As a tenured professor of biology and genetics at Harvard Medical School, David Sinclair has long been the world’s most qualified “biohacker”. The term refers to a broad community that attempts to enhance bodily performance, sometimes through simple treatments like …
The liberal lessons of the Cass Report
Pity poor Dr Hilary Cass, the eminent paediatrician charged with managing an independent review of NHS gender services for young people, whose final report was published this week. Given the hair-trigger sensibilities of interested parties, she seems to have been …
Climate science is making you miserable
There’s a thing in movie franchises called a crossover, where a character from one franchise appears in another. You know the sort of thing: Alien vs. Predator; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The entire and seemingly interminable Marvel Cinematic …
Your boss doesn’t care about your feelings
You’re at work one day when your company’s “wellness” department begins handing out “emoji” stickers with words like “frustrated”, “overwhelmed”, and “stressed” printed below their creepy yellow faces. No one uses them, of course. But the message is clear: “[Insert …
The assisted-dying lobby has already won
What counts as a “dignified death”? On Monday, we got an intimation of what one looks like for Guardian readers, as journalist Renate van der Zee wrote about her elderly mother’s “completely calm, almost cheerful” legal demise at the hands …
The truth about antipsychotics
The discovery of antipsychotics was an accidental revolution, the result not of systematic research, but of random observations. In the early Fifties, an obscure French naval surgeon was trying out chlorpromazine as a potential anaesthetic; he noticed that it calmed …
The bug in Sam Altman’s industrial revolution
It has been an intense few months for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Having survived an attempted coup, he is now looking to accelerate his artificial intelligence revolution. His next step is to raise $7 trillion in investment capital to build …
Why we still need Dr Freud
Not much is uncontroversial when it comes to the life and work of Sigmund Freud, but one thing ought to be: he was a lousy psychotherapist. Take the case of his patient Horace Frink, who Freud diagnosed with a serious …
Has HRT propaganda misled women?
The menopause is having a moment. Once only spoken of rarely, and with embarrassment, it is now sensationalised in the media. This has been accompanied by a massive increase in prescriptions for Hormone Replacement Therapy, which have more than doubled …
Who’s afraid of a female brain?
For decades now, an axiom of middle-class feminism has decreed that there are no important inbuilt differences between male and female brains. In fact, so the favoured story goes, there are no male and female brains at all, except in …
Caught in their own trap?
Introduction
On January 5, 2024 the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an article by Peter Marks and Robert Califf. Both authors are affiliated with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The article, “Is Vaccination Approaching a …
The curse of Valentine’s Day
How St Valentine came to be associated with romance is disputed. Some suggest the third-century martyr’s feast “Christianised” a Roman fertility festival — but the first mention of his day in connection with love comes more than 1,000 years after …
Virology | Mary Hauser, PhD and Jennifer Smith, Ph
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Mary Hauser and Jennifer Smith present an overview of the field of virology, covering the basics from virus structure to the mechanisms of viral infections to PCR testing.
After receiving her Masters degree from …
How Edinburgh University stifled my investigation
Almost 150 years ago, a young medical student at Edinburgh University was inspired by one of his lecturers to devise a detective with remarkable powers of deduction based on solid scientific principles. Arthur Conan Doyle wanted a hero for the …
The Immune System and Vaccines are Complicated
Vaccines are a complicated area, which is because the immune system is immensely complicated. Targeted vaccines have ancillary effects, and it is not possible to predict what they are.
Professor Peter Aaby’s group has done ground-breaking research on the effects …