
Writing Life No. 19: An Interview with Jason Pine

Amongst the UK’s current Conservative Government, rhetorically invoking the body politic is common practice. For example, in 2019 Number 10 Special Advisor Dominic Cummings argued that a European reformist faction within the Tory party “should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic” while UK Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson deployed the metaphor as a …
In 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron told the British public that ‘we are in danger of going back to the Dark Ages of medicine.’ He was introducing the UK government commissioned Review on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), which projected that there would be 10 million deaths per year due to AMR by 2050. While Cameron did not invent the ‘Dark …
What is the significance of COVID-19? The honest response is that I don’t know which, however, does not prevent me from thinking that it has something crucial to tell us. COVID-19 is both real and global and yet it manifests itself allegorically and unevenly. Some get sick, others die, and a growing few turn off and deny. COVID-19 is a …
“We are at war.” This was Emmanuel Macron’s chosen refrain when he addressed the French nation about the current COVID-19 pandemic. He is certainly not the first to present human/pathogenic microbe relations in this way. Indeed, the history of immunology and epidemiology is littered with the vocabulary of war. But this presidential rhetoric reveals a certain communication strategy based on …
A conversation with Mario Biagioli.
Mario Biagioli is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Science and Technology Studies, as well as Director of the Center for Science and Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis. Prior to his time at Davis, he was a Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, specialising in intellectual property in science. His …