Category Archives: Science

There’s nothing precise about Precision Medicine

The media gets excited about gene therapy. With the sequencing of genomes becoming ever cheaper...

Correspondence in Nature magazine

I had a letter to the editor published in Nature on big data and privacy....

On pure maths and innovation

An unpublished letter to the editor of The New Yorker, February 2015. My letter Alec...

Facebook’s lab rats

It’s long been said that if you’re getting something for free online, then you’re not...

Watson the Doctor is no laughing matter

For the past year, oncologists at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York...

The beginning of privacy!

The headlines proclaim that the newfound ability to re-identify anonymous DNA donors means The End...

Letter to Science: Re-identification of DNA may need ethics approval

Introduction I had a letter published in Science magazine about the recently publicised re-identification of...

Memetic engineering our identities

This blog post builds a little further on my ecological ideas about the state of...

Is quantum computing all it’s cracked up to be?

Quantum computing continues to make strides. Now they’ve made a chip to execute Shor’s quantum...

Science is more than the books it produces

These days it’s common to hear the modest disclaimer that there are some questions science...