At 6 am on September 13, the CSIR handle on X.com published the following post about an "anti-diabetic medicine" called either "Daiba 250" or "Diabe 250", developed at the CSIR-Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (IIIM):

Its "key features", according to the CSIR, are that it created more than 250 jobs and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi "mentioned the startup" to which it has been licensed in his podcast 'Mann ki Baat'. What of the clinical credentials of Diabe-250, however?

Diabe-250 is being marketed on India-based online pharmacies like Tata 1mg as an "Ayurvedic" over-the-counter tablet "for diabetes support/healthy sugar levels". The listing also claims Diabe-250 is backed by a US patent granted to an Innoveda Biological Solutions Pvt. Ltd. Contrary to the CSIR post calling Diabe-250 "medicine", some listings also carry the disclaimer that it's "a dietary nutritional supplement, not for medicinal use".

("Ayurveda" is within double-quotes throughout this post because, like most products like Diabe-250 in the market that are also licensed by the Ministry of AYUSH, there's no evidence that they're actually Ayurvedic. They may be, they may not be — and until there's credible proof, the Ayurvedic identity is just another claim.)

Second, while e-commerce and brand pages use the spellings "Diabe 250" or "Diabe-250" (without or without the hyphen), the CSIR's social media posts refer to it as "Daiba 250". The latter also describe it as an anti-diabetic developed/produced with the CSIR-IIIM in the context of incubation and licensing. These communications don't constitute clinical evidence but they might be the clearest public basis to link the "Daiba" or "Diabe" spellings with the CSIR.

Multiple product pages also credit Innoveda Biological Solutions Pvt. Ltd. as a marketer and manufacturer. Corporate registry aggregators corroborate the firm's existence; its CIN is U24239DL2008PTC178821). Similarly, the claim that Diabe-250 is backed by a US patent can be traced most directly to US8163312B2 for "Herbal formulation for prevention and treatment of diabetes and associated complications". Its inventor is listed as a G. Geetha Krishnan and Innoveda Biological Solutions (P) Ltd. is listed as the current assignee.

The patent text describes combinations of Indian herbs for diabetes and some complications. Of course no patent is proof of efficacy for any specific branded product or dose.

The ingredients in Diabe-250 vary by retailer and there's no consistent, quantitative per-tablet composition on public pages. This said, multiple listings name the following ingredients:

• "Vidanga" (Embelia ribes)
• "Gorakh buti" (Aerva lanata)
• "Raj patha" (Cyclea peltata)
• "Vairi" or "salacia" (often Salacia oblonga), and
• "Lajalu" (Biophytum sensitivum)

The brand page also asserts a "unique combination of 16 herbs" and describes additional "Ayurveda" staples such as berberine source, turmeric, and jamun. However, there doesn't appear to be a full label image or a quantitative breakdown of the composition of Diabe-250.

Retail and brand pages also claim Diabe-250 "helps maintain healthy sugar levels", "improves lipid profile/reduces cholesterol", and "reduces diabetic complications", sometimes also including non-glycaemic effects such as "better sleep" and "regular bowel movement". Several pages also include the caveat that it's a "dietary nutritional supplement" and that it's "not for medicinal use". However, none of these source cite a peer-reviewed clinical trial of Diabe-250 itself.

In fact, there appear to be no peer-reviewed, product-specific clinical trials of Diabe-250 or Daiba-250 in humans; there are also no clinical trial registry records that were specific to this brand. If such a trial exists and its results were published in a peer-reviewed journal, it hasn't been cited on the sellers' or brand pages or in accessible databases.

Some ingredient classes in Diabe-250 are interesting even if they don't validate Diabe-250 as a finished product. For instance, Salacia spp., especially S. reticulata, S. oblonga, and S. chinensis have been known to be α-glucosidase inhibitors. In vitro studies and chemistry reviews have also described Salacia spp. can be potent inhibitors of maltase, sucrase, and isomaltase.

