 Welcome everyone to the last seminar at the CPCS St. Noy Sarchu. There is another one next week. There is an extra one. There is an extra one next week. Thanks to Peter, so you can check that out on the website. And today is David Thera from Madrid, the UNED. UNED, I don't know how it's said. He is a professor in philosophy of medicine. You would say that, yes. He is going to present a joint work with Clara Uskanga. That's difficult, she is a VASC. I don't know. Uskanga. Uskanga. That's okay. And so what's the evidence for a Korean vaccine? That's it. Peran's submission to the Prie Brea. That's it Juliet. So thanks so much, Juliet, for the invitation. Thanks so much to the audience. And as I was telling you, Juliet, I moved because my academic career started literally 25 years ago here in Luan-Annef. When I got a fellowship that allowed me to spend the summer of 1998. I was an undergrad, I think then. At the Sherkhooper, with Willy Pampareis, completely alone in a deserted Luan-Annef. But it gave me a view of the world, my first view of the world. For instance, libraries. You could access the books here freely, without intermediation from the library. For us, it was completely new. There was the occasional seminar. There were people at the Sherkhooper working every single day of the week through the summer. I thought, God, these people are crazy. But then I loved it. I loved it. And the reason I accepted this seminar was completely egoistic. I wanted to come back. I wanted to see how it had changed. Thanks, Juliet. Thanks to the audience. I'm truly happy to be here. I guess you're not so happy to have me here, because even if Juliet said, look, a bit of history of science is always nice. I mean, our talk about an obscure physician who claimed he had invented a cholera vaccine, who would care about that for an hour on June, end of the term. So I thought, I must do these otherwise. I must present a paper that is potentially relevant for an interdisciplinary audience. And well, I mean, it's not so difficult, because you see, when I started this paper with Clara, Clara was my former PhD student. That was her dissertation project. And I thought, well, a cholera vaccine, a controversy on a cholera vaccine in 19th century Spain. And how interesting, how curious. I mean, this, when we finished this edition and then the paper, I thought, this is the last time I hear anything about pandemics. And that was literally, I mean, the papers literally submitted on January 2020. And I swear to God that I thought I'm done with this stuff. But then, I mean, to my great surprise, I mean, the world became like Clara's thesis. In debates, I had only found, I mean, as a curiosity for the antiquarian, became, I mean, our everyday controversies in the, in the daily press. So, I mean, turned back to March 2020. Remember, lockdown had started and we were assessing how good each lockdown policy was counting deaths. So the more people you saved, the better your lockdown policy was. So every day we're having death counts. It's very impressive on the media. Until, I mean, one of my favorite statisticians, David Spielhalter, came with this opinion piece in the garden and said, but look, I mean, we do not know how many people are dying of COVID this quick. Because there are many different statistical sources. These sources follow different criteria. We need to consolidate these sources. We need to check out the data. I mean, we need to perform all sorts of calculations. And these might take months, weeks, perhaps years. So use a different metric, please. And I thought, well, that's what I've been studying, because put yourselves in the following situation. Imagine 100 years from now. And in 2123, statisticians haven't yet agreed on how many people have died of COVID. Now, how would historians write the story of this episode? I mean, how can we analyze a controversy for which we don't have consolidated data? That's the mental experiment. Now, think back 100 years in the past. I mean, returned to the end of the 19th century, and you would find yourselves in exactly the same situation. Here we have Jaime Farran. I wrote Jaime, but Catalan historians call him Jalma. So that's the controversy. An independent scholar who working at his home laboratory near Barcelona by the end of the 19th century claimed he had invented a cholera vaccine. And he tried it in a massive vaccination campaign. But still, I mean, historians do not agree on the quality of this vaccine. International historians consider him a curiosity. I mean, someone who had this claim and tried this vaccine. But for them, there was no evidence that it worked. Whereas in Spain, for most historians, I mean, the guy was a hero, a pioneer. I mean, he would have himself more recognition that he got. So who's right? That was the initial question for Clara and me. Now, the first claim of the thesis that I will present here, and it's a claim that it's very mildly interesting for the non-expert, is that we will never have the evidence that would allow us to settle the controversy. I mean, we cannot redo the vaccination campaign. We don't know how the vaccine was prepared. So we have no way to decide whether Farran was right or wrong in his claims. But this sort of agnosticism puts the historian in a very complicated position because you have a void and you have to fill this void. So most historians, I mean, fill this void using sort of what I call a narrative of biases. I mean, the controversy wasn't about the vaccine, but about nationalism. So French nationals protecting their scientists, again, Spanish nationals protecting their own chauvinism, scientific diplomacy. So if you go into the standard historiography of this period, Sabine Charles isn't here because he's your 19th century expert, you would see that nationalism plays a role in narratives of international controversies in medicine by the end of the 19th century. And we are going to claim here that this shouldn't be so. That we shouldn't use the concept of bias so lightly in our historiographical narratives. And in this regard, I'm taking a position against the consensus among historians of science, and that's what I thought would be a bit more interesting for you. At least assuming that there were a couple of historians who wanted to debate this with you. So what I'm going to do in the next, like, 25, 30 minutes, because I'd like to be brief, is that I'm going to present the story, I mean, quickly, in the controversy, and then close it with a few slides in which I try to show, I mean, what's the philosophy behind all these, the philosophy of the history of science. So that's the project. And if at some point you're bored, I mean, you can stop me and ask me about my year in Paris, and I promise I can deliver wonderful stories which are much more entertaining than the talk I'm here. This is for the audience, in case. I mean, you want to make the audience of your following. You want to rise, right? You have to choose. Okay, so, what are we talking about here? So, Jaumeau, Jaime Ferraniclua, who was, like I said, a Catalan physician who studied medicine in Barcelona and was commissioned by the town hall to go to Marseille in 1884 to find out, I mean, how they were trying to control the cholera outbreak they were having there. I mean, at that point cholera was a very, very bad thing. I mean, like, it made people die by the thousands, and now you can perfectly imagine what it was like. So, there, he discovered a few disciples of Pasteur, and with them he learned, I mean, how they tried to prepare vaccines. So, in those days in which there were no serious frontiers, he brought back some samples of cholera, I mean, the standard thing to do. And he started tinkering at home with the cultures, I mean, trying