How not to investigate the origins of Covid

Matt Ridley

This book on Covid’s origins is limited to criticisms deemed acceptable to Beijing. At 1.30am on 31st December 2019, an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait […]

Plains of plenty

Matt Ridley

The Masai Mara has defied gloomy predictions of decline My article for The Critic: When I was ten years old, in 1968, my parents took me and two of my sisters on a safari through Kenya and Tanzania. Having lived there when they first married in the 1950s, they wanted us to see the wildlife […]

Playing the wild card

Matt Ridley

“Rewilding” is fashionable but there is more to it than letting Nature run free My article for The Critic: Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife […]

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The Brexit boost for British bio-science

Matt Ridley

World-class laboratories have been freed from the dead hand of Brussels regulation Update: My House of Lords Speech on Genome Editing from 4th March   My article for The Critic: Britain is really good at biology. In physics and chemistry, or painting and music, we have often failed to match the Germans, the French or […]

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The plot against fracking

Matt Ridley

How cheap energy was killed by Green lies and Russian propaganda My article from The Critic The first coffee house in Marseilles opened in 1671, prompting the city’s vintners to recruit a couple of professors at the University of Aix to blacken their new competitor’s reputation. They duly got one of their students to write […]