Fragile Science: The reality behind the headlines by Robin Baker,
Macmillan, £15.99, ISBN 0333901029
WE face the 21st century with a 19th-century model of science:
particularly the idea that it can somehow be perfected. Books like Fragile
Science, fascinating though they are, are one of the symptoms.
Robin Baker was a reader in biology at Manchester University before turning
to full-time writing and broadcasting. He remains a product of science’s
ideology of perfectibility. Thus he cannot escape from the idea that the
problems in the tales he tells lie with embarrassing “flaws” and
“mistakes”—some precipitated by greed, some by the media and some by…