to see whether he could find a vaccine that he was trying on animals, and only a few months later he announced publicly that he had got one. And in these times of desperation, I mean, he was immediately reclaimed the following year, I mean, to try this vaccine in a massive cholera outbreak that took place in Valencia, a coastal region, and he even, and he reached, he vaccinated, apparently, about some 50,000 people, which was unheard of, I mean, at that point. It was an achievement itself. But, luckily, if we're both around, I mean, and this won't surprise you either, I mean, the Spanish public opinion was immediately polarized about his vaccine in political terms. Surprise. I mean, the liberals were for the vaccine, the conservatives were against the vaccine, and so we had the ferranistas and the anti-ferranistas. Now, and likely for Ferran, the conservatives were in office, so they stopped the vaccination campaign. Not before some international delegates had arrived in Valencia to see whether Ferran was really into something or not. And again, I mean, these people had contradictory views. I mean, some were for and thought that the vaccine was working, whereas others saw no evidence about it. So, poor Ferran, imagine yourselves. An independent scholar who had suddenly became a hero for part of the Spanish population, but wasn't achieving enough scientific respect. If the best way to settle down this controversy is, again, invoke the authority of science. I mean, something we saw as well during our COVID pandemic. At that point, the authority, the scientific authority on vaccine, on cholera, was the French Academy of Science. So this academy was awarding every year the so-called privérend. The privérend was an incentive, an incentive prize for cholera research. You got it in full if you could cure, if you could prove, you could cure or prevent cholera. And if you had something less than that, you could still have a claim for a mention. I mean, a mention that wasn't endowed with the interests of the Briand Trust. So, I mean, you got money and you got the credit of the Academy of Sciences, nonetheless. And of course, for Ferran, I mean, he seemed ideal. And in that very summer of 1885, in the midst of the controversy, he made a first submission to the academy sending all the stuff he was compiling. He failed, tried again the following year, failed again, and he just gave up. Although the Academy of Science awarded him a sort of retrospective Briand in 1907 as a sort of lifetime award, I mean, for his career. I didn't know the academy did these things, but they did. But still, the award was entirely agnostic about the vaccine. I mean, they granted him merit, but they didn't settle the question of whether the vaccine worked or not. And for Ferran's supporters, for the Ferranistas, this was a complete disaster. This was a complete disaster because they thought that Ferran deserved more. I mean, Ferran, for the Ferranistas, he hadn't won the Briand because the academy was clearly chauvinist. I mean, they were friends. You know how friends are seen in Spain. And they had invited us. Now we send them a vaccine. Of course, they are not going to like it. Technically, the argument was, had he been friends with exactly the same data, I mean, he would have got a mention of the Briand. But since he was an independent scholar working from a backward country without scientific tradition, we cannot award him that. That's what the Ferranistas thought the academy had done. And this popular view that you could find in the press made it into the early histories of the controversy. Pulido, a disciple of Ferran, wrote the first history of Ferran's achievements in which he licensed this interpretation. And then it evolved into a more sophisticated account in terms of scientific nationalism that you could still see in the works of Lopet Pignet or Bonsai, both in Spanish and in English. And, and likely for us, we found this view as well in Reviewers V report. You know, there's always a mythical reviewer B. I mean, our reviewer B for this paper said, look, you're getting it all wrong about this Briand because you're saying that it was a scientific prize that should recognize scientific merit. It was not. It was a tool of the French scientific diplomacy. The prize was awarded depending on the interests of the French administration every year. And you know, there is now a big fad among historians of science about scientific diplomacy. It's the new lingo. I mean, that's contemporary and ancient. Apparently, it's at the end of the 19th century when the scientific policies started taking on an international role and the Briand would have been an early illustration of this. So, Reviewer B recommended our paper to be rejected because he thought that the Ferranistas were actually right. The whole thing was about nationalistic pride, chauvinism and the like. So, what could we do? Clara and I decided that we'd go to the Academy of Science and see what the archive was. So, what was in the archives about the Briand and then we double-checked with other archives in Germany and in Spain. And I mean, to cut the story short because if I were a real historian of science then I would start going into the details and bore you to no end. I'm going to do that because I'm Spanish and I know that if we have a seminar at 3 on a Friday afternoon, you shouldn't do that. You should do something like you should summarize which is what I do in my next slide. So, yes, let's focus on one review of Ferran's submission. So, Ferran has submitted his dossier with the results of his vaccination campaign in Valencia and this dossier was assigned to a French pathologist a professor, so one former colleague, Leon Goslaw who, I mean, tried his best to decode what was in that dossier because he found the dossier messy. He recorded it on the deliberations. Messy why? Well, because it was full of contradictory and incomplete documents. First thought, there was no clear vaccination protocol. I mean, Ferran had been vaccinated in like 20 to 30 towns and in each town he tried different doses. He tried different things. Then he wasn't submitting the whole record of his campaign. He was only covering five of the 13 weeks in which he had been vaccinating and he was submitting data for seven towns instead of the 20 or 30 in which he had worked. Moreover, he wasn't providing a statistical analysis. He was just submitting the raw data letting the academy make up their minds on what that meant. Now, just to give you a visual flavor of what that was like. So, what Ferran was submitting is what you can see on the right-hand side which is a registrar's note. So, the le notaire, the registrar, I mean, in each town, I mean, prepared a sort of formal document saying Ferran has been here for some weeks and he has vaccinated these people and there have been so many deaths. The population of this town is this. So, on the basis of these notes, Gosselán, in the document that you see on the left-hand side, was trying to calculate, I mean, what was the proportion of deaths between the inoculated and the uninoculated people assuming that there was a significant difference between these, but there was no statistical significance yet to be measured. But if there was a striking difference between these two proportions, the vaccine should be doing something. What we can see here is that Gosselán actually bought it to do so. I mean, he just started counting deaths and counting vaccines and doing these proportions and he found that there was no clear sign for the efficacy of the vaccine. Now, what we conclude here, Clara and I, against the Ferranistas is that the quality of the submitted data didn't allow the academy to award the brand to Ferran. But the rejoinder of