This is about antibiotics. Marvellous inventions, life-saving, civilisationally on roughly the same level as hot water and functioning door handles. So I am by no means against antibiotics. That would be as foolish as being against the fire brigade because water ruins carpets. 🚒

The case itself was disagreeably modern. No poison in the tea, no dagger in the drawing room, no nocturnal visitor with improper intentions. No, the culprit was polite, softly upholstered, and fully accepted in millions of households: the armchair. More precisely, what it symbolises. Sitting. Too much sitting. Moving through the day like a royal ho...

The case concerned the immune system. More precisely: its character. For decades, people had assumed that the finer sort of remembering belonged solely to the adaptive branch, that immaculately groomed specialist corps with antibodies, T cells, and the entire bureaucratic apparatus of targeted defence. The innate immune system, by contrast, was th...

The case that landed on my desk was of a particularly refined sort. It concerned a medical AI that shone in examinations like a neatly turned-out medical student on the verge of a gold medal. Diagnoses? Impeccable. Answers? Elegant. Technical language? Almost indecently well groomed. And yet the whole business smelt of deception. For excellence on ...

You know him. This supposed gentleman in tails, standing somewhere deep inside the brain with a silver baton, commanding everything: Now feel. Now remember. Now concentrate. Now do try to stumble with a little more dignity. A touching notion. Sadly, about as wrong as the claim that one can understand a sonata merely by monitoring the second violin.

It was a case of insulin resistance. A distressingly unwieldy term for a rather impertinent bit of behaviour: insulin knocks politely at the cell’s door and says, “Would you be so kind as to let the sugar in?” and the cell replies with aristocratic lethargy, “Regrettably, not today.” 🚪🍬