The best science fiction can predict the science of tomorrow and colour the preoccupations of today. It’s too early to tell whether Nick Payne’s new play, Elegy, will do the former, but it certainly takes a powerful swing at the latter. Read more
One of the remarkable features of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), is its philosophical acuity. “Science embodies the human desire to understand nature; technology couples that desire with the ambition to control nature,” he writes. Cancer treatment is at the very edge of technological possibility, intervening in a disease that is our “desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger”. To Mukherjee, cancer was not something, but someone. Read more
At the age of 12, I was knocked off my bicycle by a car, resulting in a compound fracture to my right leg that required pins and an external cage to enable the bone to reset and the wound to heal. Antibiotic therapy kept the threat of infection at bay. Recently during childbirth my wife contracted an infection that, fortunately, was cleared in her and our new-born baby following a brief course of antibiotics. Read more
When US President Barack Obama introduced his $215 million precision medicine initiative early this month, he showcased his politician’s penchant for sharing the inspiring personal stories of extraordinary citizens. One story that might be familiar to Nature readers was that of Hugh Rienhoff and his daughter Beatrice. Read more
