Features

By Charvy Narain

What do a mathematician, an epidemiologist, a vaccine developer, a protein crystallographer and a whole bevy of immunologists and infectious disease specialists have in common? Answer: they’re just some of the Oxford University researchers coming together to fight the novel Coronavirus outbreak which has (to date) killed thousands of people across the globe, with tens of thousands of people infected.

The outbreak, which the World Health Organisation has now declared a global health emergency, is caused by a new type of an old foe: coronaviruses are common enough to be one of the causes of the common cold. But they can cause a range of respiratory symptoms from mild to serious – it was a coronavirus that was responsible for the 2002-2004 outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), though the novel coronavirus (until recently known as 2019-nCoV, though now dubbed SARS-CoV-2) has already outstripped the SARS death toll in the three months since it has been active.

Like the SARS virus, which was traced back to civet cats, this previously undescribed SARS-CoV-2 is also likely to have been transmitted from an animal to humans – most people in the first cluster of cases worked at or were frequent visitors to one single seafood market in Wuhan in China. But it is now clear that SARS-CoV-2 can be also transferred from an infected person to another person, and these human-to-human transmissions are how the outbreak is currently spreading.

Mapping the disease

Dr Moritz Kraemer is the Branco Weiss Fellow at the Oxford University Department of Zoology, and part of the Oxford Martin Programme on Pandemic Genomics. Like many of the Oxford University researchers currently working on the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, he is a veteran when it comes infectious disease: he has previously crowdsourced data to track the spread of Ebola and Zika in real time, and his modelling of yellow fever in Angola showed how ecological and demographic factors contributed to that outbreak.

Dr Kraemer is a spatial epidemiologist interested in how the spread of infectious diseases interacts with geography. Together with researchers at Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University in the US, the Boston Children’s Hospital and Tsinghua University, he has produced a real-time map of all confirmed cases of COVID-19 (the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2), with all of the data publically available: you can watch how the virus spread from Wuhan in China to the 28 countries across the world that have so far reported COVID-19 cases.

What sets this map apart is that instead of being based on total counts of how many cases of COVID-19 are found in each country, it is based on a ‘line list’ – detailed information about the demographics of each confirmed case of COVID-19. This includes whatever information is available about their age, sex, the date their symptoms started, where they live, and where they might have travelled to.

What I hope to do is to build a baseline for evidence-based decisions.

This kind of information isn’t always easily available in the midst of an outbreak, but analysing it can yield all sorts of insights. Dr Kraemer says: “We can, for example, analyse this data to find what the early signals of local transmission might be, such as a change in age distribution shifting from people in their early 40s up to people in their late 40s.”

Based on this kind of detailed line list data, researchers have been able to estimate the incubation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the age distribution of people affected, as well as track how time elapsing from symptoms appearing to hospitalisation and testing is changing as the outbreak evolves.

All of this is not just an academic exercise and having this information can help governments and policymakers make the most effective decisions. For example, by combining the data on the number of cases in each Chinese province plus its population size with air-traffic patterns, Dr Moritz and his colleagues were able to work out the risk for the SARS-CoV-2 being introduced to countries in Africa.

There are no reported cases of COVID-19 in Africa yet, but the limited health infrastructure in many countries means that an outbreak here may have particularly devastating consequences. By combining information about risk of transmission versus the country’s preparedness, the researchers were able to identify that Ethiopia and Nigeria may be particularly vulnerable.

In the lab

One of the scientists helping make sure there is accurate, detailed data about SARS-CoV-2 is Dr Peter Horby, Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease Global Health at the Nuffield Department of Medicine. Dr Horby went to Vietnam, which hosts a large scale University health research unit, for a short WHO secondment as part of the response to the SARS outbreak – and ended up staying for nine years. He came back just in time for the Ebola outbreak, and set up clinical trials for a candidate Ebola treatment in the middle of an active epidemic.

He now leads the Epidemic Research Group at Oxford, which aims to reduce the impact of epidemic infections through ways of doing research that work even in epidemics, and which is currently working with the Chinese government and researchers. One of the things that this group is doing is developing and distributing an electronic case record form, which will help get the detailed and accurate data that maps and models are so dependent on.

