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The ‘great stagnation’ is a myth; wonders are being accomplished. But silly rules still block progress. My article for the Telegraph: Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was […]

From climate to Covid, politics and hubris have disconnected scientific institutions from the philosophy and method that ought to guide them. My interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal: “Science” has become a political catchword. “I believe in science,” Joe Biden tweeted six days before he was elected president. “Donald Trump doesn’t. It’s that simple, folks.” But what […]

Last week saw only my fourth visit to the Lords from the north-east since the pandemic began. From the “Lords Diary” feature at PoliticsHome: I wandered the ghostly corridors of Westminster hoping to spot a few colleagues and got lost in a one-way system. This hybrid Parliament seems to have made the government’s job more […]

Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissible but less virulent This blog post was adapted from this Twitter thread: Articles often claim that the Delta variant is more virulent, e.g. “Citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom”. Earlier in the year the same was said about […]

Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, and the problem goes further than Britain’s slow reopening My article for The Telegraph: Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has […]

Organic lobbyists show ‘sheer hypocrisy’ opposing UK emergency authorization of neonicotinoid sugar beet seed treatments — while supporting environmental waiver for ‘acutely toxic’ copper sulfate My article for the Genetic Literacy Project: The Government was right to make provision for a temporary and limited derogation for the use of the neonicotinoid seed treatment Cruiser SB […]

My article for Spectator: In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than we will […]

Officialdom’s absurdly cautious approach is now impossible to justify given the success of vaccines My article for the Telegraph: The whole aim of practical politics, said HL Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” […]

My article for Spectator: In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some […]

I went on The Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish to discuss “writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view.” It was a wonderful conversation, and […]