In one triple-blind, randomised crossover trial in 2023, biscuits fortified with S. reticulata extract reduced HbA1c levels by around 0.25% (2.7 mmol/mol) over three months versus the placebo, with an acceptable safety profile. In post-prandial studies involving healthy volunteers and type 2 diabetes, several randomised crossover designs had lower post-meal glucose and insulin area under the curve when Salacia extract was co-ingested along with carbohydrate.

Similarly, berberine-based neutraceuticals (such as those including Berberis aristata) have shown glycaemic improvements in the clinical literature (at large, not specific to Diabe-250) in people with type 2 diabetes. However, these effects were often reported in combination with other compounds and which researchers also indicated depended strongly on formulation and dose.

Finally, a 2022 systematic review of "Ayurvedic" medicines in people with type 2 diabetes reported heterogeneous evidence, including some promising signals, but also emphasised methodological limitations and the need for randomised controlled trials of higher quality.

Right now, if Diabe-250 works as advertised, there's no scientific proof in the public domain, especially in the form of product-specific clinical trials that define its composition, dosage, and endpoints.

In India, Ayurvedic drugs come under the Drugs & Cosmetics Rules 1945. Labelling provisions under Section 161 require details such as the manufacturer's address, batch, and manufacturing and expiry dates while practice guides also note the product license number on the label for "Ayurvedic" drugs. However, several retail pages for Diabe-250 display it as a “dietary nutritional supplement" and add that it's "not for medicinal use”, implying that it's being marketed with supplement-style claims rather than as an Ayurvedic “medicine” in the narrow regulatory sense — which runs against the claim in the CSIR post on X.com. Public pages also didn't display an AYUSH license number for Diabe-250. I haven't checked a physical pack.

A well-known study in JAMA in 2008, of "Ayurvedic" products purchased over the internet, found that around 20% of them contained lead, mercury or arsenic, and public-health advisories and case reports that have appeared since have echoed these concerns. This isn't a claim about Diabe-250 specifically but a category-level risk of "Ayurvedic" products that are available to buy online and which are compounded by the unclear composition of Diabe-250. The inconsistent naming also opens the door to counterfeit products that are also more likely to be contaminated.

Materials published by the Indian and state governments, including the Ministry of AYUSH, have framed "Ayurveda" as complementary to allopathic medicine. For example, if a person with diabetes chooses to try "Ayurvedic" support, the standard advice is to not discontinue prescribed therapy and to monitor one's glucose, especially if the individual is using α-glucosidase-like agents that alter the post-prandial response.

In sum, Diabe-250 is a multi-herb "Ayurvedic" tablet marketed by Innoveda for glycaemic support and has often been promoted with a related US patent owned by the company. However, patents are not clinical trials and patent offices don't clinically evaluate drugs described in patent applications. That information can only come from clinical trials, especially when a drug is being touted as "science-led", as the CSIR has vis-à-vis Diabe-250. But there are no published clinical trials of the product. And while there's some evidence for some of its constituents, particularly Salacia, to reduce post-prandial glucose and to effect small changes in the HbA1c levels over a few months, there's no product-specific proof.

An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit:

Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a topological quantum computer. “As a scientist who likes to see things tried, I’m grateful that at least one player stuck with the topological approach even when it ended up being a long, painful slog,” says [Scott] Aaronson.

“Most governments won’t fund such work, because it’s way too risky and expensive,” adds [Winfried] Hensinger. “So it’s very nice to see that Microsoft is stepping in there.”

In drug development, defence technologies, and life sciences research, to name a few, we’ve seen the opposite: governments fund the risky, expensive part for many years, often decades, until something viable emerges. Then the IP moves to public and private sector enterprises for commercialisation, sometimes together with government subsidies to increase public access. With pharmaceuticals in particular, the government often doesn’t recoup investments it has made in the discovery phase, which includes medical education and research. An illustrative recent example is the development of mRNA vaccines; from my piece in The Hinducriticising the medicine Nobel Prize for this work:

Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman began working together on the mRNA platform at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. The University licensed its patents to mRNA RiboTherapeutics, which sublicensed them to CellScript, which sublicensed them to Moderna and BioNTech for $75 million each. Dr. Karikó joined BioNTech as senior vice-president in 2013, and the company enlisted Pfizer to develop its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020.