Dr Horby and others are also a part of a band of researchers working away in labs to understand the virus, and hopefully, develop a treatment. Dr Horby is part of a clinical trial currently testing two potential drugs for treating COVID-19, using the same technology they used to generate a vaccine (currently in testing) for the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak, which was also caused by a coronavirus.

These are different approaches, but as the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak unfolds, scientists are keen to have many potential weapons in their arsenal to fight it.

And while Professor Sarah Gilbert and her team (also at the Nuffield Department of Medicine) are currently working on a potential vaccine (they’re using the same technology they’ve already used to generate an in-testing vaccine for the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak, which was also caused by a coronavirus), other researchers at the Nuffield Department of Medicine are going right back to basics: Professor Dave Stuart and Yvonne Jones have been collaborating with researchers in China to successfully decode key structures related to SARS-CoV-2 at the atomic level. They are now starting work to understand the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 ‘spike’ protein, which will help map antibodies to the virus.

Understanding these spike protein antibodies is also the main focus of immunologist Professor Alain Townsend. Professor Townsend, based at the Radcliffe and Nuffield Departments of Medicine, is also working on a vaccine based on this same spike protein. 

The maths of disease

How the outbreak might unfold is one of the questions that Dr Robin Thompson, Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, is interested in. Dr Thompson is based at the Mathematics Institute and like Dr Kraemer, Dr Thompson is an epidemiologist.

But while Dr Kraemer is interested in using the tools of epidemiology to capture trends in an outbreak as it happens, Dr Thompson is interested in using maths to develop models of what might happen in a disease outbreak. To do this, researchers take real-life data about an outbreak, and then build a mathematical ‘model’ that is consistent with the data and captures its key parameters. But in a sort of thought experiment, you can also run these models forward in time, to get a forecast of what might happen in the future.

We can use our mathematical simulations to show that if you can quickly isolate infected people after they develop symptoms, you are likely to prevent sustained outbreaks in new countries. This is true even if some people might be infectious before they have any symptoms.

Since the model is a mini-simulation of the world, researchers can try out all sorts of potential interventions and find out what effect these would have.

This is not to say that mathematical epidemiology can provide a Minority Report-style accurate future prediction. Dr Thompson says: “One challenge we have is that in the real world, there is only one realisation of what might happen, while a model gives us several possible scenarios. So it’s hard to make specific predictions early in the outbreak about precisely how many cases of COVID-19 there will be, or exactly when an outbreak will be peak.”

However, what these models do yield is a range of predictions, and what they are useful for is estimating probabilities after specific events – such as how likely a sustained outbreak might be if SARS-CoV-2 travels to a new country.

The current UK government advice is for anybody showing even mild symptoms to self-isolate for 14 days, and Dr Thompson thinks that this is good advice.

He is more equivocal about the current advice for people to self-isolate if they’re coming from Wuhan or Hubei province, even if they have no symptoms. Dr Thompson says: “It’s quite a drastic measure. While containment is easiest when case numbers are low, this needs to be balanced against the effect on people who are quarantined when they are almost certainly not infected.”

Open cooperation

This answer from mathematical modelling, like a lot of research in this area, depends crucially on open sharing of accurate data. For example, in the unlikely scenario that COVID-19 transmission from non-symptomatic people becomes common (there are now doubts about even the one confirmed case of non-symptomatic transmission), the answers from the modelling will change substantially, and Oxford University researchers are prepared – what happens in the case of non-symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission is being looked at by one of Dr Thompson’s students.

But whatever the eventual scenarios, open data sharing will continue to be crucial, and is of benefit to researchers across the globe. “Open data sharing from very early on was one of the key features of our map,” says Dr Kraemer. “We made the data behind it immediately available.” This data has now been used by researchers from another group, for example, to show that once a place has three cases of COVID-19, there is a 50% chance of the infection becoming established in that population.

