Laura Spinney

Last updated

Laura Spinney
Born1971 (age 49–50)
Alma mater Durham University (BSc)
Scientific career
Fields Spanish flu [1]
Pandemics
Institutions Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Website www.lauraspinney.com

Laura Spinney (born August 1971) is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer whose 2017 book Pale Rider is an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic. [2]

Contents

Education

Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University in 1993. [3] [4]

Career

Spinney has written for Nature , [5] [6] [7] [8] National Geographic , The Economist , New Scientist , and The Guardian . [9] She is the author of two novels, The Doctor [10] and The Quick, [11] and a collection of oral history from a central European city entitled Rue Centrale. [12]

In 2017 she published Pale Rider, [1] an account of the 1918 flu pandemic, [13] [14] published by Jonathan Cape who acquired the global rights in an auction in 2015. [15] Spinney indicates that the global pandemic was the biggest disaster of the 20th century, exceeding the death tolls of both World War I (17 million) and World War II (60 million dead). Its full scope has only been recognized in the 21st century as researchers have examined old records, determining that 1 in 3 people became ill and between 1 in 10 and 1 in 5 died. At the time illiteracy was common, germ theory relatively new, antibiotics had not been discovered, and long-distance communication was often limited. [4]

The first clearly identified and documented case was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook who reported in sick at Camp Funston in Kansas on 4 March 1918. Three distinct waves of disease outbreak occurred worldwide: in spring 1918, in late summer and autumn, and from later winter 1918 to early 1919. Between the first and second waves, the virus mutated and became more deadly in humans. The death toll in countries like China and India was particularly poorly documented. Spinney vividly describes conditions from all over the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to Russia. [4]

Spinney's English translation of Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz's novel Derborence was published in 2018. [16] [17] In 2019 she spent two months as a journalist-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. [18]

Books

Spinney's published books and novels include:

Articles

Spinney's published articles include:

Personal life

Spinney lives in Paris, France. [19]

Related Research Articles

Spanish flu 1918–1920 pandemic of H1N1 influenza A virus

Spanish flu, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or the 1918 influenza pandemic, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented pandemic illness was in Kansas, United States in March 1918, and then in April 1918 in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Two years later, an estimated 500 million people – then about a third of the world's population – had been infected in four successive waves. Death toll estimates range from a conservative 17 million to a possible high of 100 million, more fatalities than in the previous four years of World War I, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.

Jennifer Alice Clack, was an English palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. She specialised in the early evolution of tetrapods, specifically studying the "fish to tetrapod" transition: the origin, evolutionary development and radiation of early tetrapods and their relatives among the lobe-finned fishes. She is best known for her book Gaining Ground: the Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods, published in 2002 and written with the layperson in mind.

Spanish flu research

Spanish flu research concerns studies regarding the causes and characteristics of the "Spanish flu," a variety of influenza that in 1918 was responsible for the worst influenza pandemic in modern history. Many theories about the origins and progress of the Spanish flu persisted in the literature, but it was not until 2005, when various samples of lung tissue were recovered from American World War I soldiers and from an Inupiat woman buried in permafrost in a mass grave in Brevig Mission, Alaska, that significant genetic research was made possible.

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment 2012 manifesto against using the journal impact factor to assess a scientists work

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) intends to halt the practice of correlating the journal impact factor to the merits of a specific scientist's contributions. Also according to this statement, this practice creates biases and inaccuracies when appraising scientific research. It also states that the impact factor is not to be used as a substitute "measure of the quality of individual research articles, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions".

Podiata Clade of shelled animals

Podiates are a proposed clade containing the Amorphea and the organisms now assigned to the clade CRuMs. Ancyromonadida does not appear to have emerged in this grouping. Sarcomastigota is a proposed subkingdom that includes all the podiates that are not animals or fungi. Sulcozoa is a proposed phylum within Sarcomastigota that does not include the phyla Amoebozoa (clade) and Choanozoa (paraphyletic), i.e. it includes the proposed subphyla Apusozoa and Varisulca

Our World in Data Website that presents data and statistics of socially relevant topics

Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality. It is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales, and founded by Max Roser, a social historian and development economist. The research team is based at the University of Oxford.

Patrick Vallance British medical doctor

Sir Patrick John Thompson Vallance is a British physician, scientist, and clinical pharmacologist who has worked in both academia and industry. He has served as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of the United Kingdom since 2018.

Magdalena Skipper Editor-in-Chief of Nature

Magdalena Skipper is a British geneticist and the editor-in-chief of the journal Nature. She previously served as an editor of Nature Reviews Genetics and the open access journal Nature Communications.

Mike Galsworthy

Mike Galsworthy is the co-founder of Scientists for EU and Healthier IN the EU and a media commentator about the effects of Brexit on the scientific community in the United Kingdom. He is currently a visiting researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and was previously Senior Research Associate in the Department of Applied Health Research, University College London (UCL).

Jessica Polka is a biochemist and the Executive Director of ASAPbio, a non-profit initiative promoting innovation and transparency via preprints and open peer review. She was one of the organizers of a recent meeting they held on scholarly communication.

Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S", a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. The "S" stands for "shock".

CRuMs is a proposed clade of microbial eukaryotes, whose name is an acronym of the following constituent groups: i) collodictyonids also known as diphylleids, ii) rigifilids and iii) mantamonadids as sister of the Amorphea. It more or less supersedes Varisulca, as Ancyromonadida are inferred not to be specifically related to the orders Collodictyonida, Rigifilida and Mantamonadida.

Derborence is a French-language novel by Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz that was first published in 1934 and for which two English translations have been published. It is a love story set in the Alps, against the backdrop of a natural disaster.

Nature's 10 is an annual listicle of ten "people who mattered" in science, produced by the scientific journal Nature. Nominees have made a significant impact in science either for good or for bad. Reporters and editorial staff at Nature judge nominees to have had "a significant impact on the world, or their position in the world may have had an important impact on science". Short biographical profiles describe the people behind some of the year's most important discoveries and events. Alongside the ten, five "ones to watch" for the following year are also listed.

Sandra Díaz (ecologist) Argentinian ecologist

Sandra Myrna Díaz ForMemRS is an Argentinian ecologist and professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba. She studies the functional traits of plants and investigates how plants impact the ecosystem.

Neil Ferguson (epidemiologist) British epidemiologist and researcher

Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics (J-IDEA), director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.

Pale Rider is commonly associated with the fourth of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Christian eschatology. The phrase could refer to:

Neuropixels probes are electrodes developed in 2017 to record the activity of hundreds of neurons in the brain. The probes are based on CMOS technology and have 1,000 recording sites on a thin, 1-cm long shank. They are used in hundreds of neuroscience laboratories including the International Brain Laboratory, to record brain activity mostly in mice and rats. By revealing the activity of vast numbers of neurons, Neuropixels probes are allowing new approaches to the study of brain processes such as sensory processing, decision making, internal state, and emotions and to create brain-machine interfaces. The probes were announced in 2017. They are designed and fabricated by imec, an electronics research center in Belgium.

Chiquihuite cave is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site in the Astillero Mountains, Zacatecas State, in North-Central Mexico. It is located 2,740 metres above sea level, and about 1 km higher than the valley below. The lithic artefacts discovered here have been dated to 26,000 years before present based on more than 50 samples of animal bone and charcoal found in association with the tools.

Shabir Madhi South African physician and professor

Shabir Ahmed Madhi is a South African physician who is professor of vaccinology and director of the South African Medical Research Council Respiratory and Meningeal Pathogens Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, and National Research Foundation/Department of Science and Technology Research Chair in Vaccine Preventable Diseases. In January 2021, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwateratand.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Jonathan Cape, 2017. ISBN   9781910702376
  2. ↑ DeGroot, Gerard (20 May 2017). "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney". thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2018.(subscription required)
  3. ↑ "Books and Authors". Durham First (15): 31. Spring 2002.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Rego Barry, Rebecca (13 November 2018). "Exhuming the Flu". Distillations. Science History Institute. 4 (3): 40–43. Retrieved 6 February 2020.
  5. 1 2 Spinney, Laura (2017). "How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory". Nature. 543 (7644): 168–170. doi:10.1038/543168a.
  6. ↑ Spinney, Laura (2019). "How pandemics shape social evolution". Nature. 574 (7778): 324–326. doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03048-8 . ISSN   0028-0836.
  7. ↑ Spinney, Laura (2020). "Panicking about societal collapse? Plunder the bookshelves". Nature. 578 (7795): 355–357. doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00436-3 . ISSN   0028-0836.
  8. ↑ Spinney, Laura (2012). "Q&A: Maestro of the swarm". Nature. 481 (7380): 144–144. doi: 10.1038/481144a . ISSN   0028-0836.
  9. ↑ Spinney, Laura (25 March 2020). "It takes a whole world to create a new virus, not just China | Laura Spinney" – via www.theguardian.com.
  10. 1 2 The Doctor. Methuen, London, 2001. ISBN   0413754707
  11. 1 2 The Quick. Fourth Estate, London, 2007. ISBN   9780007240500
  12. 1 2 Rue Centrale. Editions L’Age d’Homme, 2013. ISBN   9782825143216
  13. ↑ Seymour, Miranda (4 June 2017). "Pale Rider review – painful lessons of the flu pandemic". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 13 October 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
  14. ↑ "The deadliest disease in history". economist.com. 25 May 2017. Archived from the original on 23 June 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
  15. ↑ Farrington, Joshua (17 June 2015). "Cape wins auction for Spanish Flu study". thebookseller.com. The Bookseller. Archived from the original on 23 June 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
  16. 1 2 Derborence: Where the devils came down. Skomlin, 2018. ISBN   9781789265811
  17. ↑ "Derborence – Where the devils came down". Skomlin. 2 October 2018. Archived from the original on 13 October 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
  18. ↑ "Journalists-in-Residence". mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de. Archived from the original on 13 October 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
  19. ↑ Spinney, Laura (5 December 2013). "About Laura Spinney". Archived from the original on 28 January 2018. Retrieved 21 October 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.