I am a member of the Association of British Science Writers. I write articles on a variety of topics related to science, medicine and the histories of those subjects, reviews of books and exhibitions, and scientific obituaries.
Articles
- Sofia Okunevska-Morachevska: Ukrainian nationalist and early practitioner of radiation therapy, The Lancet, 3 June 2023
- Jane Cooke Wright: innovative oncologist and leader in medicine, The Lancet, 15 October 2022.
- Matilde Montoya: fighter for women’s medical education in Mexico, The Lancet, 19 November 2022.
- Gillian Hanson: UK innovator in intensive care medicine, The Lancet, 2 April 2022.
- Sivaramakrishna Iyer Padmavati: trailblazing cardiologist in India, The Lancet, 1 January 2022
- Kofoworola Abeni Pratt: professionalising nursing in Nigeria, The Lancet, 23 October 2021.
- Min Mehta: surgeon who helped children with scoliosis, The Lancet, 14 August 2021.
- Monica Lewin: surgeon to victims of political violence in Jamaica, The Lancet, 8 May 2021.
- Mary Susan Malahlela: practising medicine under apartheid, The Lancet, 17 April 2021.
- Rebecca Lee Crumpler: first Black woman physician in the USA, The Lancet, 13 February 2021.
- Kesaveloo Goonaruthnum Naidoo: anti-apartheid campaigner, The Lancet, 25 July 2020.
- Helen Boyle: pioneer of early mental health treatment, The Lancet, 11 April 2020.
- Remember what science owes to child refugees, Nature, 30 January 2020.
- Mary Edwards Walker: military surgeon who wore the trousers, The Lancet, 25 January 2020.
- Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: the exceptional professor who solved the structure of insulin. BBC Science Focus 9 December 2019.
- Rukhmabai: doctor and social reformer. The Lancet, 9 November 2019.
- The structure of DNA. Nature, 9 October 2019.
- Women’s stories from the computer room, Mathematics Today,
5 October 2019, pp 172-173. - Helen Brooke Taussig: preserver of babies’ hearts and limbs, The Lancet, 7 September 2019.
- Marie Boivin: from midwife to gynaecologist, The Lancet, 1 June 2019, p 2192–2193.
- ‘Susan La Flesche Picotte: a doctor who spanned two cultures‘, The Lancet, 23 February 2019, p 734.
- ‘Dorothy Stopford Price and the control of tuberculosis in Ireland‘, The Lancet, 5 January 2019, p 20.
- ‘Agnes Yewande Savage, Susan Ofori-Atta and Matilda Clerk: three pioneering doctors‘, The Lancet, 24 November 2018, p 2258.
- ‘Yvonne Sylvain: women’s health pioneer in Haiti’, The Lancet, 13-19 October 2018, p 1299
- ‘From diamonds to DNA: three women who uncovered the secret structures of nature’, Manchester Memoirs, 2018, 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 - ‘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 - Q & A: Georgina Ferry on writing biography, Nature, 24 February 2010
- ‘The making of an exceptional scientist’, Nature,
29 April 2010 - ‘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
Reviews
- Dr Semmelweis review: Mark Rylance play shows how hand washing saved hundreds of lives, Nature, 3 August 2023.
- Anna Atkins: pioneering botanical photographer who captured algae and ferns in ghostly blue images, Nature, 31 July 2023.
- An incomparable individual who fell through the cracks of history, Nature, 10 May 2021.
- Women of the Nobel factory share their stories, Nature, 15 December 2020.
- Marie Curie biopic should have trusted pioneer’s passion, Nature, 11 March 2020.
- Time to breathe, The Lancet, 4 May 2019, p 1796.
- Moon mapper, Sun spotter: the astonishing Thomas Harriot, Nature, 17 April 2019, pp 311 – 312.
- The society that sparked change at Cambridge‘, Nature, 21 February 2019, p 324.
- ‘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
- ‘Our changing body image‘, Nature, 25 June 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
Obituaries
- Dominic Kwiatkowski,16 May 2023.
- Paul Berg,14 March 2023.
- Olga Kennard, The Guardian, 21 March 2023.
- Sir Michael Rawlins, The Guardian, 10 January 2023.
- Peter Hermon, The Guardian, 25 November 2022.
- Sir Colin Blakemore, The Guardian, 29 June 2022.
- François Gros, Nature, 18 March 2022.
- Mary Coombs, The Guardian, 11 March 2022.
- Luc Montagnier, The Guardian, 18 February 2022.
- Edward O Wilson, The Guardian, 6 January 2022.
- Martin Wood, The Guardian, 6 December 2021.
- Walter Gratzer, The Guardian, 10 November 2021.
- Ailsa Land, The Guardian, 14 June 2021.
- Fiona Caldicott, The Guardian, 17 March 2021
- John Mallard, The Guardian, 12 March 2021.
- Alwyn Lishman, The Guardian, 9 February 2021.
- Lewis Wolpert, The Guardian, 29 January 2021.
- Bryan Sykes, The Guardian, 18 December 2020.
- Bernard Dixon, The Guardian, 15 November 2020.
- Peter Sleight, The Guardian, 2 November 2020.
- Leslie Iversen, The Guardian, 18 September 2020
- Horace Barlow, The Guardian, 23 August 2020.
- Geoffrey Burnstock, The Guardian, 19 June 2020.
- Peter Day, The Guardian, 18 June 2020.
- Lord May of Oxford, The Guardian, 29 April 2020.
- Michael Wakelam, The Guardian, 24 April 2020.
- John F Murray, The Guardian, 2 April 2020.
- Sir Jack Baldwin, Nature, 7 February 2020.
- Hannah Steinberg, The Guardian, 21 January 2020.
- Sir Hans Kornberg, The Guardian, 7 January 2020.
- Cyrus Chothia, The Guardian, 12 December 2019.
- Heather Ashton, The Guardian, 18 November 2019.
- Sir Chris Dobson, The Guardian, 1 October 2019.
- Sir Rex Richards, The Guardian, 29 July 2019.
- Ian Craft, The Guardian, 10 June 2019.
- Tim Halliday, The Guardian, 13 May 2019.
- Paul Greengard (1925-2019), Nature, 13 May 2019, p 488.
- Sydney Brenner, The Guardian, 5 April 2019.
- Manfred Eigen (1927 – 2019), Nature, 28 February 2019, p 32.
- Stewart Adams, The Guardian, 13 February 2019.
- Aaron Klug, The Guardian, 10 December 2018.
- Osamu Shimamura (1928-2018), Nature, 29 November 2018, p 627.
- Thomas A Steitz (1940-2018), Nature, 1 November 2018, p 36
- John Sulston (1942-2018), Nature, 29 March 2018, p 588
- Sir John Sulston, The Guardian, 12 March 2018
- Mary Lee Berners-Lee, The Guardian, 23 January 2018
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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.