Professor Peter Horby and his colleagues are aiding this data sharing effort by developing and freely distributing a free toolkit of SARS-CoV-2 clinical research resources to anyone studying the outbreak. This set of flexible research protocols aims to help the research community generate more precise and robust conclusions faster.

Rapid detection

A team of researchers in the Department of Physics, led by virologist Dr. Nicole Robb and biophysicist Professor Achillefs Kapanidis, are working on developing new methods for rapid detection of pathogenic viruses. They combine traditional virology techniques with advanced microscopy to explore new ways of studying and diagnosing viruses. The team recently described a new way of fluorescently labelling viruses so that they can be easily observed on a microscope, and showed that clinical isolates of influenza virus can be labelled and detected in as little as one minute, substantially faster than existing diagnostic tests. The method is general and can also be used to detect coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2. The researchers, aided by their clinical collaborators, are focused on developing the method into a medical diagnostic assay. The technology that the team has been working on recently can be used to detect a broad range of viruses, and they are currently focused on adapting the tests for rapid COVID-19 diagnosis.

At some point, the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak will end, and researchers will need to be ready for the next big one. Sharing information is likely to be crucial to doing this, and an editorial from Nature had a simple message for researchers: “Work hard to understand and combat this infectious disease; make that work of the highest standard; and make results quickly available to the world.”

Please note, the information in this blog is correct at time of posting. The University will communicate significant research developments as they emerge. 

Eleanor Stride has taken an unconventional path to becoming one of Britain’s leading scientists. She tells Sarah Whitebloom how she moved from dance to design and onto biomedical science, but being a 'woman in science' is not one of the identities she seeks. 

When is a woman in science not a ‘woman in science’? When she is a woman in science.

At the risk of generalisation, women in science are hard-working, dedicated, cutting edge…scientists.  Call them ‘women in science’ at your peril.  Women in science will tell you quite firmly that they do not want to be treated differently or feel they do not deserve their place. Any hint of tokenism will be greeted with a frosty response.  

Although science needs more women, it needs more people, a diverse range of people, with different perspectives and ideas.

And Professor Eleanor Stride is an uber scientist, which is nothing to do with mini-cabs but everything to do with dedication, hard-work and world-changing ideas.  It is hard to imagine that she has ever felt she is making up the numbers.

‘You’d be surprised,’ she says. Sometimes, it is felt that there has to be a woman involved and no one wants to be that woman.  Professor Stride maintains there is, of course, a need for more women in science and is infuriated at the idea that girls are still told that Maths and science is not for them. She is, quite literally, furious at the ‘Mummy wasn’t any good at Maths’, sort of parental advice. And, she says, the counter-balance needs to start early, at Primary School, when girls start to drift away from the sciences and Maths.

Professor Stride, herself, had not intended to go into science or engineering and certainly not Biomedical Engineering. She actually started her education in a ballet school and progressed through school without a thought of going into sciences.  It is a life she has not quite ever left behind and even now Professor Stride is involved in dancing – as a teacher of swing dancing in Oxford.

You’d be surprised how many scientists are involved in dance. I think it’s something to do with being very technically focused and frankly a little bit obsessive.

Thanks to a series of chance events - and a lot of obsession - today, as well as a dance teacher, she is also the Professor of Biomaterials, with a joint position between Engineering Science and the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Science - and there is a real buzz around her work.

It is a few years off, but the work being done by her team may just revolutionise cancer treatment – using tiny bubbles and ultrasound to deliver targeted treatments inside the body.  And the self-effacing Professor Stride has won so many prizes for this work, most recently the Blavatnik award (her ninth), she is almost embarrassed.   While grateful for the recognition, she emphasises she is part of a team and muses on an idea in circulation that Nobel prizes will not continue in their present form, because science now is so collaborative that individual prizes do not make sense.

Thanks to her unconventional route, Eleanor Stride is something of a one-woman collaborative team.  Unsure at 18 what she should do, young Eleanor was taking science ‘A’ levels, but also Art and Latin when she underwent a Pauline conversion to engineering. So impressed had she been by a chance visit to a design exhibition, organised by her Art teacher, she promptly decided her destiny lay in making things.  She was inspired to take a degree in Mechanical Engineering at UCL and she intended to follow up with a Masters course in industrial design at the Royal College of Art.

