• A new frontier: regulating drones/UAVs

    This week, the website, the Conversation has an article on the need for regulating UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones). Drones came to most people’s attention first through their use in military warfare over the past decade although … Continued

  • Welcome to Technology Policy Week 1: The VW scandal

    Well I tried to think of other ‘simpler’ introductory topics, of which there are many, but the elephant in the room is the current VW scandal.  In the end, we just had to have this as our first blog.  The … Continued

  • 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