any errors in the final text, they are mine alone.
I’ve been fortunate to have had some great mentors during my career, who have encouraged me to engage with wider audiences as well as helping me develop as a researcher: Julia Gog at the University of Cambridge, Steven Riley at Imperial College London, and John Edmunds at LSHTM. Thanks also to many, many other collaborators and colleagues I’ve worked with and learnt from over the years. In particular, the ideas in this book have benefitted both directly and indirectly from discussions with my brilliant colleagues in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at LSHTM. As any popular science writer will know, I faced the obstacle of there being far more good research out there than I could ever fit into one book. Inevitably, I had to leave out several people and projects during the writing and editing stages, and this is of course no reflection on my views about the quality of the science.
I’d also like to thank everyone involved in the writing process. My excellent editors Cecily Gayford at Profile and Fran Barrie at Wellcome Collection have provided valuable ideas and input throughout. Thanks as well to Joe Staines for his work on copyediting the finished manuscript. And to my agent Peter Tallack, for his support and advice over the past few years. I am grateful to my parents for all their comments on initial drafts, as well as to Clare Fraser, Rachel Humby, Munir Jahangir, Stephen Rice, and Graham Wheeler for giving feedback on early chapters. Finally, I would like to thank my amazing, inspiring wife Emily, who I was lucky enough to meet while writing my last book, and lucky enough to marry while writing this one.
Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Inspired by the medical objects collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art. Wellcome Collection exhibitions, events and books explore a diverse range of subjects, including consciousness, forensic medicine, emotions, sexology, identity and death.
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