As with all best-laid plans, though, it did not happen. In her final Undergraduate year, Eleanor became interested in the impact of ultrasound on bubbles – in oil pipes. From there, thanks to a meeting in the senior common room between her supervisor and a senior radiologist, she ended up abandoning her plan to be an industrial designer and did something completely different - a Biomedical PhD on the use of bubbles in ultrasound imaging.

‘Bubbles in pipes are like bubbles in the bloodstream,’ she says. If you could use those bubbles and ultrasound, to deliver cancer treatments to the place it is needed, rather than injecting the whole body with heavy-duty drugs, you could revolutionise the battle against tumours, even hard to reach ones. 

Although it seems a long stretch, to go from wanting to work for Aston Martin to drug-delivering bubbles, Professor Stride insists it is an engineering delivery problem.

‘The bubbles are just like very tiny cars,’ she says. ‘And we are working on the delivery process.’

It was not quite that easy, of course. Professor Stride did have to play catch-up during her PhD years, taking classes in anatomy at the medical school and learning, for the first time, about biology.  

‘It is more complex but the approach is not that far-fetched,’ she maintains.

As a Mechanical Engineer with the know-how of a Biomedical Engineer, Professor Stride’s background is attuned to solving the problem - along with a host of experts from other disciplines from Physicists to Biologists and Chemists.  As a team, they bring together the broadest range of experience and expertise.  And Professor Stride laughs as she admits there is some truth to the science hierarchy portrayed in the American TV series, The Big Bang Theory, where the engineer is the butt of jokes.

At the top are the pure Mathematicians. Some way down are Theoretical Physicists and some way below them are Astro-Physicists. Next come Electrical Engineers and then come Mechanical Engineers, then Biomedical Engineers!

So you went down the ranking when you transferred to Biomedical and took your PhD?

‘Yes,’ she says, with amusement. ‘But then come Civil Engineers and Architects … only joking.’

Professor Stride laughs at the stereotyping, especially as her father-in-law was an architect.

‘Engineers are looked down on because they are dealing with real world problems. They make things work and sometimes that means making compromises,’ she says wryly.

Having engineers on board has brought closer the possibility that work of Professor Stride and her team will result in real advances that could save lives. The irony is clearly not lost on her. But now, she admits, the really hard part begins. The team is very close to being in a position where they will be ready to begin clinical testing. This is her next big challenge, her next career shift.

Turning herself yet again into something else, the good Professor is currently becoming accustomed to giving presentations to groups of venture capitalists and people who might possibly donate money. Without this, all the positive lab results will come to nothing.  

‘The cost is phenomenal,’ she says, describing the arduous and complex procedures that now have to be gone through before their work has a possibility of reaching patients and making a difference.

‘Some people have been very generous, but there is a lot more money to raise,’ she says.

It is a lot to ask, Professor Stride realises it is a risk for an investor, when there is only a one in ten chance that it will work. And there are vested interests in it not working, given the existing treatments that could be undermined by tiny bubbles.

But, says Professor Stride, for all the prizes, she will not feel as though she has succeeded until all this work has helped someone.    

Hear Professor Eleanor Stride speak about the future of science

Game Changers: 9 Young Scientists Transforming our World

When: Thursday 5 March, 2020, 11am–6pm

Where: Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, UK

Event: Hosted by BBC News Science Correspondent Victoria Gill, this public series of short, interactive talks from early-career UK scientists, including Professor Eleanor Stride, will provide a forum for science enthusiasts to discover cutting-edge research that is shaping the world.  Following the talks, a discussion will explore trends and insights influencing the future of science in the UK.  Attendance is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Register for free: www.nyas.org/YoungScientists2020

Dr Sarah Bauermeister is a senior data and science manager at Dementias Platform UK, an MRC-funded project based at Oxford University set up to accelerate research into the diagnosis and treatment of dementia. On International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Dr Bauermeister talks to Science Blog about her route into research – including a 20-year career break to raise and home-educate her seven children.

Q: How did you get into science?