Much of the knowledge that underpins most new drugs and vaccines is unearthed at the expense of governments and public funds. This part of drug development is more risky and protracted, when scientists identify potential biomolecular targets within the body on which a drug could act in order to manage a particular disease, followed by identifying suitable chemical candidates. The cost and time estimates of this phase are $1billion-$2.5 billion and several decades, respectively.

Companies subsequently commoditise and commercialise these entities, raking in millions in profits, typically at the expense of the same people whose taxes funded the fundamental research. There is something to be said for this model of drug and vaccine development, particularly for the innovation it fosters and the eventual competition that lowers prices, but we cannot deny the ‘double-spend’ it imposes on consumers — including governments — and the profit-seeking attitude it engenders among the companies developing and manufacturing the product.

Quantum computing may well define the next technological revolution together with more mature AI models. Topological quantum computing in particular — if realised well enough to compete with alternative architectures based on superconducting wires and/or trapped ions — could prove especially valuable for its ability to be more powerful with fewer resources. Governments justify their continuing sizeable expense on drug development by the benefits that eventually accrue to the country’s people. By all means, quantum technologies will have similar consequences, following from a comparable trajectory of development where certain lines of inquiry are not precluded because they could be loss-making or amount to false starts. And they will impinge on everything from one’s fundamental rights to national security.

But Hensinger’s opinion indicates the responsibility of developing this technology has been left to the private sector. I wonder if there are confounding factors here. For example, is Microsoft’s pursuit of a topological qubit the exception to the rule — i.e. one of a few enterprises that are funded by a private organisation in a sea of publicly funded research? Another possibility is that we’re hearing about Microsoft’s success because it has a loud voice, with the added possibility that its announcement was premature (context here). It’s also possible Microsoft’s effort included grants from NSF, DARPA or the like.

All this said, let’s assume for a moment that what Hensinger said was true of quantum computing research in general: the lack of state-led development in such potentially transformative technologies raises two (closely related) concerns. The first is scientific progress, especially that it will happen behind closed doors. In a June 2023 note, senior editors of the Physical Review B journal acknowledged the contest between the importance of researchers sharing their data for scrutiny, replication, and for others to build on their work — all crucial for science — and private sector enterprises’ need to protect IP and thus withhold data. “This will not be the last time the American Physical Society confronts a tension between transparency and the transmission of new results,” they added. Unlike in drug development, life sciences, etc., even the moral argument that publicly funded research must be in the public domain is rendered impotent, although it can still be recast as the weaker “research that affects the public sphere…”.

The second is democracy. In a March 2024 commentary, digital governance experts Nathan Sanders, Bruce Schneier, and Norman Eisen wrote that the state could develop a “public AI” to counter the already apparent effects of “private AI” on democratic institutions. According to them, a “public AI” model could “provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development,” including “how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training” and “how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use”. They added: “Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.”

Of course, quantum computing isn’t beset by the same black-box problem that surrounds AI models, yet what it implies for our ability to secure digital data means it could still benefit from state-led development. Specifically: (i) a government-funded technology standard could specify the baseline for the private sector to “match or exceed to compete” so that computers deployed to secure public data maintain a minimum level of security; (ii) private innovation can build on the standard, with the advantage of not having to lay new foundations of their own; and (iii) the data and the schematics pertaining to the standard should be in the public domain, thus restricting private-sector IP to specific innovations.[1]

[1] Contrary to a lamentable public perception, just knowing how a digital technology works doesn’t mean it can be hacked.

While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on this metric, the first place would be a tie between the chemistry and the physics prizes of 2016. The chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa for “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”. Likewise, the physics prize was shared between David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and John Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. If you like, you can read my piece about the 2016 chemistry prize here. A short excerpt about the laureates’ work:

… it is fruitless to carry on speculating about what these achievements could be good for. J. Fraser Stoddart, who shared the Nobel Prize last year with Feringa for having assembled curious molecular arrangements like Borromean rings, wrote in an essay in 2005, “It is amazing how something that was difficult to do in the beginning will surely become easy to do in the event of its having been done. The Borromean rings have captured our imagination simply because of their sheer beauty. What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be.” Feringa said in a 2014 interview that he likes to build his “own world of molecules”. In fact, Stoddart, Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the chemistry prize for having developed new techniques to synthesise and assemble organic molecules in their pursuits.

