[Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization] This is a thoroughly depressing saga. Few come out of it well. Western medicine has few miracles. Some kinds of surgery work amazingly well, although at high cost. Some vaccines work brilliantly and have eliminated many scourges of earlier era. The third miracle is antibiotics. They [...]
The earlier article looked at John Krebs’ background including his involvement with the Food Standards Agency. This article looks at the recent report by the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology (which Krebs chairs) on science advice to ministers. It is a breathtakingly arrogant document: 64. … Chief Scientific Advisers (CSAs) should [...]
This report came out yesterday. The House of Lords committee is chaired by John Krebs, an academic twitcher who has migrated into being one of the great and the good. His father was the rightly famous Hans (Adolf) Krebs (1900-1981) who identified the citric acid cycle (aka TCA cycle, aka Krebs cycle) and the urea [...]
Science is a human endeavour. Its practitioners are human with all their foibles and weaknesses. That is part of the miracle that is science. Despite such difficulties, the pursuit of science has succeeded in reaching a stable and useful body of knowledge which has enormously enhanced humankind’s mastery of the planet. I have lost track [...]
[This is the fourth in a series of articles giving the background to Ed Belbruno's work on the Interplanetary Transport Network. The earlier articles were Halfway to anywhere, Lagrange points (1), and Three is a crowd. This article looks at the stability of the Lagrange points.] What does it mean to ask if something is [...]