the Ferranistas, it's wonderful this comes up, the Ferranistas is that, no, no, no. I mean, you're getting this wrong because there was a double standard. If with this same set of data, Ferran had been friends, I mean, he would have got the award because these people didn't care about the quality of the data. They cared about their interests and what they were doing here is protecting Pasteur. I mean, they couldn't allow a Spaniard to become the pioneer in color vaccination when surely somebody from Pasteur's lab is about to get the same result. So that is the Ferranistas view of this world. Now, that's a legitimate concern. I mean, of course, I mean, French scholars are known for their national pride to put it mightily. And, I mean, how could we adjudicate this controversy? Well, I mean, since I'm an empiricist about counterfactuals, because this is a counterfactual hot hit, we thought we could try a sort of controlled comparison. I mean, let's see if in the brand, in the brand record, is there somebody from outside France who got some, who was similar enough to Ferran and got the award? And much to our surprise, we found Philip Hauser. Philip Hauser was a Spanish physician working on cholera who got a mention in this award a couple of years after Ferran tried. So, I mean, this was evidence in our view that the academy was sort of capable of recognizing some scientific merits to foreigners. Now, you might say to Philip Hauser, that doesn't sound very Spanish to me. Well, I grant you that. I mean, he was born in Austria, he had worked in Paris and then in Morocco, but settled down in Seville, after 10 years, he got the Spanish nationality. So, he was submitting his stuff to the brand as a Spaniard. Now, intellectually speaking, he couldn't be more different than Ferran. First of all, his understanding of cholera was totally opposite. He was a discipline of pedant coffer, German physician who thought that cholera propagated depending on the quality of the soil. I mean, the soil and the hygiene of the places were the key factor in cholera expansion. And as a discipline of pedant coffer, Hauser, I mean, thought that he could prove this with the Spanish cholera outbreak of 1885. And since he was a very good networker, he mobilized all his friends and colleagues in the Spanish administration and gathered data about cholera propagation from 800 towns. And these 800 towns, I mean, added up into three volumes in which he published the raw data, the tabulated data, plus a series of maps showing how cholera advance one way or another coming quickly or slowly, depending on the quality of the soil. Now, for these in 1888, he got a mention of the flora. But the academy, again, was agnostic about his theoretical outlook. I mean, they didn't want to take sides with pedant coffer. What they thought was that the quality of the data was fantastic. And that the quality of the data was unmeriting to award him a mention of the rare. Still, I mean, the official record in Spain today for this epidemic is Hauser's compilation. So it has stood the test of time. So, what do we conclude here? Why did Hauser's exceed where Ferran had failed? And I see that there is a typo on this slide. Well, reviewer B, of course, had an answer to this question. I mean, his answer was that he was not truly a Spaniard. I mean, he was a cosmopolitan person, well-connected and praised, and protected by the Rothschilds. I mean, the Jewish bankers, and he himself was a Jew. It's these internal connections that explain his success. And here is where we get to the philosophy, because the point is, for us again, how far can you multiply your hypotheses about the biases that explain the behavior of people without making this concept of bias empty? Can you postulate external factors for everything we find in the record? The alternative interpretation that we put forward in the paper is that Hauser understood much better than Ferran, I mean, how to overcome biases. And for these, we draw on some previous work online on the role biases played in scientific experiments. Because scientific experiments create a sort of adversarial situation. An adversarial situation means that you're an experimenter. You have to persuade an audience, other scientists or laypeople. But you cannot presuppose that your audience has the same priors that you do. They might have different theoretical preconceptions. They might have different personal interests or financial interests or institutional interests. And yet, your experiment should persuade these people in a way that overcomes all these biases and make them agree with you. That's the value of an experiment. Now, how can you design an experiment? How can you design an evidence-gathering process in a way that overcomes these biases? Well, you anticipate the objection and you organize your data collection process in a way that will answer those future objections. So if you think they are going to accuse you of tampering with your patients, selecting patients in a self-serving manner, randomize them. Do not do the allocation yourself. Use randomization. If you think the expectations of the participants are going to bias this process, blind them. Why? Because if you do this, you are fending off a potential objection. You are increasing the probability of persuading an audience that would otherwise object. Well, you're tampering with your data, you're tampering with the expectations of your patients, but if you could control for those, I mean, you would see that your results disappear. So the general outlook that I have been presenting in my work is scientific experiments are situations in which you need to persuade people who don't agree with you in principle and who will object to you in very personal terms. You don't think it's wrong. You are being carried away by your biases. The answer to these objections, to make your experiment persuasive, should be based on the anticipation of those challenges and in a design of the data-gathering process that anticipates and fends off those challenges. Now, Ferran wasn't clearly doing that. I mean, Ferran was submitting data that were clearly self-serving. I mean, he was clearly sending the data that he thought could prove his hypothesis, but not the full record of his data. He was just sending them the material, documented the success of the experience in those places where it had apparently prevented deaths, but he said nothing about everything else he had done. Which is a bit the same strategy that we see today in pharmaceutical companies. I mean, no disclosing the trials in full, but just releasing the subgroup analysis that somehow gives signs of efficacy of what they do. And the remedy against these bias, the way to make your data persuasive, is to release them in full. I mean, disclose all the data you have and let people make up their minds for themselves, which is exactly what Hauser did. I mean, Hauser's main epistemic merit was the completeness. He had a mass, an enormous amount of data, and he was releasing those data in full, organized in a way with the presentation formats, the maps, the tabulation, organized in a way that allowed people to see for themselves whether his hypotheses were good or not. Interestingly, Hauser didn't persuade the audience about the virtues of Pettenkoff, but they didn't contest his data either. I mean, his data are good. It's just that they are not persuasive enough. Now, so in this regard, I mean, there would have been a good reason for the academy not to give around the award, just because the quality of his data was significantly inferior to the quality of Hauser's data. And this is a sign of an emerging culture of evidence in the medical sciences by the end of the 19th century, a culture that has been documented