In the annals of the science Nobel Prizes, there are many, many laureates who allowed their curiosity about something rather than its applications to guide their research. In the course of these pursuits, they developed techniques, insights, technologies or something else that benefited their field as a whole but which wasn’t the end goal. Over time the objects of many of these pursuits have also paved the way for some futuristic technology themselves. All of this is a testament to the peculiar roads the guiding light of curiosity opens. Of course, scientists need specific conditions of their work to be met before they can commitment themselves to such lines of inquiry. For just two examples, they shouldn’t be under pressure to publish papers and they shouldn’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they don’t file patents. I can also see where the critics of such blue-sky research stand and why: while there are benefits, it’s hard to say ahead of time what they might be and when they might appear.

This said, the work that won the 2016 physics prize is of a similar nature and also particularly relevant in light of a ‘development’ in the realm of quantum computing earlier this month. Two of the three laureates, Thouless and Kosterlitz, performed an experiment in the 1970s in which they found something unusual. To quote from my piece in The Hindu on February 23:

If you cool some water vapour, it will become water and then ice. If you keep lowering the temperature until nearly absolute zero, the system will have minimal thermal energy, allowing quantum states of matter to show. In the 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless found that the surface of superfluid helium sometimes developed microscopic vortices that moved in pairs. When they raised the temperature, the vortices decoupled and moved freely. It was a new kind of … phase transition: the object’s topological attributes changed in response to changes in energy [rather than it turning from liquid to gas].

The findings here, followed by many others that followed, together with efforts by physicists to describe this new property of matter using mathematics, in harmony with other existing theories of nature all laid the foundation for Microsoft’s February 19 announcement: that it had developed a quantum-computing chip named Majorana 1 with topological qubits inside. (For more on this, please read my February 23 piece.) Microsoft has been trying to build this chip since at least 2000, when a physicist then on the company’s payroll named Alexei Kitaev published a paper exploring its possibility. Building the thing was a tall order, requiring advances in a variety of fields that eventually had to be brought together in just the right way, but Microsoft knew that if it succeeded the payoff would be tremendous.

This said, even if this wasn’t curiosity-driven research on Microsoft’s part, such research has already played a big role in both the company’s and the world’s fortunes. In the world’s fortune because, as with the work of Stoddart, Feringa, and Sauvage, the team explored, invented and/or refined new methods en route to building Majorana 1, methods which the rest of the world can potentially use to solve other problems. And in the company’s fortune because while Kitaev’s paper was motivated by the possibility of a device of considerable technological and commercial value, it drew from a large body of knowledge that — at the time it was unearthed and harmonised with the rest of science — wasn’t at all concerned with a quantum-computing chip in its then-distant future. For all its criticism, blue-sky research leads to some outcomes that no other forms of research can. This isn’t an argument in support of it so much as in defence of not sidelining it altogether.

While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, I’ve covered each edition with not inconsiderable excitement[1]. Given the fondness of the prize-giving committee for work on or with artificial intelligence last year, it’s possible there’s a physics prize vouchsafed for work on the foundations of contemporary quantum computers in the not-too-distant future. When it comes to pass, I will be all too happy to fall back on the many pieces I’ve written on this topic over the years, to be able to confidently piece together the achievements in context and, personally, to understand the work beyond my needs as a journalist, as a global citizen. But until that day, I can’t justify the time I do spend reading up about and writing on this and similar topics as a journalist in a non-niche news publication — one publishing reports, analyses, and commentary for a general audience rather than those with specialised interests.

