People
More attentive research
A lot of things get left behind in research. We pay too little attention to the status of animals in society, the reproducibility of data, and the differences between men and women who fall sick. Three researchers take a closer look.
Image: Cornelia Vinzens/SNF
Charlotte E. Blattner is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Law, Institute of Public Law at the University of Bern, and specialises in animal law. She won the 2020 Marie-Heim-Vögtlin Prize of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which brought her Swiss-wide recognition. ‘Das Magazin’, the weekend supplement of the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper, has now published a long interview with her. She explains how globalisation is a disaster for animals, and why the problem with the original transmission of the novel coronavirus was not bats, but people. She urgently calls for a new perspective on “other animals”, and wants them to be acknowledged as members of society. “If that were to happen, they would have the right to live their lives according to their own needs, and we would have to take note of them when determining the common good”.
Image: zVg
Leonhard Held is a professor of biostatistics at the University of Zurich, where he runs the Center for Reproducible Science. Together with colleagues from Bern, Geneva and Zurich, he has also founded the Swiss Reproducibility Network. It is part of a growing international movement that aims to improve the credibility of the empirical sciences. “Many scientific results are published then afterward prove untenable. We want to teach researchers the concepts they need to improve efforts to prevent this”, says Held.
Image: Daniel Kellenberger
Catherine Gebhard is a cardiologist at the Zurich University Hospital, where she is investigating gender differences in cases of infection with Covid-19. She has attracted attention with her work, and the media are increasingly reporting about gender medicine. Both in the tabloid newspaper Blick and on Swiss Radio SRF, she has been explaining why men tend to have more severe symptoms when infected with Covid-19: “The proteins that enter our cells through the virus can be influenced by sex hormones such as oestrogen and testosterone”, she says. “This could mean that the virus finds it easier to penetrate male cells”. Such gender differences generally remain too unacknowledged in the development of drugs and in medicine overall. And it is usually the specific reactions of women that are inadequately investigated, because many things are only tested on men.
