Rupert Beale

We have seen​ plenty of viral variants, some with Spike genes of sufficient interest to merit a Greek letter. Spike is the virus’s entry weapon, and the bit of the virus that’s targeted by vaccines. If your antibodies block Spike, you block the virus – and if Spike has mutated, it may have become better at dodging those antibodies. Delta has been the most vicious variant so...

In​ Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Professor Challenger takes a party of adventurers to South America, where they discover a plateau filled with dinosaurs. The book’s lesser-known sequel, The Poison Belt, isn’t quite so thrilling, and not only because of the disappointing lack of dinosaurs. This time Challenger summons the same cast to Sussex, where he tells them that...

Biologists​ love abbreviations, but we often use them clumsily. What may sound like catchy acronyms to one group of researchers are tiresome jargon to colleagues in related fields. Fruit fly geneticists have taken whimsy to absurdity: MAD stands for ‘Mothers Against Decapentaplegic’. The ‘decapentaplegic’ bit comes from a mutant fly that doesn’t correctly...

Do you remember​ the spring? We were said to be ‘following the science’, but the scientific advice was kept secret. The minutes of Sage meetings were not published; even the ad hoc membership of the government’s advisory group was uncertain. Now that the minutes are available, they make grim reading. A vaccine would not arrive in any useful timeframe; there was no...

On​ 29 July, I received ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) update: issue 97’ from my university. I understand from dimly remembered friends and colleagues outside the Covidology bubble that 2020 hasn’t been much fun for them either. We’re all tetchy. Those of us who have been working round the clock on increasing testing capacity are also thoroughly exhausted. In March we ran on...