Year: 2022
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Gene drives and metaphors
I have been writing about developments in the biosciences for twenty years. In that time, I have covered a wide variety of topics, such as cloning, genomics, the human genome project, the microbiome project, faecal microbial transplants, synthetic biology, epigenetics, genome editing and now gene drive. I was lucky enough to get many reflections on…
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Gnomes, ichthyosaurs and 19th-century science communication
Last weekend I had an interaction on Twitter that got me away from doomscrolling and transported me back to my safe place, namely the 19th century. In my past life, when I was very young, I wrote a Staatsexamensarbeit, a sort of MA for people on the teacher training track (I never went to the…
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Endemic confusion
A few days ago, I saw this tweet by Bill Hanage and smiled: “For some reason there seems to be a lot of talk about endemicity again. For the avoidance of doubt, omicron is not endemic right now in much the same way that the moon is not a hamster”. I read many of the…
Making Science Public 