My wife met me off the overnight train from Beijing. ‘It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have breakfast somewhere.’ How nice, I thought. But breakfast...
On 24 April 1497 there was a meeting of the Aberdeen town council. Controlling the ‘infirmity coming out of France’ was one item on the agenda. This ‘infirmity’ was...
Rainspotting is the ultimate anorak pastime. You really need an anorak to do it. You could use an umbrella, only then it’d be difficult to write at the same time. You could sit indoors....
Do we today have an available bioethics? Yes, we do, a bad one: what the Germans call Bindestrich-Ethik, or ‘hyphen-ethics’, where what gets lost in the hyphenation is ethics as such....
Soon after his 70th birthday, Charles Darwin sat down to compose a Life of his grandfather Erasmus, poet and sage of 18th-century Lichfield, brilliant physician, mechanical inventor, incorrigible...
Four years ago I wrote The River, a book in which I argued for a new theory of how the Aids pandemic began.* The book proved very controversial, and provoked what I would consider a defensive...
Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to...
The molecular revolution in biology began 50 years ago with the discovery of the structure of DNA, and has had such an impact that the reading public’s interest now extends even to the...
In the middle of the 19th century the prevailing scientific view of the abyssal ocean held that it was a vast body of water with a uniform temperature of 4 °C. With no variation of...
If you are a scientist at an American research university like mine, you know what to do if you think you’ve hit on some technique or bit of knowledge that might have commercial potential....
Early in the first volume of his collected papers, the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton retells a Victorian joke. Two ladies are conversing, and one says: ‘Have you heard that Mr Darwin...
One of the most intriguing of all magic tricks, the Disappearing Handkerchiefs, was presented to King Louis-Philippe at the Château St-Cloud in 1846 by the renowned French magician...
Nixon loved air-conditioning. In summer he would turn the thermostat down as low as it would go, so he could toast himself by a blazing log fire in the synthetic chill. Extreme as Nixon’s virtuoso double-polluting...
By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my...
At dinner after a recent meeting about ethics and genetics, a guest told me that he had never been to a conference of bioethicists before. The person next to him sat up straight, as if insulted,...
The Prince of Wales would love The Forgiveness of Nature. The underlying vision is of England on a Saturday afternoon in late summer, the village green bathed in golden light, the groundsman...
‘Objectivity’ is a word at once indispensable and elusive. It can be metaphysical, methodological and moral by turns, occasionally in the same paragraph. Sometimes it refers to the...
The noises of the sperm whale are unlike the lyric hootings and musings of the humpback, whose ‘songs’ won him a place in the LP charts in the 1970s. Recordings of the humpback were...