Private Lewis had suffered a sore throat before. He knew that feeling lousy wasn’t a good excuse for not performing to the best of his ability. Against medical advice he joined his fellow US army recruits on their all-night hike, in New Jersey, in January 1976. A few hours later he collapsed. He was carried back to Fort Dix army base but died shortly afterwards. Lewis’s death, from swine flu, [...]

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. He then spent six days knocking together everything upon earth: millions of living species and even more now extinct ones. Yet it is not easy for biologists to believe in God the Creator; 50 years of extreme reductionism have removed much of nature’s mystery. We know all about the genetic code, and how the chemical composition of DNA can be [...]

Each second of every day, three people become infected with the malaria parasite. A child dies from the disease every 15 seconds. Malaria, meaning bad air in Italian, was so named because of the historical belief that it was caused by malignant swamp vapours. We now know the disease is caused by tiny blood parasites that are transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, which breed in stagnant water.

Malaria remains one of [...]

''Mad? I'm f***ing furious." The caption beneath the photograph of a boss-eyed, knock-kneed Friesian captured something of the pantomime humour that first accompanied the concept of mad cows. Yet bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), as mad cow disease is officially termed, was nothing to laugh about. How did it occur? And what is the continuing threat to humans?

Scrapie in sheep was the first documented spongiform encephalopathy. An utterly bizarre agent [...]

As a biologist, I have devoted my professional life to research aimed at countering the threat of infectious disease. So the prospect that I, and many people I know, may soon be queuing for an inoculation against smallpox is appalling. The threat, however, is real - the government is contemplating vaccinating health workers in preparation for a bioterrorist attack.

Smallpox was supposed to be the one we had beaten. The [...]

Some individuals capture the imagination to such an extent that they become the subject of serial biographies. It is always interesting to follow how judgements on a particular subject vacillate as social values change over time. Demonic acts can be forgiven; deeds interpreted as benevolent by one generation may be vilified by another. Impressions of the Victorian missionary explorer Dr David Livingstone have ebbed and flowed for more than a [...]

The old zoology department at University College London, converted from an ancient Bloomsbury warehouse, was a labyrinthine building. When I first arrived there as an undergraduate, in the early 1980s, I was delighted to stumble across an office ostensibly inhabited by Professor James D Watson. Because Watson and his helix-busting partner Francis Crick, as well as Charles Darwin, were the only biologists I'd ever heard of, I felt as though [...]

Every 12 seconds a child dies from malaria. Almost half a billion people contract the disease annually and a couple of thousand bring it back to the UK after trips abroad. Which means that there are, more or less, as many new cases of malaria diagnosed here every year as there are of Aids. And yet malaria remains a disease of others, of elsewhere.

This was not always so. Malaria [...]

Mistah Kurtz lives on. Joseph Conrad, his creator, attempted to kill him off in the final pages of Heart of Darkness. T S Eliot then spotted him directing horrors in the First World War and ironically echoed Conrad's declaration of death as an epigraph to his poem "The Hollow Men". It was left to a bloated, shaven-headed Marlon Brando to show us what Kurtz looked like in Francis Ford Coppola's [...]

Who at some time has not wondered what those tiny pills prescribed by a doctor actually do to us? Very few, I suspect. We simply take them to make us feel better. Sceptics of modern medicine may avoid the GP and, instead, visit a herbalist or homeopath under the delusion that "natural" products are somehow gentler on the body, but believe drugs (man-made or derived from natural products) work because [...]