EN MASSE: DR JOHN CULLERNE
‘ Whatever the world throws at you, you don’ t immediately think that it’ s all going to be fine, but you don’ t think it’ s all lost either. You think: we’ re going to get through this, because we have the mind to do so and the problem-solving skills to apply methodically.’
This is a tale of a series of curious coincidences which set the current Undermaster, Dr John Cullerne, on an extraordinary journey. It began when he was Housemaster of Trant’ s, and his boys staged a play about a Derbyshire Village in quarantine during the great plague of 1665-1666. That play, The Roses of Eyam by Don Taylor, is based on data meticulously collected at the time by the local Rector, who charted the waves of disease that the village endured.
Dr Cullerne, was so fascinated he decided to teach the play to his div. This was in 2014, and at the height of the West African Ebola outbreak, so it was very appropriate. The boys came up with an idea:‘ Look Sir,’ they said,‘ can we try to model the 1660s outbreak in Eyam? We’ ve got the data.’
Some of the pupils weren’ t mathematicians, so Dr Cullerne decided he would avoid computer modelling and reach for something more tangible. In the 1950s the LSE economist William Phillips designed a machine that used water to represent money as it flowed around the economy. Dr Cullerne realised this‘ Phillips machine’ could be applied to the flow of virus through a population, with the settings of valves, pulleys, levers and pumps reflecting factors such as case numbers and infectivity.
With the help of the Senior Physics Technician, he and his div developed a Phillips machine, and used it to model the waves of infection that passed through Eyam. They wrote up their findings using charts similar to those we’ ve seen modelling the COVID-19 pandemic.
This could have been the end of the tale, had a visiting epidemiologist from Oxford University, Dr Robin Thompson, not spotted their work pinned on a Science School wall. He suggested that Dr Cullerne spend a sabbatical at Oxford, to study epidemiology and model their prototype more formally.
In 2019, therefore, Dr Cullerne did just that, deepening his knowledge of epidemiology and modelling, while working at the Maths Institute of Oxford University. With the help of Dr Andrew French and two students, Dexter Poon( H, 2015-20), and Alfie Baxter who was on the Win Coll Maths Summer School, he wrote up the work on the Black Death and extended it to model the Ebola outbreak in West Africa of 2014. Alongside Professor Dame Angela McClean, Deputy Government Health Adviser, they modelled both outbreaks and published the findings in academic journals.
Then came COVID-19.‘ The amazing thing was that we had no idea COVID was going to break. We had no idea it was going to happen to us,’ John says, even now with a look of incredulity. He began studying the data and applying
35