Democracy should certainly be informed by expert knowledge but democratic governments are entitled to take their own view on the policies that might follow. Benajmin Disraeli, a 19th century UK conservative politician, once commented, after a major extension in the franchise, that political elites must now educate their masters. Disraeli showed a degree of humility… Read More »
My Oxford Year is not intended as a serious critique of sexual misconduct in universities and it would be unfair to judge it in that way. Nevertheless, it does normalise a type of relationship that is deeply problematic, and this should be called out. Tragic love does not excuse all missteps in life. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/my-oxford-year-wrong-normalise-staff-student-romances
Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia Some international and national regulatory and policy actors assume that strengthening domestic laws and tightening enforcement measures will be sufficient to reduce the extra-legal supply of medicines, whether legal, substandard, or falsified, to patients in low- and middle-income countries. The… Read More »
Co-authored with Carine Vassy (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord (Paris 13) and Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Sur Les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS), France) The French research ecosystem long resisted extending the ethics regulation processes established for biomedical science into the social sciences. This is now changing. This history of resistance is examined, together with the alternatives proposed.… Read More »
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) left a legacy of influence that many more literary writers might envy… The impact of his best-known writings has, however, been almost entirely opposite to their intentions. He has become something of a hero to a range of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who see his writing, which Asimov himself described as social… Read More »
Wherever you stand on the management of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is hard not to accept that it has created a serious crisis of legitimacy for the liberal social and political order… …The consequence was a set of state-backed interventions that were neither rational nor legal but harked back to an earlier time of traditional… Read More »
The immediate reaction to the emergence of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China, has focused on its challenges to the biomedical sciences. But the new infection is at least as big a challenge to the social sciences. If we continue to neglect this, there is a serious danger that we end up with mistaken… Read More »
The constitutional processes are now complete and Robert F Kennedy, Jr has been confirmed as Secretary for Health and Human Services despite a vicious, and at times vitriolic, campaign waged by the biomedical and public health establishment. For more than fifty years, I have been reading work by US medical sociologists on the power and… Read More »
…Trump’s plan to take over the territory is merely the latest American failure to understand that others also have nationalist sentiments and national pride. It was a mistake that dogged US policy in Central America for a generation and led to the disaster in Vietnam. Trump’s plans for Palestine take the USA down the same… Read More »
It is widely reported that one of the first acts of the incoming Trump administration will be to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). Predictably, responses are divided. US nationalists dislike the growing efforts to turn WHO into some form of world government with authority to dictate health policies to individual states. Against this,… Read More »