Johnjoe McFadden
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/ 30 April 2007

TB is that time bomb

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, a virtually unknown German country doctor called Robert Koch stood before the Physiological Society of Berlin and announced that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis (TB). This was probably the most astonishing and significant statement in the history of medicine. Yet the disease he discovered still kills one to two million people per year.

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/ 4 January 2006

What’s the point of sex?

Why do we bother with sex? I don’t, of course, mean just the physical act. Artificial insemination made that dispensable several centuries ago. We expend a lot of time and energy finding, seducing and mating with our mate, and as a method of making babies it just doesn’t seem to make economic sense. New research backs the idea that sex is a kind of Epsom salts for genomes, purging them of errors.