Author: lauraspinney
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Memorialising Covid
JUST over two years ago, my friend Janet came over to commiserate with my husband, whose leg was in plaster after a road accident. We immediately noticed a change in her. This sharp, funny woman in her mid-60s, who had nothing good to say about men (with the exception of her three beloved sons, whom…
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The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson – review
ONE of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s new book comes towards the end. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and…
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How elimination versus suppression became Covid’s cold war
A year ago, when the World Health Organization published a report showing that China had shut down a highly contagious virus in a city of 11 million people, epidemiologist Michael Baker assumed that the international body would advise the rest of the world to follow China’s example. When to his amazement it didn’t, he decided…
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What can we learn from Africa’s experience of Covid?
AS Africa emerges from its second wave of Covid-19, one thing is clear: having officially clocked up more than 3.8m cases and more than 100,000 deaths, it hasn’t been spared. But the death toll is still lower than experts predicted when the first cases were reported in Egypt just over a year ago. The relative…
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The first urbanites
AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated…
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The next pandemic? It may already be upon us
WOULDN’T it be wonderful if there were a silver lining to this pandemic? If history is anything to go by there may actually turn out to be a number of them, though we can’t quite see them yet, but here’s one that is just beginning to gleam. In the words of Prof Kevin Outterson: “Today,…
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‘We took a huge risk’: the Indian firm making more Covid jabs than anyone
ADAR Poonawalla, 40, is the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the Pune-based, family-owned vaccine manufacturer that is producing more Covid-19 vaccines by dose than any other in the world. For now it’s the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine rolling off its production lines, but SII has signed contracts with three other developers – Novavax,…
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Has Covid changed the price of a life?
THE dilemmas are achingly familiar by now. Should we lock down or stay open? If we lock down, when and in what order should the different sectors of the economy open up? What about schools? Places of worship? Cultural and sporting venues…? This article first appeared in The Observer on 14 February 2021. To continue reading, click…
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Another wave is possible
AT 8.30am on Tuesday 26 January the waiting room of the emergency department at the Lariboisière hospital in Paris was still empty, festooned with signs reading “emergency department on strike” that predate the pandemic but have been left pointedly in place… This article first appeared in The Guardian on 7 February 2021. To continue reading, click…
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Dark and frozen matter: science in the Alps
I’m shamelessly advertising the following 6-day tour of Switzerland and France that’s being organised by New Scientist and Kirker Holidays, because I’m going to be a guide on it – talking about all that the melting glaciers are revealing about our past – and because if scientific holidays are your thing, this one promises to…