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Science is packed with committees deciding on ethics… but there are few that decide whether it is safe “I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly and strangely worded tweets sent in recent days from the Twitter […]

The theory of evolution is dominated by the utilitarian logic of natural selection: adapt or die, survival of the fittest. But consider that the word “fit” has two meanings among the young these days: “healthy” but also “hot”. There is another evolutionary mechanism that scientists have taken a longer time to appreciate – seduction by […]

At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British Nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors […]

This appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-wager-the-400-bio-bet-that-predicted-the-pandemic/ At the end of the year, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to settle a wager with another of the world’s most renowned scientists. We don’t yet know which will win, but it is likely to be the wrong one, in my […]

Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-experts-who-enabled-rfk-jrs-rise/ The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator […]

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshall, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs […]

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the […]

Every five years Latvia stages a week-long song and dance festival and this year my wife’s Latvian cousins got us tickets to two of the biggest events. I had no idea what to expect. The first evening, in a vast open-air arena in the Mezaparks forest outside Riga, while the light faded behind the tall […]

That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious. That now we […]

When I joined the House of Lords in 2013 I soon realised that, despite its poor reputation, the place contained plenty of wise, quick-witted and courageous minds. None more so than Nigel Lawson who died this week. An intellectual titan who had once almost become a philosophy professor, he was not content to rest on […]