by other historians as well. I mean, Ted Porter in his recent book on the math houses, it was about how medical records were formatted and used to prove points about the heredity and psychiatric conditions and so on and so forth. So what we see is that by the end of the 19th century, there is an emerging new culture of proof in medicine in which the quality of the data made your hypothesis more or less credible. And that's something that our story illustrates. So it's quite a different story than French versus Spanish chauvinism. Chauvinism, it's a story of science in progress, very conservative, very old-fashioned. But still, I mean, the Ferranistas might have one final objection that again resonates with our recent experience of the pandemic. That was a medical emergency, not a scientific experiment. I mean, Ferran's goal was to save people's lives, not to prove his point. So he was vaccinating as best as he could. He was trying to get the data that he could gather. But the primary purpose of his vaccination campaign was not scientific, it was medical, it was humanitarian. So in a medical emergency, those are the data, that's the evidence that we have to deal with. And it would be unfair to Ferran to demand more. I mean, Hauser was working from the comfort of his cabinet. Ferran was in the field, I mean, getting his hands dirty, vaccinating people himself. Okay, point taken, and I agree that in an emergency, the quality of scientific data diminishes. That's something that we all witnessed during the pandemic. But the conclusion I think we should draw from this is that those data are never going to be persuasive. I mean, it might license a political decision, like, okay, it's better to vaccinate than not to. But they are not going to unanimously persuade the scientific community. I mean, they are not going to sell down the controversy, which is precisely what we found during all that first stage of the pandemic, in which we were discussing hydroxychloroquine, as you get followed closely and denounced. I mean, we were doing all sorts of strange things in scientific terms that were justified in terms of humanitarian concerns. I lived to the bioethicist to decide whether this was good or bad, and you get, of course, thought it was bad. But from a purely systemic point of view, the point is that those data are never going to be persuasive if we found ourselves in an adversarial situation, in which not everybody, I mean, has the same priors about what we are doing. Okay, what follows from that? Well, it follows from that we need to be agnostic about the historical processes that are taking place there. So, if we cannot conclude, if we don't have an agreement on what the standard for evidence is, we cannot start talking fully about biases, because in science, biases are deviations from a norm. Only when we have a norm about how to do things, we can speak of a bias, a deviation from that. We can only speak about nationalism as a deviation, as a deviation from an epistemic standard when we have an epistemic standard about when to adjudicate scientific prices. So, if we use Hauser as evidence about, I mean, as a benchmark about how to do things right, we might conclude that the academy was justified in giving them the award, and not to for run. Because even if, I mean, these French academics were very biased themselves, at least they showed they could behave occasionally, I mean, in a correct manner. I mean, giving awards to people who deserve them and denying them to others. The alternative, I mean, like doing history without this, history of science without this evidential benchmark, is to use bias as a grand narrative. Bias is as explanatory devices that can account for any phenomenon you observe. Which is our controversy with the UIV? I mean, we kept sending responses, and UIV came up with explanations in terms of, no, it's all nationalism, it's all chauvinism, it's all the academy, but that's entirely legitimate. We saw it during COVID, I mean, COVID is capitalism. COVID is pharmaceutical, hidden calculation. But in the end, I mean, those one narratives, I mean, do not help us to achieve any consensus, do not elucidate, I mean, the practical situations we have to deal with. And that was basically what I wanted to tell you today is that if I am correct in about 30 minutes, sharp, with these, we can close, because it's Friday afternoon, thanks, you can upload now. There are 13% left. Hello. Question. And for the ecologues, if you want, we can do it in French. Yes, yes, yes. Do you want to do it in French? No, in Spanish. We can do it in English. No, no, no. In Spanish, in English? Oh, okay. Okay. No, you can do this in English, you can do this in French, and I will do all the necessary documents. I will do this in French. I will do it in English. Okay, but who's the audience asking? Who's the audience? It's someone called Who Is This? Who Is This? Okay, Who Is This? So, who will do it in English? Okay, do it however you want, and we'll sort it out. I mean, you do want to do it in French, it's fine. No, do it in French, and I will translate it to English in my answer. So, go. Okay. I have several questions. For me, the curiosity is a little more sensitive. For me, the curiosity is that who won the prize? Nobody won the prize in full, in the end. Not in French. Not in French. Okay. It's just embarrassing. That's another question. So, as you were speaking, there are a lot of issues. No, there are a lot of issues. No, there are a lot of issues. But in response to... In French. I'm not sure. I was wondering what the... Because as you can see in the video, it's... I was wondering what the standard of presentation of the research in addition to public questions and others played in this story. I mean, I imagine that the way to present the data, to present the interpretations of these data in French, in German, in Spanish, different at this time and place, surely, there is not a universal standard. So, I imagine... At what point does that play in terms of questions for our scientists or politicians? Now, that is the key question for these historical analysis. And the question I repeated for the audiences to what extent there was a shared standard, an internationally shared standard, about how medical data should be presented. And the answer was there wasn't. So, by the... In the early 19th century, I mean, there is an emerging culture of medical records. So basically, friends in particular Parisian hospitals began to standardize the collection of data for each patient and archiving those data as a future source of evidence. But this was a very local process that wasn't replicated elsewhere. I mean, we saw all the science of it in the UK about the same period. But by the end of the 19th century, we still don't have among physicians a shared standard of how data should be formatted and delivered. Still, those who were shared in the sense that... I mean, it was agreed by the whole community and implemented in a uniform manner, I mean, across Europe. But still, the Kokma Shenty, I mean, those who were following up the research closely, I mean, we're aware that if you wanted to show that you had a treatment that worked, I mean, whatever the treatment, it should make a difference in between the death ratios. We still didn't have medical statistics as we did the medical statistics that we had 30 years later when Fisher started tinkering with his clinical trials. I mean, Pearson had only begun... I'm saying all these for Charles, in case it's who he is. Charles would know all these people. So Pearson, I mean, had started to try his hand at medical data. But among physicians, I mean, there was still no shared criteria of data interpretation. But we observed here how there is an international