A: Before having children I completed a degree in sports science in South Africa and was intending to travel, but instead I quickly settled in the UK. Later, while home-schooling my children, I worked towards a further degree in psychology, then a master’s – both through the Open University. I specialised in cognitive neuropsychology, focusing on the neurological changes affecting cognition in older adults, and completed my PhD at Brunel University London focusing on lifestyle and fitness as moderators of cognitive decline. I then completed a postdoctoral position investigating cognitive predictors of falls and frailty at the University of Leeds.

Q: Tell us about your first job in science.

Given the competitive nature of the field and the precariousness of contracts early in scientific careers, women are hesitant to take career breaks to start a family.

A: After a 20-year period during which I studied while raising and home-educating my seven children, I became an early-career scientist in Leeds with people 20 years younger than me. I’d already had my family by that stage, but I found that many of the younger women around me felt they were in a difficult position in this respect. 

Q: How can we encourage more women and girls into science?

A: There are some real barriers to women working in science. Although there is a lot of work being carried out to shift the balance, reports show that institutions, research groups and individual scientists still support men in their careers more than women. In too great a proportion of research groups you see the group leader is a man and the postdoctoral researchers are women. This is disheartening, because it shows that many talented women were not mentored or encouraged to stay in science, or given the right support either to return after raising a family or to combine working with raising a family. This type of support is crucial if we want to retain women in this field.

It is no longer up to women to push equality – it needs to come from the top, and then this would filter down so that the main income is no longer gender-specific. Only with this type of policy change will equality of care be feasible for families.

Q: What changes need to happen?

A: We need to start by changing the culture in schools, as well as in higher education. The intake of women into the physical sciences is 39%, whereas in computer science it is only 19%. We also need to change how we develop and talk about women’s scientific careers. Many women still feel that they need to choose between having children and succeeding in their career.

If there was more gender equality with regards to salary, there would be more shared parental care.

Q: What is your current area of research?

A: I’m a cognitive neuropsychologist managing scientific research across several multi-disciplinary projects, as well as being senior data manager for Dementias Platform UK (DPUK). Dementia is our most pressing public health crisis: around 50 million people worldwide have dementia, and the WHO projects that number to treble by 2050. We haven’t yet found a cure, and I’m as driven and excited as I’ve ever been about preventing or delaying the onset of this disease.

My interests include using statistical modelling techniques to make sense of data arising from psychometric tests, and to explore the presence of two or more conditions or states in an individual – such as cognitive change and poor mental health, or childhood adversity and adult low mood. 

DPUK’s Data Portal is a repository of more than 40 cohorts – long-term health studies – comprising data on more than 3 million participants from among members of the public. This data is hugely valuable, and it’s available for analysis by researchers with the aim of finding new insights into the causes, early diagnosis and treatment of dementia.

I have only ever wanted to be a scientist, over any other career. 

Q: What does being a scientist mean to you?

A: I’ve always been curious about the mechanisms of the brain and body, ever since buying and avidly studying a Reader’s Digest book called How the Body Works when I was nine. That passion has never left me, and I’ve never let anything distract me from that – even after a long break to have my children.

Now that I’m working for Dementias Platform UK, I feel driven to contribute towards the search for ways to predict dementia before it is clinically evident, driving forward the search for interventions and a cure.

Q: Based on your own experience, what would be your message to girls and young women considering a career in science?

A: Science doesn’t stand still, but taking time out to have a family doesn’t need to be perceived as ‘the end’: there are many ways to stay abreast of findings, utilise institutional facilities for childcare, arrange working from home, or share childcare with partners, friends and family. There are always ways to pursue a career in science, if you really want to.

Listeners to Radio 4's Today Programme will have heard Eamonn O'Keeffe, a doctoral student in the Faculty of History, explaining a new discovery this morninig.

He found an 1810 diary entry by Matthew Tomlinson, a Yorkshire farmer, which suggests that recognisably modern understandings of homosexuality were being discussed by ordinary people earlier than is commonly thought.

