KRISHNA Léger is confident he is the only person to have smuggled fresh fish into Les Baumettes in Marseille, one of the most notorious prisons in France. With the fish he made bouillabaisse, the famous Marseillais soup. One of his fellow inmates – also from Marseille – said it was the best he had ever tasted…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 20 August 2022. To continue reading, click here.
IN 1945, while in a state of exhaustion, the mathematician John von Neumann had a kind of stammering premonition. He was in Los Alamos, working on the atom bomb, and he told his wife Klari that the “energy source” he was helping to develop would make scientists “the most hated and also the most wanted citizens of any country”. Then he informed her that his other ongoing project, the computer, would one day be even more important—and potentially even more dangerous…
This article first appeared in The Economist on 6 October 2021. To continue reading, click here (paywall).
We stopped, they rethought. Meet the outstanding minds who are shaping the future.
…In science, we have Tim Spector, who was remaking the science of nutrition before redirecting his efforts into a Covid tracker. And also Laura Spinney, who pursued her own interest in the 1918 Spanish Flu when no one else cared, but then became one of the most prescient and prominent public voices when a new pandemic hit…
JUST over two years ago, my friend Janet came over to commiserate with my husband, whose leg was in plaster after a road accident. We immediately noticed a change in her. This sharp, funny woman in her mid-60s, who had nothing good to say about men (with the exception of her three beloved sons, whom she had raised almost single-handedly) had softened…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 18 March 2021. To continue reading, click here.
ONE of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s new book comes towards the end. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and scientifically unfounded views he has expressed on intelligence. Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has to make his way to the house on the nearby campus that the scientist has been allowed to keep. When the conversation sails dangerously close to the race issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson shrugs and changes tack…
This article first appeared in The Guardian on 11 March 2021. To continue reading, click here.