standard emerging about that data presentation. Because you needed to report your data in a way that allowed people to calculate these death proportions. And everybody in the field did this one in another way. And what we see is that the Academy was trying... I mean, was favoring the data presentation that allowed them to do their work better, to do this particular kind of work better. So it's a birth moment for this story. And I presume that there's a lot of work to do here in the history of statistics. But since we only started to care about data recently, it'll take us still some time to see how it all evolved. Yeah, I have a lot of questions. We might have a dream later. Sure, sure. I mean, just... No, but I really like it. I really like it because I saw this as a goal for empiricism in historical research and a goal for historians not to take for granted historical... I don't think it's against what it is. The category of standards. First of all, the category of nationalism, because you show very clearly there was the Ferranistas who are the historians of science of the late 90s. They just repeated what the Ferranistas were saying, which was accusing the French nationalists to defend their scientists. So I think that that's really nice. And what else do I want to say? Yes, that's sort of putting nationalism or the notion of bias as an explanatory tool, but without showing exactly how those things are connected. It's like putting the garbage for the horse. It's not showing much. So I really empathize with that because that's something I always struggle with, really showing how things are actually political, how things are actually ideological. But there's something that the historian in me was doubting. Perhaps this is not just a story of... Because you could be... It seemed that point that you were putting the history as is this an internalistic history of science or is this an externalistic history of science? Should we study it from the internal mechanisms of what comes as scientific evidence or should we use external explanations? But maybe, and that's what I try to do, is to put those things together because at some point you showed the reason why the Spanish-Austrian scientist understood better how to overcome his audience's naturalistic bias. So I feel like that's precisely where Verran failed is that he didn't know how to construct his data as his audience wanted to see it. I feel like that understanding this and not actually being connected to Paris and that those people are the people going to go and say, hey, give him the prie prion. But his understanding, because he spent time with the French people, that's exactly what they need, that's how I'm going to present it. And so I feel like that's exactly the place where the internal story meets the external story. Exactly. And it feels like, I don't know if you agree, but this culture of evidence, how it was constructed precisely at that point, it is naturalistic. So it's not like naturalism doesn't play a role in the story, but it plays a role in the making of data or the making of practices. So I don't know if you would agree. No, it's lovely because it's allowed me to present my own worldview developed over the last 25 years after my arrival in Lova in 1NF. So I spent these three months here and after that, the shadow of God on you followed me and illuminated me. No, but here's why, honestly speaking, so I grew up in a world in which still, the reference point and the philosophy of science was, OK, when science is done right, I mean, everything else is excluded, biases, mysteries, human. I remember that when I arrived in London from my dissertation and I asked, I mean, I met John Worrell, and I said, well, John, my project is to see, I mean, how impartiality is achieved in clinical trials. In what sense we can tell that, and we can claim that a trial is impartial. And he went, we should assume scientists are impartial, he went. Otherwise we are all screwed. And I thought, fuck, that's literally the old view. But, I mean, historians and sociologists of science after Coon had been showing quite extensively that the world of science is quite impure and that what you see is a world of biases at work and interests in conflict. And, I mean, it's only the philosophy that eventually pretends to see something different there. But the reality of life is the conflict of worldviews and biases. So, my thought was, following the inspiration of some friends and colleagues was, well, look, isn't there a way in which, even if the world is impure and we are all self-serving and biased, isn't there a way to control for those biases and to reach some common ground? Because, I mean, a different way of reading the history of science is, well, I mean, if we all were, if we were all seeking our own interests ruthlessly, we would never agree. And the history of science is the history of agreements. Because if I am conducting an experiment and nobody's going to agree with me because they would make them wrong, that would make experiment, would make them wrong and would make me right, well, there would be no winner. And the beauty of science is that there are winners. I mean, there are no prizes. There is somebody who persuades everybody else. So, the thing is, when scientists agree, I mean, are these agreements like a mafia agreement? Like, let's all pretend that this works, even if we know it doesn't. I mean, there was no mutiny in Rostov yesterday. It was sold under control. I mean, is this this sort of agreement which we pretend that things are as we wish they are rather than as they actually happened? Or rather, do we try to sort of reach an agreement based on some agreed requirements? Okay, you and I disagree. And one of us is going to win and the other to lose in this experiment. I mean, it might make me a winner and you a loser, you will lose the reputation and the money that I will get from this paper. So, how could we design the test in a way that you will accept the defeat that I win and the opposite? And that's where epistemic standards play a role to make us agree. That's how we achieve impartiality. Okay, we are going to make the experiment in a way that both parts consider us correct. And it's like a lottery. Whoever wins gets it and everybody else accepts. The mystery of losing. That's what, I mean, that's my philosophy here. So, you pointed rightly. I mean, there are two ways. So, what Hauser did was to play by rules that he thought would make people accept his petencoferian views. And you might say, but he knew these rules because he was an insider and he was cosmopolitan and he knew how to play this game whereas Ferran didn't. That's probably right. That's how we all get to know things and through personal connections and following our interests. But then the key point is that once these rules are in place, they are the same for everybody. At the time, they were not in place yet. They were still being constructed. That's what I call the constitutional moment of these dead aliens. Constitutional, the sense that when we draft a constitution, we need to agree on rules without any binding agreements. So, how do we negotiate the constitution? So, go ahead. So, then would you say that nationalism does play an explanatory role in your history or not at all? I think that there was lots of nationalism at play in the academy. I think that everybody was biased by their national prejudices but there were things, I mean, there were epistemic devices in place to control for those biases. I mean, when you go to the archive, what you see is that for Goslan, I mean, he had to deliver reports based on death proportions. This was a secret. I mean, nobody was going to check these calculations. I mean, he could have come up and said, I