Hugh Pennington

I worked on bird flu in a laboratory in London in the 1960s. We called it KP, short for klassische Geflügelpest. The boss was an ardent Germanophile, but this wasn’t the only reason. He wanted us to remember Werner Schäfer’s discovery in 1955 in Tübingen that KP, fowl plague, was an influenza virus, and Shäfer’s suggestion that such bird viruses might...

Well over three hundred years have gone by since the plague died out as an indigenous disease in Britain. It lingers on only as a rare rural infection in Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Zaire, Botswana, Uganda, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Burma. Worldwide, the annual number of human cases rarely exceeds a couple of thousand. As the Oxford Textbook of...

Joanna Blythman does not like supermarkets. The bigger they are, the greater her hatred. She says they are responsible for the slow death of community life. They take the skill out of shopping. They subvert home cooking. They have done away with seasonal variety. Their buyers are bullied by their superiors to bully their suppliers. Supermarkets have an obsession with hygiene at the expense of...

“Retractions of scientific papers are not uncommon. They usually happen because a research team has been unable to replicate or substantiate its findings. But the formal retraction of an interpretation is almost without precedent. Horton’s leader [in the Lancet] on ‘The Lessons of MMR’ doesn’t discuss the scientific strength of the link made in the Wakefield paper between autism and MMR. It implies that with hindsight he would not have published it – but the reason would have been Wakefield’s apparent conflict of interest, not doubts about its truth.”