Me and my heart.
The Health Variations Programme is a research programme focused on the social determinants of health inequalities. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 1996 to 2001. Its aims were to undertake multi‐disciplinary social science research to advance the understanding of the social processes that underlie and mediate socio‐economic inequalities in health, and to advance the methodology of health inequalities research.

Having been chairman of an MRC board, I am aware of what you might call competitive pressure for grants, and the years of battle at Board and on the Council have left me scarred. This has lead to an unreasonable caution (no—those are weasel words—a suspicion) of work where endpoints or outcome measures are difficult to define. The kind of work supported in this initiative is difficult to constrain in these terms but rather, lends itself to the discovery of things that are hard to quantify and hard to deal with in the remedial sense. They are, however, clearly important to the community. In looking at a number of reports from the initiative to see how the new biology might help to resolve some of the difficulties of research in this area, it was interesting to see a good many methodological studies designed to resolve some of the difficulties outlined above, but one study in particular is compelling since it defines, for me, another set of problems.

Under the title ‘The role of perceptions of family history in persisting inequalities in health and lifestyle’, Watt has looked at coronary heart disease (CHD). People's ideas about their ‘family histories' …