Hugh Pennington

On 16 July, Cadbury was fined £1 million, having pleaded guilty to charges that they had put unsafe chocolate on sale, had failed to alert the authorities that salmonella was in the chocolate, had breached hygiene controls, and had committed six other food safety offences at their Marlbrook manufacturing plant in Herefordshire. Essentially, Cadbury came unstuck because of bad...

Carolus Linnaeus, who was born almost exactly three hundred years ago, on 23 May 1707, was the founder of modern systematics and taxonomy, the sciences of classifying and naming living things. Science has no holy books, but Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae comes close. Its tenth edition, published in Stockholm in 1758, was the starting point of zoological classification, and the binomial...

Big Science took off during the Second World War and justified itself with successful ventures such as the Manhattan Project. Physicists have operated on a grand scale ever since. Lavish public funding has enabled them to conduct enormous experiments, each taking years in the planning and requiring hundreds of scientists and machines that cost hundreds of millions. Biology is different. Its...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart, there have been very few deaths from acute radiation poisoning. Thirty-one firemen, engineers and others at Chernobyl; two physicists who fumbled when handling a sphere of plutonium at Los Alamos, one in 1946 and one in 1947; and a few others, including some contaminated by contact with illegally dumped radiation sources, are the only people to have been lethally...

The term ‘allergy’ was coined in 1906 by the Viennese paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet to denote any kind of biological reactivity, including asthma, hay fever, reactions to insect bites and stings, and the immunological effects of vaccines and natural infections. Some influential contemporary specialists thought the new term to be both wrong and unnecessary. Wrong, because the...