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To solve 21st-century problems, innovators need the freedom to experiment without the burden of overregulation and the abuse of intellectual property rights by vested interests My article for the Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay, adapted from How Innovation Works which is available Tuesday, the 19th of May: The Covid-19 pandemic reveals that far from living in an […]

For private enterprise, time is money; delay can be lethal. My article for the Telegraph: At the start of the pandemic, China built a hospital in double-quick time and we all thought, “that’s why they are so good at economic growth”. Then Britain did the same, proving we can do it too. Medical devices have […]

Last week, I did an AMA with a community called whatshouldireadnext.com and the answers are now available on their blog. I answered 23 questions in total from their community and staff as well as a few from social media, discussing the usual topics of innovation and the pandemic, but also some new ones like time […]

US and Canada Only, Details Below With the North America release of How Innovation Works just one week away, I am unable to travel to the US to promote the book as I would normally do. So my team and I are trying to come up with creative ways to promote the book while also […]

My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph: Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they […]

It is data, not modelling, that we need now My article for The Spectator: We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot […]

There has long been evidence that a sufficiency of vitamin D protects against viruses My article for The Telegraph: A suggestive set of numbers was published online in April by a medical scientist in the Philippines, Dr Mark Alipio. Of 49 patients with mild symptoms of Covid-19 in three hospitals in southern Asian countries, only […]

There are reasons to be optimistic about the therapies being tested My article for The Spectator: A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, […]

I went on The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg podcast to discuss innovation, the lockdowns, and more. How does technological innovation actually happen? We were able to speak to Matt Ridley, who has literally written the (upcoming) book on this subject, How Innovation Works. Matt brings up fascinating points, such as whether or not innovation really […]

A month or two ago, I went on a podcast called The Political Orphanage with Andrew Heaton to have what Andrew called a “literary tailgating party”, and discuss both The Rational Optimist and my upcoming book How Innovation Works. Listen on Apple Podcasts I thought it was a really good interview, and enjoyed it so […]