Borrowing Strength
The birth of pharmacometrics.
Arena Magazine <[email protected]>
Share
Arena Magazine presents an article by Alex Kesin exploring the origins of pharmacometrics, a field that emerged from a chance encounter between economist Barr Rosenberg and physician Lewis Sheiner. The story delves into how computers, prediction models, and pharmacology gave rise to drug modeling. It highlights the intersection of technology and medicine in shaping the field of pharmacometrics.
What the raw message shows
From the headers
- Sent with
-
Klaviyo See it in the headers
Across Arena Magazine's email
- Sends
- About 3 a week
- DMARC
-
Not enforced
Failures are monitored but still delivered.
The copy
530 words · about 2 min to read
Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
Borrowing Strength
In today's newsletter from Arena Magazine, Alex Kesin explores the story of how computers, prediction models, and pharmacology gave rise to the drug modeling that decides how new drugs drugs are dosed. This article was first published in Issue 009: Hello, World, our ode to software.
In October, 2003, the scientist Lewis Sheiner sent an e-mail to Nick Holford, a former student, recalling how their field of pharmacometrics had begun. Within a few months, Sheiner was dead. The following year, Holford quoted a brief passage of the correspondence in a memorial tribute. When I reached out to him this summer for the rest of the exchange, he searched his archives and wrote back: “I cannot find the original email from Lewis that I cited.” That left only the brief scene he had already committed to print.
And it goes like this. A seminar room at the University of California, San Francisco, sometime around 1970. A young physician is up front, presenting his work on drug dosing, when an even younger economist starts interrupting from the audience — takes his math apart piece by piece, then rebuilds the field on the spot.
I spent several weeks this summer tracking the people and the institutions that grew out of that afternoon, guided by oral histories of retired clinical pharmacologists, veterans of the FDA, and a programmer who spent her career building the software that resulted from that chance encounter. The economist in the room was Barr Rosenberg. The doctor was Lewis “Lou” Sheiner. From their collision emerged pharmacometrics: the statistical scaffolding for how drugs move through populations, how doses of medicine are chosen, and how medicine attempts to learn from the sparse data of human bodies.
Barr Rosenberg was a forecaster of financial risk, and he was quite good at it. Born in Berkeley in 1942, he enrolled at the University of California at sixteen, secured a master’s degree from the London School of Economics by twenty-two, and completed a Harvard doctorate in economics at twenty-five. His dissertation carried a title only a statistician could truly appreciate: Regression with Stochastically Varying Parameters. The topic was a happy accident. He had originally intended to analyze capital markets using a pristine new stock-price database in Chicago, but when the data delivery stalled, he abandoned capital markets for pure theory, focusing entirely on how to model systems with underlying variables that continuously shifted over time.
That theoretical detour proved immensely valuable. The late 1960s and 1970s marked the dawn of quantitative finance, an era when it suddenly felt possible to quantify the invisible risks lurking inside a stock portfolio. In 1974, Rosenberg launched a consulting firm, BARRA. The reigning method scored a stock’s risk with a single number: how much it moved with the market. Rosenberg’s models pulled that risk apart across many features of the company itself. Suddenly, an oil company’s risk could ride on the price of crude and a bank’s on interest rates, a homebuilder’s to mortgage rates. The shift from one factor to many became, and remains, the working grammar of quantitative finance. It made BARRA’s tools standard equipment for institutional investors.
The words as text: what a screen reader can follow, and all there is when images don't load.
What the headers say
Read from the message's own headers, as it arrived.
- Came from
-
kl-203-28-36.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com
· 170.203.28.36
Klaviyo's sending servers
- SPF
- Pass for k3.send.arenamag.com
- DKIM
-
- Pass signed by shared.klaviyomail.com
- Pass signed by send.arenamag.com
- DMARC
-
Pass for arenamag.com
Policy: none, so failures would still be delivered
- Unsubscribe
-
One-click
Meets the Gmail and Yahoo rule for bulk senders.
- Complaints
-
Feedback loop set up
Mailbox providers can report spam complaints straight back to the sender.
Show all 21 headers Hide the headers
As received, minus the delivery side: the archive's own addresses show as [recipient], its mail servers as [receiver], signatures are left out and unsubscribe links trimmed to their host.