The justification is necessary at all because the time I spend doing something is time spent not doing something else and the opportunity cost needs to be rational in the eyes of my employers. At the same time, journalism as a “history of now” would fail if it didn’t bring the ideas, priorities, and goals at play in the development of curiosity-driven research and — with the benefit of hindsight — its almost inevitable value for commerce and strategy to the people at large. This post so far, until this point, is the preamble I had in mind for my edition of The Hindu’s Notebook column today. Excerpt:

It isn’t until a revolutionary new technology appears that the value of investing in basic research becomes clear. Many scientists are rooting for more of it. India’s National Science Day, today, is itself rooted in celebrating the discovery of the Raman effect by curiosity-driven study. The Indian government also wants such research in this age of quantum computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. But it isn’t until such technology appears that the value of investing in a science journalism of the underlying research — slow-moving, unglamorous, not application-oriented — also becomes clear. It might even be too late by then.

The scientific ideas that most journalists have overlooked are still very important: they’re the pillars on which the technologies reshaping the world stand. So it’s not fair that they’re overlooked when they’re happening and obscured by other concerns by the time they’ve matured. Without public understanding, input, and scrutiny in the developmental phase, the resulting technologies have fewer chances to be democratic, and the absence of the corresponding variety of journalism is partly to blame.

I would have liked to include the preamble with the piece itself but the word limit is an exacting 620. This is also why I left something else unsaid in the piece, something important for me, the author, to have acknowledged. After the penultimate line — “You might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” — I wanted to say there’s a confounding factor: the skills, choices, and circumstances of the journalists themselves. If a journalist isn’t a good writer[2] or doesn’t have the assistance of good editors, what they write about curiosity-driven research, which already runs on weak legs among the people at large, may simply pass through their feeds and newsletters without inviting even a “huh?”. But as I put down the aforementioned line, a more discomfiting thought erupted at the back of my mind.

In 2017, on the Last Word on Nothing blog, science journalist Cassandra Willyard made a passionate case for the science journalism of obscure things to put people at its centre in order to be effective. The argument’s allure was obvious but it has never sat well with me. The narrative power of human emotion, drawn from the highs or lows in the lives of the people working on obscure scientific ideas, is in being able to render those ideas more relatable. But my view is that there’s a lot out there we may never write about if we couldn’t also write about what highs/lows it rendered among its discoverers or beholders, and more so if such highs/lows don’t exist at all, as is often the case with a big chunk of curiosity-driven research. Willyard herself had used the then-recent example of the detection of gravitational waves from two neutron stars smashing into each other billions of lightyears away. This is conveniently (but perhaps not by her design) an example of Big Science where many people spent a long time looking for something and finally found it. There’s certainly a lot of drama here.

But the reason I call having to countenance Willyard’s arguments discomfiting is that I understand what she’s getting at and I know I’m rebutting it on the back of only a small modicum of logic. It’s a sentimental holdout, even: I don’t want to have to care about the lives of other people when I know I care very well for how we extracted a world’s worth of new information by ‘reading’ gravitational waves emitted by a highly unusual cosmic event. The awe, to me, is right there. Yet I’m also keenly aware how impactful the journalism advocated by Willyard can be, having seen it in ‘action’ in the feature-esque pieces published by science magazines, where the people are front and centre, and the number of people that read and talk about them.

I hold out because I believe there are, like me, many people out there (I’ve met a few) that can be awed by narratives of neutron-star collisions that dispense with invoking the human condition. I also believe that while a large number of people may read those feature-esque pieces, I’m not convinced they have a value that goes beyond storytelling, which is of course typically excellent. But I suppose those narratives of purely scientific research devoid of human protagonists (or antagonists) would have to be at least as excellent in order to captivate audiences just as well. If a journalist — together with the context in which they produce their work — isn’t up to the mark yet, they should strive to be. And this striving is essential if “you might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” is to be meaningful.

[1] Not least because each Nobel Prize announcement is accompanied by three press releases: one making the announcement, one explaining the prize-winning work to a non-expert audience, and one explaining it in its full technical context. Journalism with these resources is actually quite enjoyable. This helps, too.

[2] I’m predominantly a textual journalist and default to “write” when writing about journalistic communication. But of course in this sentence I mean journalists who aren’t good writers and/or good video-makers or editors and/or good podcasters, etc.

The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes continuing to crown some of the greatest achievements in the history of modern science.

