George Davey Smith

Brilliant inaugural lecture by Professor Evie Stergiakouli on her career so far, @uob-ieu.bsky.social so lucky to have secured her talents right from its inception. Thx Evie!

“There is nothing that utterly destroys all chance for scientific investigation or any continuous work, like having a Distinguished Guest on your hands” H S Jennings, c1925

Perhaps counterintuitively higher prepubertal BMI is strongly protective against breast cancer in later life

Lifecourse genome-wide association study meta-analysis refines the critical life stages for adiposity’s influence on breast cancer risk Improving knowledge of adiposity’s genetic architecture across the lifecourse refines insights into its role in breast cancer.

Grace Power, @mendelrandom.bsky.social and others (not me!) takes a plausible causal FX of BMI on breast cancer, and narrow down *when* that effect plays out. They find the effects of later BMI on breast cancer are steeply attenuated when conditioned on early BMI. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Why evidence matters in health research Professor George Davey Smith explains why he encourages scientists to look for ways they might be wrong.

Newspaper headlines often share compelling quick fixes for health issues - but often the realities of what causes health conditions is more complex. In this blog post @mendelrandom.bsky.social explains why he encourages scientists to look for ways they might be wrong. www.ukri.org/blog/why-evi...

Even Confuseus has caught up on colliderscopes academic.oup.com/ije/article/... 🤣 @f2harrell.bsky.social @michelnivard.bsky.social

Why ‘coffee causes cancer’ headlines get it wrong Coffee causes cancer. Red wine protects your heart. Chocolate cuts diabetes risk. These headlines catch the eye, but are they true?

Happy New Year! To start the year, do read this @ukri.org interview with our director @mendelrandom.bsky.social, recipient of the prestigious MRC Millennium Medal. medium.com/@UKRI/why-co...

I know a bit about the past of MR, something about the present, and look forward to discussing whether MR has a future, and if so, how that should look

On a Wensleydale pilgrimage - geographically and back in time - to where and when epidemiology was about fieldwork (or practice) amongst real people in actual populations, and involved literally crossing fields … check out his beautifully written papers as a seasonal treat to yourself …

If you enjoy @michelnivard.bsky.social collider bias posts you might enjoy “why epidemiologists who can maintain eye contact are bad at maths” in here www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zPq...

It gets dull after a while 🤣

YouTube video by MRC IEU at University of Bristol MRC Millennium Medal recipient George Davey Smith reflects on a career in epidemiology

I'm sure @mendelrandom.bsky.social will be gratified to learn that their ads kept popping up during his outstanding YouTube presentation (congrats on the award, George):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zPq...

If you watch one talk on epidemiology this month, make it this one.

🙏 @greally.bsky.social sadly the ads not part of my efforts to become a 💰YouTuber

I have become mightily interested in the causal effect of “forever chemicals” and plastics on gynecological health.

I want to make sure our new menstruation data in ALSPAC and Born in Bradford can be used to research this.

Anyone know who’s big in (causal) epidemiology of this sort of exposure?

Abolish it!

💯

YouTube video by Philip Corr Hans Eysenck (1994) personality and cancer lecture

Here’s a video of Eysenck in 1994 in Edinburgh presenting his nonsense. Tony Pelosi hammers him in the discussion and I told him his “findings” reached the very high bar of being literally impossible youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

YouTube video by Philip Corr Hans Eysenck (1994) personality and cancer lecture

Here’s a video of Eysenck in 1994 in Edinburgh presenting his nonsense. Tony Pelosi hammers him in the discussion and I told him his “findings” reached the very high bar of being literally impossible youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

YouTube video by Philip Corr Hans Eysenck (1994) personality and cancer lecture

Have you seen George Davey Smith telling him the smoking findings were completely implausible at a seminar in Edinburgh 1994? youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

Its notable that some (in this case @mendelrandom.bsky.social (George Davey-Smith)) were on to him while he was alive, video a young GDS confronting Eysenk in a Q&A in 1994 for his data being inconsistent: youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...

YouTube video by sbritt The United States Of America "The Garden Of Earthly Delights"

Just heard of the death last month of Joe Byrd of the extraordinary United States of America; this song from 1968 seems timeless www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx0U...

David Blunkett on Radio 4 Today programme saying "if you don't know what bread and dripping is, you don't know about what poverty is" takes me back ~60 years to what was my favourite food (had to be white bread ..), and to remember tripe and onions, heart, offal in general, and other delights

🚨 Rachel Reeves JUST unveiled “the most complex government budget in history.” But without a proper wealth tax we’ll never fix the NHS or fund schools properly. So we HACKED a billboard in her constituency with the real solution: TAX THE F*CKING RICH

Free book starting with how politics could consider happiness as an outcome (without resorting to slapstick)

ALSPAC is known locally as Children of the Nineties, now tagging them @childrenofthe90s.bsky.social

It’s an extremely broad category Paul, running from very early middle age (you) to extremely extremely if not impossibly late middle age (me)

The UKB 1/2 million (of which I am one) are indeed reasonably investigated, but in comparison to the ALSPAC cohort - who were recruited as foetuses and followed up into middle age - what I've had done in UKB is tiny. ALSPAC has 3 generations too. We need both study types! www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/

🙏

“A better NHS is possible”; Starmer’s Labour Party has sadly forgotten this. A better Labour Party is also possible!

It’s been amazing colleagues like you Gemma that has made working as a researcher seem both fun and (sometimes at least) worthwhile