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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 […]

Like (I suspect) many birdwatchers, I sometimes wish I actually was a bird. Birds are just better at life. They are more colourful, more tuneful, more beautiful, than mammals. Their feathers are more versatile, their lungs more efficient, their digestion faster, their genomes more streamlined, the visual acuity superior, their eyes attuned to more colours, […]

Ten years ago, I invited a bunch of clever biologists to my home to discuss the possibility of one day reversing the extinction of a bird called the Great Auk. We did not claim it could yet be done but we knew that the two technologies for doing de-extinction – ancient genome sequencing and Crispr […]

I now expect to see the existence of extraterrestrial life confirmed in the next few years. When it happens, put down your phone, look up from your work, walk away from your routine and let the moment sink in. Then we can go back to arguing about pronouns and tariffs.   We are not there […]

Sir Keir Starmer has woken up to the fact that his policies are killing one of Britain’s last successful manufacturing industries, the £90-billion-a-year car industry, on which 800,000 jobs depend. ‘This is the beginning of a new era,’ said Starmer yesterday, as he announced plans to aid the motor industry by relaxing environmental rules following Trump’s 25 […]

Five years ago this week, based on a highly misleading “model” forecast from one academic, Neil Ferguson, the British government ditched its pandemic plan and locked the entire country down with disastrous and – as Sweden proves – unnecessary consequences. It was the first of many dreadful mistakes made by the government during the Covid […]

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 […]

The Covid pandemic almost certainly began with a leak from a laboratory, probably in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some time in the autumn of 2019. The evidence is voluminous, detailed, precise and devastating, as I and others have catalogued. The CIA, FBI, German intelligence and the former head of MI6 all say they think […]

Together with Stephen McBride, founder of the Rational Optimist Society, I have set up an account at Substack called the Rational Optimist. I encourage all readers of this blog to subscribe – initially for free – to that account:  https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com. Stephen and I will be posting there regularly from now on.

This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be […]