What the Nobel Prizes are not

The winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prizes are an opportunity to discover new areas of research, and developments there that scientists consider particularly notable. In this endeavour, it is equally necessary to remember what the Nobel Prizes are not. For starters, the

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The prizes are exclusive by design and their prestige is enforced through a system of secrecy: the reasons for picking each laureate are locked away for 50 years even as the selection process happens behind closed doors. In keeping with a historical tradition of all prizes being distinguished by their laureates, the Nobel Prizes are sought after so scientists can enter the same ranks that hold Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.

Of course the institution like others of its kind reinforces the need for itself, creating self-fulfilling conditions by mooching off the reputation of scientists who have laboured for decades in specific social, economic, cultural, and political contexts to produce knowledge of incredible value and in return conferring a reputation of a different kind. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre tried to decline the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964.

Then again, the way the award-giving foundation conducts the prizes’ announcements has also helped to ameliorate the neglectful treatment many sections of the mainstream media, especially in India, have meted out to the sort of scientific work the prizes fete, even if the foundation’s conduct also panders to the causes of such treatment.

The prizes

I think the Nobel Prizes for physiology/medicine and for physics caught many science communicators off guard because they were both concerned with very involved pieces of work with no direct applications. The medicine prize was for the discovery of microRNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation, which when it happened overturned what biologists had assumed was a complete picture of how the body’s cells regulate genes to make different proteins.

The physics prize was for the first work on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which produced a machine-friendly version of cognition by drawing on ideas in biology, neuropsychology, and statistical mechanics. If this work hadn’t happened, ChatGPT may not exist today, but several other developments built on the first ANNs to produce more new knowledge whose accumulation eventually led to ChatGPT et al. Ergo, calling ChatGPT et al. an application of the first ANNs would be thoroughly misguided.

The chemistry prize — for the development of computational tools to design proteins and to predict their structures — presented a slightly different problem: the tools' advent meant humans suddenly found themselves spending much less time on deciphering the structures, yet the tools didn't, and still don't, say why proteins prefer these structures over others. Scientists still need to figure out the why by themselves.

All this said, I’m grateful this year as I’ve been before for the prizes’ ability to throw up an opportunity for all sections of the media to discuss scientific work many of them would most likely have neglected otherwise. Reading the research papers that first reported the existence of microRNA and the papers that explained how models to understand exotic states of matter lent themselves to the first ANN concepts allowed me personally to refresh my basics as well as be reminded of the ability of blue-sky scicomm — as a direct counterpart of blue-sky research, one that isn’t fixated on applications — to wow us.

This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel and Mahima Jain.

The Rosalind Lee issue

To reiterate from the introduction, the Nobel Prizes are one institution with deep and well-defined flaws. And I have learnt from (journalistic) experience that there’s no changing its mind. It's too big to change and doesn’t admit the need to do so, and its members have had no compunctions about articulating that in public. The vast majority of scientists also subscribe to the prizes’ value and their general desirability. So it is my view today that we work around the prizes and/or renounce the prizes altogether when dealing with the award-giving group’s choices.

Caste, and science’s notability threshold

A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more

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A third option is to change the foundation’s mind but this requires a considerable amount of collective work to which I doubt more than a few would like to dedicate themselves. Mind-changing work is demanding work. Then again the problem is if you fall anywhere in between these two more-viable options, you risk admitting other possibilities vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes that (I imagine) you’d rather not.

For a background on the Rosalind Lee issue, I suggest you browse X.com. My notes on it follow:

(i) The Nobel Foundation has historically reserved the Nobel Prizes for persons who conceived of important ideas and made testable predictions about them. The latter is important. IIRC this is why SN Bose didn't win a Nobel Prize for coming up with Bose-Einstein particle statistics. Albert Einstein could have won instead because he built on Bose's ideas to predict the existence of a particular state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate. Who came up with the testable predictions in the paper that won Victor Ambros a share of the medicine Nobel Prize?