Interestingly, this is not what Eamonn was looking for when he opened the large volume of diaries in Wakefield Library last year. In a guest post on Arts Blog, Eamonn takes us behind the scenes of his unusual find:

"While looking for something completely different, I discovered a remarkable discussion of homosexuality in the diary of an early-nineteenth-century Yorkshire farmer.

Reflecting on reports of the recent execution of a naval surgeon for sodomy, Matthew Tomlinson wrote on 14 January 1810: “it appears a paradox to me, how men, who are men, shou'd possess such a passion; and more particularly so, if it is their nature from childhood (as I am informed it is) – If they feel such an inclination, and propensity, at that certain time of life when youth genders [i.e. develops] into manhood; it must then be considered as natural otherwise, as a defect in nature”. Either way, “it seems cruel to punish that defect with death.” This inference sparked solemn religious introspection, as Tomlinson struggled to understand how a just Creator could countenance such severe penalties for a God-given trait: "It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty shou'd make a being, with such a nature; or such a defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whome he had formed, shou'd at any time follow the dictates of that Nature with which he was formed he shou'd be punished with death."

A forty-five-year-old tenant farmer, Matthew Tomlinson resided at Dog House Farm on the Lupset Hall estate, a mile south-west of Wakefield in Yorkshire. His voluminous diaries chronicle local Luddite disturbances, agricultural life, and his attempts to find a second soulmate after the demise of his first wife. A former Methodist, Tomlinson was an observant but ecumenical Christian; he wrote extensively on faith, love, death, and the political and economic affairs of his day. Although a few historians have quoted from Tomlinson’s diaries in the past, his meditations on homosexuality have never previously been brought to light.

I identified the passage by chance in the course of my PhD research on British military musicians during the Napoleonic Wars. Returning by train from a conference in Leeds, I decided to stop in Wakefield on a whim to view Tomlinson’s diaries, having noticed colourful quotations from them in a book by Ellen Gibson Wilson on the Yorkshire election of 1807. As it turned out, the diaries had little to say about military music – Tomlinson was disdainful of patriotic pageantry – but his reflections on homosexuality, which I spotted by chance while paging through the journals, stood out to me as striking and unusual for the time. I decided to reach out to specialists on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexuality to discern if my instincts were correct. Dr Rictor Norton and Prof Fara Dabhoiwala both generously shared their expertise, confirming the rarity and significance of my discovery.

The argument that same-sex relations were natural and innocuous was occasionally advanced in eighteenth-century England, while Enlightenment thinking on individual liberties and legal reform spurred calls for Britain to emulate its Continental counterparts by abolishing the death penalty for homosexual acts. Some Georgian men and women who engaged in same-sex relationships viewed their sexual orientation as innate: Halifax landowner Anne Lister justified her lesbian feelings as “natural” and “instinctive” in her diary in 1823. Utilitarian philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham even expressed support for the decriminalization of homosexuality in various writings from the 1770s to the 1820s, contending that sodomy statutes stemmed from “no other foundation than prejudice”. However, he did not dare publish such radical views. After all, this was an era when spreading false allegations of same-sex proclivities was considered by some commentators as akin to committing murder, such was the reputational ruin faced by the accused. In an age of rampant persecution, homosexual men in Georgian Britain were regularly executed or publicly disgraced, brutalized by hostile crowds in public pillories and forced into exile overseas. Tomlinson’s own meditations appear in his private diary, an intimate record of his thoughts not intended for a wider audience.

While Tomlinson’s writings reflect the opinions of only one man, the phrasing implies that his comments were informed by the views of others. This exciting new evidence complicates and enriches our understanding of historical attitudes towards sexuality, suggesting that the revolutionary conception of same-sex attraction as a natural human tendency, discernible from adolescence and deserving of acceptance, was mooted within the social circles of a Yorkshire farmer during the reign of George III.

