A couple of years ago Britain's leading HIV specialist Professor Brian Gazzard wrote an editorial in the Lancet, titled "Miracles do happen", about his astonishment at how Aids had become a treatable illness. A decade earlier it had seemed "highly unlikely an effective treatment would become available in the foreseeable future", but a vigorous research programme has identified several therapeutic "targets", and the combination of two, and then three, drugs [...]

Provocative ideas in science are not common, but when they come along it is a fair bet that established, "self-evident" truths will, deservedly, be in trouble. There has been no truth more self-evident over the past 100 years than the virtues of hygiene. A clean home is a healthy home where Mother, armed with Harpic and Dettol, has banished bacteria from the kitchen and the bathroom. But it is not [...]

It had, as for so many others, been a truly dreadful day. Retiring to bed, the same thought kept recurring: "How could they have got it so wrong?"

I could understand that they might not have wished to dwell on the past, on the achievements of the intrepid explorers who had circumnavigated the globe, or the great scientists and philosophers - Newton, Darwin, Hume and Locke - or even that [...]

By all accounts, 1 December was a momentous day in the history of science, with the publication in the journal Nature of the first chapter of the "Book of Man", snappily titled "The DNA Sequence of Human Chromosome 22". The reviews were enthusiastic: "One thousand years from now," observed Dr Michael Dexter of the Wellcome Trust, "this will be seen as one of the true milestones in scientific research." Dr [...]

Greenpeace is basking in the glow of a spectacular - and well-deserved - triumph. No one, until a few years ago, had ever heard of the difficult to pronounce phthalates (f-thalates), let alone that they are an essential ingredient of virtually everything that is plastic and malleable - children's toys, garden hoses, blood transfusion bags and much, much else besides.

Then, in 1997, Greenpeace raised the alarm. Its Play [...]

Over the past decade, the pharmaceutical industry has worked wonders with its image. In the aftermath of the Opren scandal (an anti-arthritic drug with the unfortunate side-effect of causing liver failure) and the over-promotion of "addictive" minor tranquilisers such as Valium, the term "multinational drug company" was almost synonymous with sharp practice and extravagant profit - but no more.

The big player in Britain, Glaxo Wellcome, is now commonly perceived [...]

Everyone needs a lucky break, and mine came one Saturday afternoon in 1986 in Fleet Street's famous watering hole, El Vino, where I was enjoying a lunchtime drink with a friend from university days. Conrad Black had just bought the Telegraph titles from the last of the old press barons, Lord Hartwell, and there was much speculation about the future. Suddenly the door burst open, and the new arrival announced [...]

On Wednesdays, David "Two Brains" Willetts hosts lunch at the Tory think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). Willetts was director of studies at the centre during the glory days of Thatcherism and is now shadow education secretary. The last time I went, the hot topic was whether, as Willetts has strongly hinted, the Conservatives should be opposing David Blunkett's latest plans for the national curriculum. There are a lot [...]