mean, this Ferran is a fucking loser. I would just ignore him. But no, I mean, he redid all the... I mean, he went through the statistics, tabulated them, I mean, did the calculations and said, well, doesn't seem to be working. He knew that in order to persuade everybody else, this was the way to go. He could have spared himself these if it was all based on Chauvinism. But he took the bother. And that's an interesting thing. Ferran himself, I mean, presented tabulated it much later. I mean, it's open to discussion whether... had he waited a little bit? I mean, had he waited a couple of years and delivered things in a more structured way? I mean, he might have got the Ferran, but he chose to write first. He went for priority. He lost. So that's the thing. That's the thing. I think that naturalism plays a huge role, but there are devices that somehow constrain your naturalism. And these devices are what explain the scientific consensus, the reach. So I would like to ask the next question. The next question is then, I think, to ask also one of the persons in the chat as well. Okay. So basically you make a comparison between Ferran and Corsair. But I guess you didn't get to give us a lot of details, but basically... These are in the paper. I mean, the paper is forthcoming. So I'm just... It's finally really free to review it. I don't have the details. So basically, with what you give us, I feel like there are so many gaps and things are missing from your argument. I mean, so for instance, was the reviewer the same? Was it different? Because we all know that sometimes we were supposed to submit and we had different reviews. Like, you've got a feminist interviewer, so you could help clarify it. But also I'm thinking, I think you probably need more than just one comparison to make the argument. I feel like because you need to see what are the overall comparisons of the whole thing to make any kind of... Generalization. Generalization. I mean, I don't feel like comparing too. Because it's very similar. It's both cholera, Spanish, and a few years after Ferran submission. So it could be that one bias is that he was just better than Ferran and that's why he got the prize. So it could also be this. And you also have other gaps, which is maybe the guy at the house had a personal connection. Those would be so hard to get or maybe Ferran had enemies. We all know that this kind of stuff could influence a plea at the academy. Maybe you would have to get personal letters. I don't know, maybe it's not impossible. So you have many explanations that could be Alternative. Alternative accounts are exactly the same record. Now you're absolutely right. So here there is this tension between how historians like history to be written and how an physicist would do this. Because historians want all the details of the case. Historians do not like generalizations except if they are built on a case-by-case basis. And each case should be incredibly detailed. My question here. You mentioned that there is the evidence to present the evidence in a certain way. But to make that clear, you have to... I was getting there. You were absolutely right. So I was going to explain how I got to that point. So basically the idea is that to answer your objection what we would have had to do is to go through the entire record of the academy and see for each brand that was awarded why it was awarded how were the data presented and for each failure see what the quality was. And on the basis of all these data I would present a paper on what was the emerging standard of the academy during the end of the 19th century. And this would ground properly my claim. And this is absolutely correct. And this is how it should be done. Why didn't we do it? Well, basically and this is what I was starting to explain because historians do not like this empiricist approach. I mean they want I mean for them and this is to me a perfectly legitimate concern for them I mean every case should be studied on its own merit and we should understand the circumstances of each candidate and how it was awarded. So it's not just a matter of checking the record and see what was in the record but rather who's the candidate who's assessing it, who's the jury and how are they working. So since this was a phase in the history of science we thought I mean let's first start with Ferran and Hauser came only as a secondary project once we realized that the claim that most historians were making was well this is just a conspiracy against Spaniards so this is the general claim we give a counter example not because this guy is Spaniard and actually presenting data differently he got the award. That's more or less and if you say that something more is at work show us where because we're going through archives in Germany France and Spain and we couldn't find that trace I mean we didn't find the smoking gun it was all uncontrollable so that's the limited claim that you find in the paper but like I said at the beginning it's Friday, it's the end of June so I thought I mean I'm going to make something sexier which is to say well look there's an emerging data culture at the Academy of Science in which you could see I mean how this guy Ferran was failing to persuade people whereas Hauser was succeeding and the evidence that we have for this is completely limited we are presenting this as a hypothesis that might hold or not because the reason I'm asking this is because I'm not in the history of medicine in France at that time and even later like a hundred years later maybe not a hundred but a lot of time much later on and the standards are not that high so I'm very surprised that the standards were so high I'm just surprised and I think I would be very much interested to know whether it was true or not that is the elite nature of the Academy so basically this is what I was answering to Kevin before that but also the type of data so those are Korea vaccine and they have a lot of vaccination data but because this is France and the hero was faster but also called Bernal and in statistics it was not they didn't like it was not it would be more like a mechanistic data and lots of years absolutely so but what you're saying is absolutely correct I mean there are a number of historians that have shown to what extent there was an allergy to data in the French system by the mid 19th century so it is sort of surprising that these people started up exceeding it but it's not implausible because I mean what we know about the controversies of the 50s was banishing already by the at the same time that this was happening there was this other emerging culture of medical records so there were the popes and underings saying statistics deprives us of clinical judgment but at the same time there were other physicians who were collecting records because they thought oh well this might do something so there was this tension at the same time there was an international pressure for tabulation people that separate paper show the evidence there was an emerging awareness that if you want your data to be persuasive you should tabulate them I mean organize these in a manner that allows people to make up their minds there is the CRC project by Lukas Engelman and now in Edinburgh in which they are trying to make exactly this point this emerging culture of tabulation played a cognitive role in making people agree in the academy of science by the end of the 19th century was a super elite situation in which you had people who were just knew what was happening in many different countries they were an international hub so they were aware of the allergy to statistical calculations the necessity to present records in a way that is readable for everybody and the people in other empires other colonial empires like