Route
- Received Identifies Klaviyo
- from kl-203-28-36.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com (170.203.28.36) by [receiver] (cloudflare) id BczBGKGiLUck for <[recipient]>; Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:01:59 +0000
- Received Identifies Klaviyo
- from unknown (HELO kmta-worker-prod-go-577b795c8c-wqfwj) ([email protected]@10.8.106.88) by kmta-mta-blue-05ce10a079b455d55.servers.clovesoftware.com with SMTP; 13 Oct 2026 12:01:59 -0000
Authentication
- Received-SPF Authentication result
- pass ([receiver]: domain of bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m4rtthzeh0a3dp-h-075d9133f3=2@k3.send.arenamag.com designates 170.203.28.36 as permitted sender) receiver=[receiver]; client-ip=170.203.28.36; envelope-from="bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m4rtthzeh0a3dp-h-075d9133f3=2@k3.send.arenamag.com"; helo=kl-203-28-36.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com;
- Authentication-Results Authentication result
- [receiver]; dkim=pass header.d=shared.klaviyomail.com header.s=def1 header.b=bm9eynbV; dkim=pass header.d=send.arenamag.com header.s=mtd1 header.b=O09M3OCn; dmarc=pass header.from=arenamag.com policy.dmarc=none; spf=none ([receiver]: no SPF records found for [email protected]) smtp.helo=kl-203-28-36.kmta.shared.klaviyomail.com; spf=pass ([receiver]: domain of bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m4rtthzeh0a3dp-h-075d9133f3=2@k3.send.arenamag.com designates 170.203.28.36 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounce-kl_28279663254-kl_101101m4rtthzeh0a3dp-h-075d9133f3=2@k3.send.arenamag.com; arc=none smtp.remote-ip=170.203.28.36
Platform
- X-Mailer-Info-Extra2
- 5a8a739f57:0AckNTYwgWZ6hGd0JHNtFDMxEDMx8FbrBwcAc mcv5SZ2lGajJXY49mYulGQh5WZyFGAyBgNz4SO04CNuATMAA3bAYzMtgjMtMDMy0CbrBg bvBQM2YDAp9GAt92YuwWah12b5lmdhx2auQWZyFGaz5SY012auYzMtgjMtMDMy0CbrBAa vBANfh2ZphGAu1GA5cTOAkWbA02bj5yZh1WYuVmch5CZuV2cuMzaAJTPzY2MzETOkVzNw 0CatAHZzEGMoVmeoRHdyRTbxATMxATMfx2atQTNyMjN2kzNygjMfx2atU2YuV3biBgZtB ANfh2ZphGAtBAN1IzM2YTO3IDOy8FbrBAbAAFRzEEMIVkWIRFVSRTTxATMxATMAkGA91n IsFWduFWbiojI4JCLiIVOOJkNRp0RXNEVWJDN40ERZFFOIRFNNFDMiojItRnIsYTM5ITO 4ETO3EjOiQnIsIiT1oFNUdTNHdDVQR0MBBDSFpFSURlU00UMwIiOi0mIsgTM5ITO4ETO3 EjOiQHaiwSM6ISbhNmIsIyRMZmetZlI6IyYisnOiIVOOJkNRp0RXNEVWJDN40ERZFFOIR FNNFDMisHIAMGAkJGMwYWYiNGO1QWN++
- X-Mailer-Info
- 10.sGbfJDOycTO2YzMyUDN.sGbfFDMxEDMx0GNyRHdopXZoBTYzQGc.QYyVmbh BUauJ2b4FmcjhWa2VmLvJ3Z.gsnIwETT0QFS4EVWE1EO0IjVUN0VHpUU2IkT5IlI6snIjJiOiYVb 6ZGTHJCLiMWYtJiOxwiIoRnI6EzN5EDO5ITOxgDLi0mI6ICMx0ENSRFVIpVRIBTQzQEUUdzR1cDV 0oVNOJCLiQnI6EzN5EDO5ITOxYDLiQXbiojIwETT0QFS4EVWE1EO0IjVUN0VHpUU2IkT5IlIsICe iojItFmb1FGbi0Xf..EDMxEDMx0ENSRFVIpVRIBTQzQEU..
- X-Mailer-Info-Extra
- 075d9133f3:0QR0MBBDSFpFSURlU00UMwETMwEDApBQf9JCbh Vnbh1mI6ICeiwiISljTCZTUKd0VDRlVyQDONRUWRhDSURTTxAjI6ISb0JCL2ETOykDOxk zNxojI0JCLi4UNaRDV3UzR3QFUENTQwgURahEVUJFNNFDMiojItJCL4ETOykDOxkzNxoj I0hmIsEjOi0WYjJCLicETmpXbWJiOiMmI7pjISljTCZTUKd0VDRlVyQDONRUWRhDSURTT xAjI7BCAjBwZy9mLlZXaoNmchh3bi5WaAFmblJXY++
- X-Kmail-Account
- VmzfLG
- X-Kmail-Message
- 01M4RTTHZEH0A3DPT7G57T4Z5N
- X-Kmail-Ops
- 01M2DNQM9PBPXNRBNYYSX9216V
Unsubscribe and feedback
- CFBL-Address
- [email protected]; report=arf
- List-Unsubscribe
- <https://manage.kmail-lists.com/…>, <mailto:…@shared.klaviyomail.com>
- List-Unsubscribe-Post
- List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
- X-Report-Abuse
- Please report any spam or abuse to: [email protected]
Message
- Date
- Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:01:58 +0000
- MIME-Version
- 1.0
- Message-ID
- <[email protected]>
- Reply-To
- <[email protected]>
- Subject
- Borrowing Strength
- From
- "Arena Magazine" <[email protected]>
- Content-Type
- multipart/alternative; boundary=91d81e501bc9f946bfcaf45c0320e521e58e436a9468d62bddab6267f8b1
More from Arena Magazine
All 12 emailsSimilar campaigns from other brands
Different brands running the same play. Compare any of them side by side.
Archived for reference and commentary. Arena Magazine, its logos and content are the property of their respective owners; Inbox Archive claims no affiliation and has disabled all links. If you own this content and would like it removed, get in touch.