WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying […]

Despite Chinese obstruction and denial, the world is coming round to the idea that the origin of the pandemic might be traced to a Wuhan laboratory. Little wonder — the clues have been there all along   By Matt Ridley   It is not clear why the US government chose this week to drop not […]

Tuesday 28th February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the entire history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: […]

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/27/the-case-for-the-lab-leak-theory-grows-stronger-by-the-day/   The case for the lab leak theory grows stronger by the day. Matt Ridley     The news that the US Department of Energy has changed its mind about the probability of a lab leak as the source of covid-19 on the basis of new evidence has sent shock waves through the scientific […]

The Department of Energy in the United States, which has responsibility for a network of national scientific research laboratories, has changed its mind. It now thinks it likely the pandemic began in a Chinese laboratory, not in a seafood market, on the basis of new evidence it has seen.   It has not divulged what […]

The failure to speedily investigate Covid’s real origins leave us vulnerable to another pandemic   The World Health Organisation, the body charged with finding how a virus from central China killed more than ten million people and upended the world economy, has dropped the ball. An article appeared in Nature magazine this week, headlined “WHO […]

In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll brought the dodo back to life. The extinct, fat, flightless pigeon arranged a famous running race in which “all shall have prizes”.   Now an American tech entrepreneur, Ben Lamm, plans to bring the dodo back to life for real, along with some other extinct species like woolly mammoths, […]

The failure of Britain’s first space launch is coming in for a lot of Schadenfreude. (Given how much we Brits revel in other’s misfortune, it is surprising we have to borrow a German word for it.) While an inquest into what went wrong is clearly warranted, it would be a mistake if we gave up […]

Sweden’s refusal to impose compulsory shutdowns has now, by contrast, been completely vindicated We will never know how many people are dying of covid in China. The regime will probably cook the statistical books. The chief executive of an asset management firm in China shared an image last week of a document at a mortuary […]

Science can thrive after Brexit: there is public support for skilled migration My Times column on skilled versus unskilled migration and Brexit: Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea of […]