The mapping of social, ethnic, gender, and other inequalities are key to epidemiology, beyond its concern (as a public health science) with inequity. For those epidemiologists who denigrate our discipline for engaging with social deprivation (107), it is perhaps worth considering that health inequalities for particular causes can favor the less powerful social groups (108, 109), and this provides at least as much evidence regarding disease etiology as does the more usual (but apparently uninteresting) concentration of misery on the expropriated.

Remarkably, studies receiving mainly public funding can, a quarter of a century on, still survive without making their data available in a useful way. In the UK a series of studies—the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) (100), UK Biobank (101), and Born in Bradford (102), among others—have surely been exemplary in promoting data accessibility.