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Polish physician and sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck was a prisoner in Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the day my father, a US army physician, arrived there with the liberating troops. My father was exposed to Nazi brutality as a young Jew living in Vienna in the 1920s. Fleck was from Lvov, an epicenter of Nazi persecution. For both, a paramount question was what kind of medicine could be practiced in a world of deliberate extermination. Did they meet? My father's late-life memoir notes that "the inmates who were physicians immediately proceeded to make use of their skills to help their fellow inmates." That piqued my interest in how Fleck's socioscientific insights, described in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact , emerged from his prewar experience of Nazi terror, when his scientific work, sociological-philosophical background, and observations of the prevailing fascism coalesced. This shaped his awareness of how collective thinking—by a nation, race, party, or class—produces facts and how politics and prejudice get entangled in scientific work. This essay explores Fleck's legacy and how both physicians offered resistance and reprisal to fascism, compelling concerns in view of today's increasing tolerance for fascism, racism, antisemitism, and "alternative" truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toxicokinetic–toxicodynamic (TKTD) models simulate organismal uptake and elimination of a substance (TK) and its effects on the organism (TD). The Reduced General Unified Threshold model of Survival (GUTS‐RED) is a TKTD modeling framework that is well established for aquatic risk assessment to simulate effects on survival. The TKTD models are applied in three steps: parameterization based on experimental data (calibration), comparing predictions with independent data (validation), and prediction of endpoints under environmental scenarios. Despite a clear understanding of the sensitivity of GUTS‐RED predictions to the model parameters, the influence of the input data on the quality of GUTS‐RED calibration and validation has not been systematically explored. We analyzed the performance of GUTS‐RED calibration and validation based on a unique, comprehensive data set, covering different types of substances, exposure patterns, and aquatic animal species taxa that are regularly used for risk assessment of plant protection products. We developed a software code to automatically calibrate and validate GUTS‐RED against survival measurements from 59 toxicity tests and to calculate selected model evaluation metrics. To assess whether specific survival data sets were better suited for calibration or validation, we applied a design in which all possible combinations of studies for the same species–substance combination are used for calibration and validation. We found that uncertainty of calibrated parameters was lower when the full range of effects (i.e., from high survival to high mortality) was covered by input data. Increasing the number of toxicity studies used for calibration further decreased parameter uncertainty. Including data from both acute and chronic studies as well as studies under pulsed and constant exposure in model calibrations improved model predictions on different types of validation data. Using our results, we derived a workflow, including recommendations for the sequence of modeling steps from the selection of input data to a final judgment on the suitability of GUTS‐RED for the data set. Environ Toxicol Chem 2024;43:197–210. © 2023 Bayer AG and The Authors. Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of SETAC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]