Life Science
I write about life sciences for a variety of magazines, journals and web sites, for both technical and general readers. I cover leading edge research in fields of public interest such as conservation and human impact on biodiversity for the science and society section of EMBO Reports, read mostly by molecular biologists. I write about similar topics for non-scientific audiences, including popular science titles such as BBC Focus, and broad issue based magazines such as Prospect.I have helped organisations that conduct or fund research, such as the European Science Foundation and IBM, improve the presentation and description of their activities on their web sites. On this front my writing is not confined to life sciences, but has extended to other fields, in particular meteorology and climate science. I have exploited my expertise in my other main area of writing, communications technologies, to cover the convergence between life sciences, computation, and physical sciences. I described recent work and thinking on the role of quantum mechanics in biology for EMBO Reports.
I focus particularly on several core areas of life sciences research – the fundamental laws of size and scaling in biology; research in protein synthesis, folding, and docking; application of physics and maths in metabolism; the role of inorganic chemistry and particularly metals in key biological reactions such as photosynthesis; the application of DNA analysis to forensic science and archaeology; the impact of humans on biodiversity; ageing science; and the link between mind, medicine and healing as in the Placebo effect.