I am a member of the Association of British Science Writers. I review books and exhibitions, write articles on a variety of topics related to science, medicine and the histories of those subjects, and write scientific obituaries.
Reviews
- ‘Ribosome reader to Royal Society leader: a biologist’s road to the Nobel‘, Nature, 4 September 2018
- ‘Experiments in circulation’, The Lancet, 24 February 2018
- ‘Inspirational women in medicine’, The Lancet, 21 October 2017
- ‘Thomas Browne: A rarity among rarities‘, The Lancet, 29 April 2017
- The marginal notes of John Dee‘, The Lancet, 2 April 2016
- ‘Ada Lovelace: in search of “a calculus of the nervous system“‘, The Lancet, 31 October 2015
- ‘A treasury of learning’, The Lancet, 5 September 2015
- ‘Of DNA and broken dreams’, Nature, 5 June 2014
- ‘Architecture: Life in stone’, Nature, 6 September 2012
- ‘That much the brighter’, TLS, 3 August 2012
- Review of The Machine in the Text, British Society for Literature and Science, February 2012
- ‘Prime mates’, Guardian Review, 25 July 2009
- ‘Under the microscope’, Guardian Review, 25 April 2009
- ‘The number one’, Guardian Review, 14 February 2009
- ‘Code breaker’, Guardian Review, 2 August 2008
- ‘What’s it all about?’, Guardian Review, 19 January 2008
- ‘Learning the lessons of life’, Guardian Review, 27 October 2007
- ‘The fly boys and the godfather of zebrafish’, Guardian Review, 2 June 2007
- ‘The Colossus of Codes’, Guardian Review, 29 July, 2006
Other recent articles
- ‘From diamonds to DNA: three women who uncovered the secret structures of nature’, Manchester Memoirs, vol 155, pp 113-118
- ‘The art of medicine: Collecting modern medicine‘, The Lancet, 1-7 September 2018
- ‘Women making medical history: introducing A Woman’s Place‘, The Lancet, 4-10 August 2018, p 370
- ‘Anna Morandi: anatomist of Enlightenment Bologna‘, The Lancet,
4-10 August 2018, p 375 - ‘Obituary: John Sulston (1942-2018)’, Nature, 29 March 2018, p 588
- ‘Obituary: Sir John Sulston’, The Guardian, 12 March 2018
- ‘Obituary: Mary Lee Berners-Lee‘, The Guardian, 23 January 2018
- ‘The lion, the web and the Wildcru‘, Oxford Today, Trinity 2016, pp 38-41
- ‘Beyond the human genome‘, Oxford Today, Michaelmas 2015, pp 28-32
- ‘Medical periodicals: mining the past‘, The Lancet, 27 June 2015
- ‘Dorothy Hodgkin: On proteins and patterns’, The Lancet, 25 October 2014
- ‘Fifty years of EMBO’, Nature, 10 July 2014
- ‘Women in crystallography’, Nature, 30 January 2014
- ‘Science today, history tomorrow’, Nature, 3 January 2013
- ‘Max Perutz and the SPSL’, in Shula Marks, Paul Weindling and Laura Wintour (eds), In Defence of Learning, The British Academy, pp 87-98, 2011
- ‘The exception and the rule: women and the Royal Society 1945-2010‘, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 20 September 2010
- ‘Pioneers of plant genetics to flower on stage’, Nature,
8 July 2010 - ‘The making of an exceptional scientist’, Nature,
29 April 2010 - ‘Our changing body image‘, Nature, 25 June 2009
- ‘Science’s new battle lines‘, Nature, 7 May 2009
- ‘The art of laboratory design‘, Nature, 29 January 2009
- ‘A scientist’s life for me‘, Nature, 16 October 2008
New Scientist: I wrote regularly on biomedical science and women in science during the 1980s and 1990s. The most recent articles were ‘Mad brains and the prion heresy’; ‘Parkinson’s: a suitable case for treatment?’; and ‘The human worm’.
Oxford Today: I became science editor from the first volume in 1989, and had a stint as editor from 2000-2007. Issues earlier than Michaelmas 2009 are no longer archived on the website.