• GSK and the Ebola vaccine: drug approval, ethics, corporate citizenship and regulatory strategy

    Is the Ebola vaccine taking too long to get to market or is it being rushed too quickly?  In spite of the World Health Organization (WHO) recommending that vaccines jump straight to phase III efficacy tests in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra … Continued

  • Innovation, risk, uncertainty and precaution

    Sir Mark Walport, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser issued his first annual report this past week, entitled Innovation: Managing Risk, Not Avoiding It.  In this short report, he makes a number of quite useful points regarding risk, hazard, exposure and … Continued

  • Writing a letter to the editor and/or are letters to the editor becoming obsolete?

    This week I thought I should propose something different for your blog contribution. Originally, I thought I should assign everyone the same goal: write a short ‘letter to the editor’ based on an article that you feel the urgent need to comment … Continued

  • 2015 and the Millennium Development Goals

    With 2015 looming, I couldn’t resist taking a look at the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for this week’s topic.  The international community agreed these goals back in 1990 with a twenty-five year horizon (not long after the fall of the Berlin … Continued

  • Evidence-based policy making

    A number of my tweets and retweets this past week have focused in different respects on the notion of evidence-based policy. Most with any training in the sciences may well be confused by the very concept since it implies that there is, … Continued

  • Week 3: EU data protection laws, TTIP and industry responses

    The topic for this week was inspired by a short article in the FT about Amazon’s decision to site a data centre in Germany to create more confidence in Amazon’s ability to protect the data of Europeans and comply with data … Continued