the British Empire or the Russian Empire they were tabulating as a way to bring the least calories so all these things might coalesce into a single narrative but you are absolutely right I don't have the full evidence for this it's just a hint but I thought it's more entertaining what can I do I just didn't want to word you to that the person here saying I am wondering why there is only one review for Ferran's submission so that their rejection is based on the expert judgment of one person does this impact the interpretation in terms of bias the collective bias of a committee would not be the same of the personal bias of one individual that's a very very good point actually but that's about the review culture and that's a separate problem in itself because it came to my mind at some point and then I forgot about this thing because the standard practice we went through the archive and we saw other submissions and we tried to document who was doing what so the standard practice for doing the award for award in the brilliant was that each submission was given to a reviewer who should present a report and then the committee decided in full on the basis of that report so the expectation was that the committee should override the personal biases of one of the individuals and this is what I was sort of answering to Max before yeah I mean the reason why Goslang was so obsessed with the calculation was that because he needed to persuade the committee but it remains to be seen to what extent this committee was a serious scientific body with serious disagreement among the members or rather a sort of mafia style committee in which they all I mean get on with the decisions on the basis of mutual favors and interests the evidence that we have gathered and this came from reviewer B as well I said well look I mean who's doing this who are the members of this committee and interestingly it's difficult to find I mean there's only there's a limit to what we can know about the views of these people because some of them are known others are already unknown and there are no sources for them so we can only reason by proxy as to what they might have thought and how they might have thought it so in the paper we make a footnote on this and say well look the committee was diverse enough to justify the decision but of course again the evidence is inconclusive because we I mean some evidence about these people is completely lost so the historian should make up the minds of Therese do I fill this gap or do I remain agnostic but thanks for this Carine I have no question this is what we are going to talk about today's scientific communication what your historian is showing what clearly that's scientific communication for Therese you want the public communication so you see the the standard for public communication on different levels of scientific communication and in today's fight for COVID some people want the public communication to be lost to this information so how different is it can you articulate both both at the same time I can elaborate on this I mean this was the conversation that we were having with Juliette over lunch about the different problem which is so Goslan the reviewer was complaining that Ferran was releasing data to the press that wasn't being included in the dossier so Goslan assumed a sort of hierarchy in which if you wanted to be a serious scientist you should first submit your data to the specialized scientific community and then release it whereas Ferran who was vaccinating as an outcast and without any official support I mean preparing the vaccines on his own he needed to win the Spanish public opinion because otherwise he would be stopped so he had to choose between persuading first the academy or persuading first the Spanish audience and he went for the audience for moral reasons my primary duty as a physician is to care but the thing is that the academy saw this differently saying well look you might pretend to care what was the name of the hydroxy hydroxy Raul you might pretend that you want to be caring people but how do we know that you're really intentional how do we know you're not seeking fame of recognition and Raul's question was well look how can you question my intentions I mean it's clear that I'm doing this for the and then in time we found out what Raul was actually doing and really it's very clearly right at the beginning that's the thing in a medical emergency I mean you should not trust by default people who claim they can save you and try to persuade the public before persuading the experts but that is a general problem in the history of science it's only that in medicine it has more traumatic consequences but Stephen J. Gould who's a complete dissenter in the history of paleontology made his cause progress I mean writing wonderful popular books that gave a vision of the field that was irresistible but didn't overlap with consensus among experts so gradually what we have seen over the last hundred years is that in order to make science progress more and more scientists are invoking the public to support the cause and they might have good intentions but in the end they create an awful mess I mean you start skipping the protocols Well the thing is that you need the money mostly because for I was self funded so I need the money how do I get the money how do I get the funders to support me well I mean I'm gonna they're gonna find me the newspapers because the scientists are skeptical reluctant so yeah that is our world and the interesting thing is that so for me the funny thing is that as you can imagine by the end of the 19th century and our political system was quite rudimentary so there were very few readers and the politics was I mean there was an alternation between conservatives and liberals so the elections were fraudulent so we're not talking about the same regime that we observed today but still the debates are strikingly similar and the solutions just so I don't know what to make of these but I have two questions one just curiosity and the other one more like historiography the curious thing is that did he know Ramon and Ahal they collaborated anyway because I know that Ahal was involved in Valencia with the color vaccine and also he had this debate with Golgi which also played and was explained in very nationalistic terms like Spain, Italy, who's the best so I don't know if there is a connection their personal connection or at the level of country rivalry Ahal was at first four and then became sceptic correctly because this is something that Clara did and I think that Ahal was put off by the excessive exposure to her to the press he was more the long runner yeah that was the the fun question the other one is I still haven't brought my head around this but I also started with this issue of the archive never being complete and always missing the smoking gun and what this has led me has been to go from one archive to the other obsessively thinking that I'm going to find it thinking I found it and realizing no I actually haven't found it and then sort of accumulate documents until you drown in documents and so you say that because we don't have the empirical evidence of the documents of how some of the decisions might have been due to nationalism we should remain agnostic but my question is that if we accept that the archives are imperfect always should is saying we should remain agnostic not simply following what the archives already are is because bias of committees and so on I'm also looking at committees are very partial of how the discussion was really about so there's already a process of making the archive which incorporates all the biases nationalism, sexism you name it it filters out what should be included and what should be excluded for