Sublime

A few years ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had produced the world’s first CRISPR-edited humans—twin baby girls. According to He, the girls’ genes had been tweaked to confer resistance to HIV, though whether this is actually the case remains unclear. Shortly after he made the announcement, He was placed under house arrest in

One of the few scientists to have raised questions about the laboratory procedures used for the examination of cells and tissues is Dr Harold Hillman PhD, who has London University degrees in medicine and in physiology and a doctorate in biochemistry and is therefore eminently qualified to comment on the problems he has discovered. The investigatio

‘Good’ cholesterol This is the high density lipoprotein level (HDL), which normally sits at about 1.3mmol/l. Anything below 0.9mmol/l and your life-insurance company will cancel your subscription, then paint a little black spot in the middle of your palm for good luck. Above 2.0mmol/l, and you can get the Saga booklets out and look forward to a lon

Despite the absence of a genuine biochemical theory of depression and associated ‘behaviours’, as well as the lack of any test to determine the existence of a ‘chemical imbalance’, millions of people around the world have been regularly prescribed drugs to treat their alleged ‘mental disorder’. This is a highly lucrative market for the pharmaceutic

“Each year approximately 2.2 million US hospital patients experience adverse drugs reactions to prescribed medications.”

One of the people who most helped me to understand some aspects of these questions was Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.