Tomlinson’s reflections were prompted by reports of the court-martial and execution of naval surgeon James Nehemiah Taylor, who was hanged from the yard-arm of HMS Jamaica on 26 December 1809 for committing sodomy with his young servant. Newspapers across Britain and Ireland published accounts of the case, reminding their burgeoning readerships of the draconian state penalties for homosexual behaviour. Contemporary media reporting on sodomy cases, often couched in the language of moral panic, both reflected and reinforced social stigma against same-sex intimacy, but Tomlinson’s writings suggests that not all readers uncritically accepted the homophobic assumptions they encountered in the press. Disheartened by the ignominious demise of an accomplished medical man, the diarist questioned the justice of Taylor’s punishment and debated whether so-called “unnatural” acts were truly deserving of such an appellation.

However, Tomlinson’s musings are still very much the product of his time. Although the diarist seriously considered the proposition that sexual orientation was innate, he did not unequivocally endorse it. Erroneously believing homosexual behaviour was unknown among animals, Tomlinson still allowed for the possibility that homosexuality might be a choice and therefore (in his view) deserving of punishment, suggesting that capital sentences for sodomy be replaced by the still-gruesome alternative of castration.

Tomlinson’s meditations thus prove ultimately inconclusive, but nonetheless provide rare and historically valuable insight into the efforts of an ordinary person of faith to grapple with questions of sexual ethics more than two centuries ago. His comments anticipate many of the arguments deployed successfully by the LGBT+ and marriage equality movements in recent decades to promote acceptance of sexual diversity. Tomlinson’s remarkable reflections suggest that recognizably modern conceptions of human sexuality were circulating in British society more widely – and at an earlier date – than commonly assumed.

I am thrilled to be able to share this exciting and historically significant new evidence with a wider audience, particularly during LGBT+ History Month. I hope the buzz surrounding the find will inspire other historians and students to engage more fully with the rich collections available in local and regional archives, while serving as a reminder of the serendipity inherent in historical research. Sometimes the most interesting and important discoveries are the ones you weren’t even looking for!"

This post was written by Eamonn O'Keeffe, a historian in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford.

By Guillermo Navalon

Darwin’s finches are among the most celebrated examples of adaptive radiation in the evolution of modern vertebrates and their study has been relevant since the journeys of the HMS Beagle in the eighteenth century which catalysed some of the first ideas about natural selection in the mind of a young Charles Darwin.

Despite many years of study which have led to a detailed understanding of the biology of these perching birds, including impressive decades-long studies in natural populations, there are still unanswered questions. Specifically, the factors explaining why this particular group of birds evolved to be much more diverse in species and shapes than other birds evolving alongside them in Galapagos and Cocos islands have remained largely unknown.

finch figure

An international team of researchers from the UK and Spain tackled the question of why the rapid evolution in these birds from a different perspective. We showed in their study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that one of the key factors related to the evolutionary success of Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers might lie in how their beaks and skulls evolved.

Previous studies have demonstrated a tight link between the shapes and sizes of the beak and the feeding habits in both groups, which suggests that adaptation by natural selection to the different feeding resources available at the islands may have been one of the main processes driving their explosive evolution. Furthermore, changes in beak size and shape have been observed in natural populations of Darwin’s finches as a response to variations in feeding resources, strengthening these views.

However, recent studies on other groups of birds, some of which stem from the previous recent research of the team, have suggested that this strong match between beak and cranial morphology and ecology might not be pervasive in all birds.

By taking a broad scale, numerical approach at more than 400 species of landbirds (the group that encompasses all perching birds and many other lineages such as parrots, kingfishers, hornbills, eagles, vultures, owls and many others) we found that the beaks of Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers evolved in a stronger association with the rest of the skull than in most of the other lineages of landbirds. In other words, in these groups the beak is less independent in evolutionary terms than in most other landbirds.

Many questions remain: for instance, are these evolutionary situations isolated phenomena in these two archipelagos or have those been more common in the evolution of island or continental bird communities? Do these patterns characterise other adaptive radiations in birds?

Future research will likely solve at least some of these mysteries, bringing us one step closer to understanding better the evolution of the wonderful diversity of shapes in birds.

Guillermo Navalón is lead author of the study and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences, having recently graduated from a PhD at the University of Bristol.

Read the full study 'The consequences of craniofacial integration for the adaptive radiations of Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers' in Nature Ecology & Evolution.