Category: History of science or medicine
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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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Anti-vaxx through history
SARAH and her brother Benjamin (not their real names) have never seen eye to eye. She’s a professional scientist, he – according to Sarah’s description – is someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories. They maintained an uneasy truce until a few weeks ago. Tensions came to a head when Sarah was on the phone…
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Why neglecting immigrants’ health is a terrible idea, especially in a pandemic
THE Trump administration’s colossal mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t over, and won’t be for a long time after the current president’s departure. There’s a sting in that administration’s tail, whose poison is already spreading through the US population. It has been invisible until now, at least in the higher echelons of power, but as…
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Hospitals without walls: the future of healthcare
ST Mary’s hospital was slated for a £1bn redevelopment before the pandemic struck, with work due to start in 2027. The main emergency and specialist hospital serving north-west London will still get its upgrade, but it might look quite different now. “Covid-19 has dramatically changed things,” says James Kinross, a surgeon who works at St…
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What are COVID archivists keeping for tomorrow’s historians?
IF only somebody had counted the orphans. That was one wish I had while trawling archives on the 1918 influenza pandemic to research my book Pale Rider. Another yearning? If only someone had saved biological samples of the unidentified respiratory disease that ravaged China in late 1917. Historians a century hence will, I think, have…
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What science can learn from religion
OVER the first half of the 20th century, the Catholic priest and prehistorian Henri Breuil transformed our understanding of early humans. Armed with a pared-down travel kit and a folding umbrella, this diminutive figure in a worn cassock criss-crossed France, then Europe, then the world, in search of painted caves. Having wriggled his way into…
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The flawed brilliance of J.B.S. Haldane
TOWARDS the end of his life, J.B.S. Haldane was inseparable from a pebble that had been found in the Valley of Elah in Israel, where David felled Goliath with a similar projectile. A king-size man who towered over British biology for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, Jack Haldane—the “half-Dane”—was a more…
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God’s perfume
IN THE EARLY 1990s, the then Mayor of Versailles, André Damien, discovered a folded paper in the drawer of an antique desk he had just bought at auction. When he opened the paper up, he saw that it had written on it a formula for what seemed to be a perfume, so he took it…
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On pandemics and inequality
A LOT has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened…? This article first appeared in The Guardian on 12 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.
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Scientists make ethical decisions too
SOMETIMES the parallels between this pandemic and previous ones are uncanny. Take hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that regulatory agencies all over the world are now hastily authorising for the treatment of hospitalised Covid-19 patients. Outside hospitals, Donald Trump and the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, have expressed enthusiasm for the drug, people are breaking social distancing…