I’m not directly defending the exclusion of Rosalind Lee, who was the first author of that and in fact many of the more important papers Ambros published in his career. Instead, I’m pointing to an answer that could explain her exclusion with a reminder that the answer is flawed and that it has always been flawed. I suppose I’m saying that we couldn’t have expected better. 🙃

(ii) Physics World recently published an interview with Lars Brink, a physicist who has been part of the decision-making for many physics prizes the last decade. Brinks bluntly states at one point that the Nobel Academy doesn't give the prizes to collaborations or in fact even more than three people at a time because they don't want 5,000 people (for example at CERN) claiming they're Nobel laureates all of a sudden. There is an explicit and deliberate design here to keep the prizes exclusive, like Hermes handbags.

(iii) The first author is often the one who designs the experiment, performs it, collects the data, analyses it, etc. — basically everything beyond, but not necessarily excluding, the act of having an idea itself and including most of the legwork. The Nobel Prizes however are not awards for legwork. This sucks because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the people required to produce good-quality scientific knowledge.

Thanks to the influence the prizes exert on the scientific community, the people who are left out also fade further — in the public view and also in terms of not being able to benefit from the systematic rewards vouchsafed for the Nobel laureates who are now institutions unto themselves. The fading is likely compounded for people already struggling to be noticed in the scientific literature: the “technicians” who equip, maintain, and operate laboratory instruments, among others (a.k.a. the Matthew effect). Of course the axis of discrimination is gendered as well: as one friend put it, “the ‘leg work’ of science is historically feminised”, and when awards and other forms of recognition exclude such work they perpetuate the Matilda effect.

How cut-throat competition forces scientists to act against the collective

Brian Keating, an astrophysicist who led the infamous cosmic inflation announcement in 2014, thinks this is how science works: “… you put out a result, and other scientists work to test the result”. However, his own story shows that this is a cute ideal that’s often unreasonable to expect on

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Overall, whether the prize-giving body is aware of these narratives and issues is moot. What matters is that it acknowledges and responds to them — which it has signalled it won’t do. QED.

(iv) In fact, all these rules of the Nobel Prizes are arbitrary. It's effectively a sport and a poorly managed one at that. You make up a playing field, publicise some of the rules, keep the governing body beyond reach or reproach, hide the scorecard, and then you say you have to jump five feet in the air to qualify. The outragers are raising their voices for Rosalind Lee (what does she want, by the way?) but not for the first authors of all the other papers by other laureates over the years. If they don’t belong to marginalised social groups, is it okay to leave them out? Then again these are moot questions, pursuits leading nowhere at all thanks to the Nobel Prizes’ presumption that they’re not of this world.

The Nobel Prizes have also wronged many women, but I can't claim to know whether there's a case-by-case explanation (with arbitrary foundations) or if it was a systematic program to do so. Both seem equally likely given how slow attitudes have been to change on this front. This said, just because women have been wronged doesn’t mean all forms of reparation will be equally useful. More specifically, what will breaking the (arbitrary) rules do to change for women in science?

Obviously this is part of a broader question about the influence of the Nobel Prizes on doing science. Mukund Thattai ran a survey on Twitter years ago asking scientists about why they got into or stayed in science. "Because of a Nobel laureate” received the fewest votes in a large pool of respondents. It wasn’t a representative survey but it does hint at an important piece of reality. Once we start to argue that including Rosalind Lee would have been better, we also tacitly admit the Nobel Prizes matter for who chooses to stay in science and who is condemned to fade — but do they?

On the other side of this coin lie all the other prizes that did fete Rosalind Lee along with Victor Ambros. If we’d like to have any prizes at all (I don’t but YMMV), shall we celebrate the Newcomb Cleveland Prize more than the Nobel Prizes? Likewise, by railing against Rosalind Lee’s exclusion on arbitrary grounds, what do we hope to achieve? It may be more gainful to spread awareness of the Nobel Prizes’ flaws and finitude and focus on the deeper question of how the opportunities to win X award can influence the way science is done, who does it, and why.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it's also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren't required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can't be in anyone's interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t "provided any financial or technical support" to the study and that the study is “poorly designed". Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR's makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri's film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: "While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in 'The Vaccine War' movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials."

I'm not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I've written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven't watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP's nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample ("While 'The Vaccine War' movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the "ICMR owes it to the people of India" — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I'm not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn't have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: "It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in 'The Vaccine War' movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.