including possible the inability to appear more scientific so my struggle is how do I engage with this missing because I feel like we cannot remain agnostic that's my problem we just have to engage with that bias of the archive itself and so I'm just not sure whether agnosticism is possible well, it all depends on whether you want to be an empiricist or not about these things because here's the thing when I was in Luanlanf 25 years ago I discovered that there was a conference in the history of economics at the beginning which I was then engaged and that was my first exposure to history of science serious in Antwerp so I I'm better in a word so I was completely shocked because every historian came up and said the history of science that was done around me came up here are my archives here's what I can conclude it was a time of extreme empiricism the conclusions that historians were licensed to present on the basis of their evidence and I was shocked because for me history was a more ambitious field but then over time what I have seen is that historians have become more and more ambitious about the grand narratives again, I mean just think of Lorraine Dustin who spoke on rules throughout the history of the western world so well that's super ambitious it's like a collection of case studies built up into a history of the general concept of rule and it's up to the historians to decide how they do the thing but if they want to override the archive and say well even if I don't find the smoking gun there's a bias there they are not being exactly empiricist they are doing something that admits philosophical contestation because then the question is what do you take this bias to be and the historians I know and I deal with don't want to engage in this debate because the comfort of the convenience of being an empiricist is that you can dispense with philosophy but if you want to what I think you're getting I mean you need very serious hypothesis as to how people make their decisions how the mind works, how the bias operate and if you want to call them sexist or racist or any bias you can think of I mean you should do this on the basis of structural explanations that cannot be inferred directly from the archive Sure some of them not but do you still have more an empirical option which is shifting sort of what you're explaining and going to other alternative archives and seeing sort of the contenders of alternative ways of creating archives of the moment of creating science and seeing well there will be always a process of extrapolation I think that the smoking gun will never be able to be found but I think if if you plunge then that's my hypothesis I'm not working with your archive but my hypothesis is if you plunge into the archive of a committee that if you see enough that you eventually will see some of those bias of play and that there will be always sort of extrapolation and you always have to as you did what you were saying then you need them to systematize your analysis of these records and say well look here a pattern and then you are moving into a line of thinking that historians haven't liked so much this far like to be to empiricism in the sense that historians have this obsession with the case this is a singular case I mean they try to present each case on its own merit if you want to detect biases the way you're suggesting what you need to show is that there's a pattern of comparison between cases and this comparison between cases goes against this obsession with the individuality and I am all for this and I would support you if you wanted to do this but my experience of trying to I've published reasonably in the history of science I mean persuading reviewers ends up always in this sort of shit and so either we take the archive as a testing ground or we don't if we take the archive as a testing ground I mean this is all the evidence we have if you have something else you put it on the table please otherwise I mean we don't know what we and this has happened to me time and again but my problem is that I'm going to use my own example I'm looking at archives of the European Commission under regulation of four C's from the 1950s to the late 1990s and so if you look at it it's mostly very technical discussions on jurisdictional aspects, legal aspects and scientific aspects and if you read it you can read this as a history of progress from we were not really sure how to regulate trade and how to make classification of C's and now we do it's a technocratic win through and through and that's what you see in the archives empirically that's the only thing I can that the archive is really telling me that I know this cannot be the case there needs to be something else and my question is like either the archive is corrupt the archive is not showing some of the stuff that they were going in people's mind filters from the person's head to what I find but another option is to look at another archive that is not the European Commission's archive that is the archive also the private correspondence but even sort of an activist an activist archive of an activist organization actually there were other ways of regulating this but it's more of a comparison case like okay well we have these people who do things in a very sort of prerogatized way very European Commission style but we also have people who sort of deal with forest seeds in very different ways and just at least you show that the alternative was there and that we don't know how but they chose to ignore it the people in the Commission of course we just won't find sometimes the evidence but I feel like this comparative approach is maybe a way of and that's what you did but I feel like that's the only way but I'm with you but for these stuff, I mean you always have the possibility of an oral history but you can just it has some problems but what I'm saying is that for such a recent case I mean there are other sources of these sort of cases it's all said and done I mean we cannot interview anybody we cannot find any more evidence I mean the interpretation is based on whatever you have on the table so I mean oral history is beautiful but I'm not sure it delivers and I don't think it aims to deliver on the empiricist quest because I think oral historians are really aware that they are dealing with people's account of the past which is probably bad which is really bad at telling how things happen but oral historians they are very aware that their technique is not about bringing data of what happened in the past but it's about looking how people recollect the past which is something else but I feel like historians of science are not really good at sort of accepting our archives artists that we need to fill the gaps in any way well that's a professional controversy I've been following in a number of outlets and I think it's a generational matter I mean it's your generation no no no no it's a generational thing in the sense that so I mean the people I mean the people I knew 25 years ago here did that sort of textual history that was completely incompatible with these oral but once I mean you find a new cohort of scholars who are gathering all these material and classifying it in a systematic manner in presented in an articulated argument my older colleagues wouldn't be able to resist it to resist it because they would think that it's not empirical enough because I mean I think that shall we record all these because I'm gonna start I'm sorry who is I but shall we close it formally just to so I mean before we go into the drinks it's my time to thank you for this wonderful opportunity to revive my past in one and if and to be here with you again as a small but committed audience and I'm very happy to be here and thank you all and thank you who said